Becca has now lost 60 pounds since February, and she looks fantastic. This clip is about how much her life as changed as a result of having Lap Band surgery. She rides bikes without worrying about the tires deflating, she plays the piano without problems and she can even cross her legs now and yes, there are some before and after pictures.
Anyway, good work, Becca! Congratulations on your triumphs.
Hmmmm, here’s something I’ve never read before. Dr. Rachael Keilin is talking about how fills impact a bandee’s hunger, and how the impact of the fill isn’t necessarily immediate.
There is also a phenomenon we see fairly often, but really can’t explain well. Some people will have a delay in the “tightness” of a fill by as much as two weeks. This is why we won’t fill one day and then fill again three days later. Because there is sometimes a lag in the perception of hunger after a fill (and remember: it’s hunger control we’re aiming for, not bulimia!), we don’t want to end up over-filling patients, especially if they live out of town. Spitting into a cup is just not fun. You’re meant to have gradual weight loss with the Lap Band from eating less. You’re not meant to be on a liquid diet or pureed food diet. We want to eat more or less a regular diet, just eat a smaller amount of food so that you can lose weight.
Interesting. Now, that I’ve checked out Dr. Keilin’s site, I have to go find out what “Smart Lipo” is. Inquiring minds want to know.
Well, this is good news. Maybe it will help knock down a few more insurance walls for Lap Bands here in the US. Maybe it’ll help reduce the cost as well.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Medicare program may expand reimbursement for bariatric surgery for the obese, in light of a study that found the treatment can help reverse diabetes, the agency said on Monday.
Recent research found the surgery can completely reverse type 2 diabetes, a metabolic condition spurred by weight gain and suffered by millions of Americans.
Medicare, the government health plan for the nation’s 44 million elderly, “will assess the nature of the scientific evidence supporting surgery for the treatment of diabetes,” the agency said on its Web site.
The agency will decide whether to set a “national coverage decision,” that would set reimbursement policy for all Medicare recipients. It could also decide to not cover the weight-loss surgery for diabetes alone.
The government already pays for the surgery in certain patients, generally those classified as “morbidly obese.”
Both my mother, and my grandfather had diabetes and died at the age of 64 from heart attacks. Neither of them were obese and both of them were quite active. My grandfather was a rodeo photograher - not a job for the unfit. He was taking down storm windows from his home when he died. My mother was digging a ditch and I’m guessing the combination of the diabetes, the smoking and the Arkansas summer heat took her. Still, 64 is awfully young. Here’s hoping that we help keep parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles around longer.
I just checked in with Dr. Chris Oliver, my favorite Lap Band blogger. He’s 16 months post-banding and has lost 55% of his excess weight. He’s riding in bicycle tournaments, competing in triathalons and he looks great. If you haven’t read his Lap Band blog, by all means, check in. Being a physician, he writes with a level of detail and precision we don’t get with most Lap Band bloggers.
Anyway, he’s blogging about a Lap Band study out of Lebanon that followed 591 patients with an average BMI of 41.95 (that’s our 5′4″ woman at 235 and our 5′11″ man at 290) that had a Lap Band procedure. Fifty-one of the patients wound up having their Lap Bands removed. The researchers followed their weight loss for up to ten years. After the first year, the patients had lost, on average, 66% of their excess weight. At the end of the second year, they had lost, on average, 72% of their excess weight. At the end of four years, 75.9%. And, most delightfully, at the end of six years they had lost, on average, 82.8% of their excess weight! How exciting to learn that people continue to lose as time goes on.
If you want to check your BMI, you may do so here. For the newbies, most insurance standards require that you have a BMI of 35 with at least two co-morbidities - meaning high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea or high cholesterol before they will cover it. If you have a BMI over 40, usually you don’t need the co-morbidities. I have a link to a list of the standards for several dozen insurance companies here.
I just watched FAT: What No One Is Telling You - a PBS documentary about obesity and weight loss surgery. They interview Dr. Lee Kaplan extensively and it’s always good to hear what he has to say. He does discuss just how complex weight gain is and states, for the record, that only 5% of people who have gastric bypasses get all the way down to a normal weight. Very interesting. They also interview Dr. Michael Gershon who talks about the gut being a second brain for our body. He even composes poetry to the intestine.
As a young man, Michael Gershon, professor of medicine at Columbia University, went against the wishes of his father and the advice of his professors who urged him to study the brain. Instead, he set off on an exploration of the bowel. Intrigued by some long-forgotten 20th century scientific discoveries about an independent nervous system in the gut, Dr. Gershon’s research uncovered how this sophisticated physiological wiring functions essentially as a “second brain.” The gut, it turns out, has a mind of its own and plays a major role in deciding when and how much we eat. When the brain in the head says eat less and in moderation, the “second brain” in the gut can override the brain in the head and propel us to eat more and without restraint.
Obesity expert Dr. Lee Kaplan and his team at Massachusetts General Hospital compare the body’s hunger drive to the human body’s response to running up six flights of stairs. You can force yourself to breathe slowly for a few seconds, despite this exertion, but ultimately your body will demand more oxygen and you’ll breathe faster. When it comes to decisions about how much to eat, a similar battle occurs between your conscious will and your subconscious. And if your subconscious brain wants more food, it wins and you eat more.
A study of gastric bypass surgery has led Dr. Kaplan to a compelling discovery about how the body regulates food consumption, and the hope that someday surgery can be avoided altogether. Dr. Kaplan has found that weight loss in surgery patients is not just a result of making the stomach smaller. The surgery actually reduces the feeling of hunger by cutting some of the nerves in the bowel, which changes the signals that flow between the gut and the brain. It also alters the way the hormonal system gets its information from food and sends it to the brain. “By manipulating the gut, even in a small way, we end up changing the communication to the brain and the brain acts differently to manage our weight and metabolism,” says Dr. Kaplan. His goal now is to completely replace surgery by developing medication that alters these intricate circuits in the same way that an invasive operation currently does.
They follow a handful of people who are losing weight - one of whom has a gastric bypass and loses 150 pounds over the course of the shoot.
A familiar face on television, actress Mary Dimino’s battles with food and dieting are the hysterical heart of her stand-up comedy. As the documentary opens, we see Mary sweating through one of her daily three-hour gym sessions on the treadmill. Acknowledging that it’s a lot of exercise, she explains, “I have to work just as hard, even harder, just to maintain this level of chubbiness.” Like many people who struggle with weight control, Mary has persistent fat cells in her body that were added during years of overeating. Now the weight may come off, but the cells remain — always hungry — constantly crying out for more calories and defying Mary’s willpower.
“There was something haywire,” says Rosie Delhi, whose words confirm the suspicion every fat person has from trying and trying to lose weight. A retired school principal, her bariatric surgery was, until now, a secret from everyone but closest family members. “You can’t believe how awful it is,” says Rosie, who yearned to play on the floor with her grandchildren and be able to get up again. “If I didn’t make a change, I was headed for a death sentence.” The rewiring effect of the bariatric surgery, which Dr. Kaplan has identified, seems to be helping Rosie to sustain her weight loss by helping to suppress her hunger impulse. Now her disciplined effort to maintain a healthy weight has a shot at success.
As a senior in high school, Rocky Tayeh utilized his budding talent as a journalist by producing a radio documentary on his battle with obesity. Raised in Brooklyn, Rocky laments the everyday temptation of food available in his neighborhood. “If I’m hungry at 4:00 in the morning, I just have to walk a block down,” says Rocky. “There’s a Dunkin Donuts here, a McDonald’s here, a fast food restaurant here, a Chinese restaurant and they deliver.” Despite the disapproval of his family and his own doubts about “taking the easy way out,” Rocky makes a decision to have surgery, loses 150 pounds and faces the prospect of a new life in college without the embarrassment, shame and stigma.
Carla Hurd has gained about 120 pounds over the last twelve years in her job as a marketing executive at Microsoft. Carla and her overweight husband David signed up for a comprehensive weight management program funded by Microsoft. Even with the no-holds barred support of all the best personal trainers, doctors, dieticians and psychologists and a profound motivation to get pregnant, her success in the battle to lose weight is elusive. In videotaped diaries, Carla tracks her uncontrollable urges and her struggle to resist the comforting temptations of food that calms her stressful life.
Public health nurse Pat Lyons, who describes herself as a professional fat woman, knows there is very little justice or sympathy for fat people. Pat’s mission is to uncouple the idea that physical fitness and activity is only useful in regard to losing weight. She believes everyone should be active, regardless of size, aiming to be as healthy as possible whatever weight you are. “There are happy, healthy people of all shapes and sizes,” she points out.
It’s broken up into little clips. The longest is about 10 minutes and the shortest about 4 minutes long. It’s easy to get through.
Wow - this is so cool. Life coaches Cher Ewing and Jeff Cadwell have both had weight loss surgery. Cher has had a Lap Band and Jeff has a gastric bypass. Together, they have an internet radio show that provides advice and counseling for people who are thinking about or have had weight loss surgery.
Their next show is Wednesday, April 23rd and they’ll be talking to Nurse Connie Cox, a registered dietician, who works with bariatric surgery patients and has had a gastric bypass herself.
Date: 04/23/08
Time: 8:00 pm ET, 7:00 pm CT, 6:00 MT and 5:00pm PT
Where: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thewlscoaches
Call-In Line: 646-716-9413
The have a fantastic podcast available with Dr. Terry Simpson of the Arizona Bariatric Center. Dr. Simpson is late calling in so the meat of all doesn’t happen until 40 minutes in - I’d encourage you to skip the first forty minutes and just cut right to Dr. Simpson. The interview with him is about 42 minutes long and is well worth the time to listen. He’s an incredibly charming, well-spoken, funny guy who knows his subject inside and out. I learned several things from the show that I’ll be writing about later today.
Diets and exercise just don’t work - let’s face it. Fewer than 5% of people who lose weight through diet and exercise manage to keep it off. There are reasons for this, as I have written about before, that have nothing to do with self-discipline. You can’t lose weight and keep it off for some very sturdy evolutionary reasons - your body likes having all that handy-dandy energy just packed away for a rainy day. Or more precisely, a non-rainy season. So when you lose weight, after a certain amount, your body starts cranking down your metabolism. Youve been losing weight on 1200 calories a day? No more. That fifteen pounds you’ve lost that has you feeling svelte is gonna come right back, if your body has any say over the situation. And your body does have say over the situation. So, your metabolism goes down and your hunger level goes up. Your body floods you with chemicals that make you feel hungrier than you’ve ever felt. Oh, you think you’re just being undisciplined and you feel guilty for eating. But that’s not what’s happening. Your body is pushing you to eat, eat, eat, and it’s slowing your metabolism down so that you can pack the weight right back on. Good bye, little red dress. Hello, big black dress. Have you ever stood in the kitchen eating something, hating yourself for eating it because you’re actually losing weight, but you can’t stop because you’re so darn hungry? That’s normal. That’s your body functioning as it should. The curious thing is that obese people’s bodies functions normally when they’re heavy and their bodies cease to function normally when they lose weight. Factor in that we now know that around 75% of weight gain is genetic, and we’re all in a dire situation.
Look, there are lots of reasons to lose weight besides vanity - you’ll live longer. And if you’re like most people, you have family who love you and want you to live as long as possible. That right there is good reason to do it. You’ll be happier. And more physically comfortable. And you’ll probably earn more money. And have more sex. So with all those motivations, if losing weight was really possible, you would do it. Some of us master the literally Sisyphean task of weight loss and peel off 120 pounds or maybe more. But then, because of biological imperatives, we gain it back again. Over and over.
That’s where Lap Bands come in. Dr. Favretti, one of the first surgeons to work with Lap Bands, completed a 12 year study on the effectiveness of Lap Bands and the news is good - people don’t gain the weight back. The study covered over 1700 patients over twelve years both morbidly obese and super obese. The average weight of the patients started out around 260 pounds plus or minus 37 pounds with an average BMI of 42.6 - that’s our 5′3″ woman at 236 pounds or our 5′10″ guy at 292 pounds. At the end, they weighed on average 185 pounds plus or minus 60 pounds with an average BMI of 31.6 - putting our woman at 175 pounds and our man at 216.
If you want to check your BMI, you can do so here at the Centennial Treatment Center For Obesity in Nashville, Tennessee.
I know all of you reading this think, “Oh no, I want to lose a lot more weight than that!” Well, of course you do, and as far as I can tell, you can. You do have to exercise though and to make that point, I’m going to quote Dr. William Lee of Blue Earth, Minnesota in the Mankato Free Press:
Lee said his patients can be divided into two groups, those who shed 6 to 8 pounds a month and patients who lose 10 to 15 pounds a month. “The difference between these two groups,” he said, “is exercise.”
So, just keep that in mind - you’re gonna have to buy a trampoline, a pair of Nordic Walking Poles or get yourself a backyard treadmill. And if you do, and if you follow the doctor’s directions, and get yourself into a support group, you’re going to have a really good shot at getting down to the tiny little person you’d really rather be.
Cruising around YouTube today, I found Becca’s video blog. She’s only got two videos up, but she’s very well spoken. She’s lost, I think, 50 pounds in the past few months and has gone from three chins to one.
And here is her second video where she talks a lot about the process of having a Lap Band. She only needed Tylenol to deal with the pain - nothing stronger. She had her surgery on Thursday and was back at work on Monday. At the very end, she shows you her scars and I know there are a lot of questions about that out there.
Her surgery was performed by Keith McEwan at the Indiana Obesity Center.e.com/watch?v=V1VG824lr6M&hl=en]
Anyway, enjoy.
Here’s good news for those of us who live in Southern California - Journey Lite of Thousand Oaks has dropped their self-pay price from $15,500 to $13,499.
“We recognize that many people are forced to choose between having surgery or paying their bills. This choice is even harder in today’s economy, and one we wish no one should have to make,” stated Cynthia Winker, a Board member of Journey Lite of Thousand Oaks. “By reducing the charge for the Lap-Band(R) procedure, we are making this more affordable for patients. For those with good credit who choose to finance the procedure, the cost can now be under $300 per month for five years, much like a car payment. But unlike owning a car, the possible benefits of weight loss surgery have the potential to last a lifetime.”
They have four different Southern California locations:
Journey Lite patients can be seen at Dr. Helmuth Billy’s offices in Ventura (805-648-2227) or Santa Maria (805-648-2227), at Dr. Jeremy Korman’s office in Marina Del Rey (800-491-1977), or at the Journey Lite facility in Thousand Oaks (877-452-BAND).
About Journey Lite Of Thousand Oaks
And here is their website:
http://www.journeylite.com
Let us know if you take advantage of this. I’d love to tape an interview before you go in, and the day after the process as well.
I just received this press release from New Jersey’s Bariatric Center’s Dr. Ajay Goyal on bariatric surgery and pregnancy. He says that pregnancy is safe for a Lap Band patient six months after surgery, though there may not have been enough weight loss in that time frame to prevent obesity related complications. Lastly, he says nutritional supplements are a necessity since you will be eating such small amounts of food.
New Jersey Bariatric Center’s Ten Guidelines to Follow for a Safe Pregnancy Post-Surgery:
1. Avoid pregnancy for one year after weight loss surgery
2. Take multivitamins (Vitamin A, B1, B12, Iron, Folic Acid)
3. Make regular appointments with your bariatric surgeon and obstetrician
4. Obtain regular blood test to check for vitamin deficiency
5. Eat multiple small meals a day (at least four meals per day) and spend 30 minutes to eat each meal
6. Eat high-protein, low-carbohydrates and a low fat diet
7. Take 30 grams of proteins in supplements
8. Drink plenty of water (40 – 60 ounces per day)
9. Continue regular low impact exercise for both body and mind
10. For lap band or realize band patients, one can remove the restriction by an adjustment if patients develop pregnancy related nausea.
Quick link here - this is a promotional video from the Detroit Medical Center interviewing Dr. Mohamed Gazayerli. The woman who is in the first part of the video looks so dramatically different, it’s hard to imagine. She looks like a little bird afterwards! Very fine boned. Dr. Gazayerli has had a lap band procedure himself. Always nice to hear.
I hope you enjoy it. I love the before and after images.
So, I get off on kicks and read everything I can find. While looking for articles about lap band studies on kids, I found this article by Andrew Binion for the Kitsap Sun - which is quite lovely. It’s about then 12 year old Hannah Siparek. Her mother, Marsha, had wrestled with obesity her entire life. She was never full regardless of how much she ate. Now, her beloved daughter was wrestling with the same problem.
At 12, on the verge of the cruelest year of adolescence, Hannah stood 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighed about 290 pounds. She could eat and eat and never feel full. She showed early signs of Type 2 diabetes. She loved soccer but couldn’t force her overburdened frame to run the field.
“She was always hungry, and she kept getting bigger and bigger,” said Marsha, who like Hannah, didn’t get the full, satisfied feeling that tells a person to stop eating.
Less than two years ago, Hannah was a morbidly obsese 290 pounds. Today, she packs just 150 pounds on her 5-feet, 5-inch frame and plays soccer — thanks to lap-band surgery she had in Mexico that shrunk her stomach, and her once-endless appetite for food.
“You have this infillable hunger, and it’s not just in your mind,” she said. “You’re just starvin
Mom had the Lap Band procedure and was quite happy with the results:
For Marsha, the results were dramatic. For the first time, when she ate, she felt full — and didn’t eat any more after that. She has lost, and kept off, 100 pounds since the surgery in November 2005.
Marsha was interested in getting the procedure for 12 year old Hannah, but none of the US doctors would agree to it because of her age. Finally, Dr. Pedro Kuri, who had performed Marsha’s surgery agreed to see Hannah. He’s performed over 3500 lap band surgeries and had operated on children as young as 12.
“Sometimes I have my doubts about teenagers because they don’t act like an adult,” Kuri said during a phone interview. “I have adults that don’t act like they should.”
Teenagers must have a long, serious conversation with him beforehand, and he has refused to perform the implant on teens who weren’t mature enough. He said Hannah was a self-possessed, confident, emotionally mature girl, and having a long talk with her convinced Kuri she could carefully watch what she ate.
He has given implants to 15-year-olds, a 14-year-old recently and a 12-year-old other than Hannah. He said the procedure doesn’t interfere with the maturation process. And, Kuri added, if left unchecked, the teens and Hannah would be beyond morbidly obese by the time they are in their 20s.
All told, he’s performed more than 3,500 surgeries over the past 10 years. And 99 percent of the patients were American, he said.
Age sometimes is the deciding factor. He was approached about putting the implant in a 10-year-old.
Now, fourteen years old, Hannah is slender and pretty:
As a result, Hannah is now a 150-pound, 5-foot-10-inch 14-year-old who hangs around the house in soccer shorts and dismisses talk of turning to basketball. Because of her age, Marsha said, her skin shrunk back in with her frame.
“She lost a whole person,” Marsha said, who hopes the implants are approved for other obese children as young as Hannah.
Hannah’s life is dramatically different now, than it likely would have been:
At first, Hannah didn’t have much interest in being a “bandster,” as Marsha calls it, and she didn’t have self-confidence problems. But as she watched her mom lose weight, and become happier, she came around to the idea.
Hannah said she has a sense of what life would be like without the band. She would not have lost the weight, she might have gotten heavier, and she would have likely dropped out of school. Marsha said she would have been home-schooled.
“I feel like a whole new person, I can finally be the kid I want to be,” she said. “When I was big, I’d stand in the middle of the field and wait for the ball to come to me.
“Now I go for the ball.”
One of the things I like about this article is that it has Hannah’s yearly portraits starting at age 3. You can see how severely obese she is. And how well she’s turned out now. It’s a great story and hopefully, we’ll see more kids rescued in the future as well.
That Fat Chick, a Lap Band blogger, I’ve included on my blogroll, just got the good word from Blue Cross that her weight loss surgery will be covered.
I wanted to cry in relief when I read that letter. It does echo most of what the woman I spoke to on the phone with last fall said to me. It’s good to see it reaffirmed in writing!
And I definitely meet the “medically necessary” criteria, particularly in regards to having a BMI of over 40 (48-49) AND being 100 lbs. or more overweight (my ideal weight is 121 lbs. - 155 lbs. and I’m currently 309 lbs. You do the math!).
From the News-Enterprise, this is one of the better told newspaper stories about lap band patients and their successes that I’ve read. Hardin Memorial Hospital in Elizabethtown, Kentucky has begun doing lap band procedures. They tell the story of Sandy Weaver, who has lost 82 pounds in the last 11 months and Mary Divinksy who has gone from 254 to 170 in the past year. Good before and after photos as well. Dr. Nandakishore Dukkipati and Dr. Srinivas Kaza of Advanced Surgical Associates of Kentucky performed their surgeries.
ELIZABETHTOWN — When Sandy Weaver sits down to dinner tonight, she won’t sit long. A couple ounces of meat, an ounce or two of vegetables and she’ll be full. It’s all her stomach can handle after bariatric surgery that Weaver says was the key to weight loss after decades of obesity.
Weaver underwent gastric band surgery 11 months ago. With a band blocking the lower majority of her stomach, she’d lost 82 pounds as of last week.
Sure, she’d like to have a cheeseburger — especially one with a bun — for dinner, but she won’t, she said.
“It’s hard to explain. I miss it, but then I look down and see my lap,” she said. “I have a lap now. It’s worth it.”
And Ms. Divinsky’s tale:
Mary Divinsky, a 59-year-old from Sonora, said she tried everything before she looked into the surgery.
“All the diets invented, I tried them,” she said, rattling off a list of diets and weight- loss programs from Weight Watchers and the Atkins Diet to fasting.
She struggled with her weight since childhood. Friends and relatives can hardly find her in her third-grade class picture because she was so tiny. In the fourth-grade photo, however, she was heavy enough to look like an entirely different person.
She boarded a dieting roller coaster in the early 1980s. She would lose 50 pounds, stabilize, get discouraged and regain the weight.
“I did the yo-yo thing for years and years. Lose it, gain it back, lose it, gain it back. I just thought (gastric band surgery) was the right thing to do,” she said.
Divinsky is the unit secretary at HMH’s intensive care unit, so she knew about the program early. Plus, her brother has had a band for three years.
Poor health drove her decision.
She was taking the highest dose of oral diabetes medication and knew she was a step away from needing insulin shots because of her weight. She also had high blood-pressure.
She started a pre-surgery diet in January 2007. At that time, the 5-foot, 4-inch woman’s weight had peaked at 272 pounds. She weighed 254 when she underwent surgery April 23 — Divinsky, Weaver and one other patient had the surgery on the same day.
Divinsky weighs 170 pounds now. Her goal is 153.
And the really happy part of the story for her family:
She no longer takes medication for high blood-pressure or diabetes.
Patients usually decrease or drop their obesity-spurred medications within a few days, Dukkipati said
And the same for Sandy:
Since the surgery, she stopped taking acid reflux medication, hormones and water pills for swelling. She no longer suffers sleep apnea and her insomnia has improved.
And that part of the story brings us back to Dr. Paul O’Brien’s study at Monash University study which found a 72% decrease in the risk of dying that lap band patients experience over people who use diet and exercise. 72% is a very big deal, and would, no doubt, make a lot of people who love you very happy to know.
There is a lot of good basic information in the story, so if you’re beginning to consider having a lap band procedure, it’s a good article. It covers all the basics.
And while Advanced Surgical Associates of Kentucky does not have a website, their patients have a MySpace page where they provide support for each other.
Now, here’s something I’d never thought about - spouses are frequently threatened by impending weight loss surgery. This is an article from ObesityHelp that runs down the issues spouses face.
“I just don’t understand it,” Dawn said. “Why doesn’t my husband want me to have the surgery?” Tammy agreed. Her spouse was also unsupportive: “My husband said, ‘Just keep trying new diets—you should be able to lose weight. This surgery is too risky and doesn’t make sense
Uh oh.
They’re worried you might stop loving them
Howard said, “I was worried about how our social life would change. Would she still find me acceptable?” Bruce echoed this by saying, “I was used to having a wife that looked a certain way and I was fine with it. I didn’t know what would change for her or for me after the surgery.” Mike cited statistics: “I’d heard how many people get divorced after weight loss surgery and I didn’t want that to happen to us.”
Oh, okay, here we go. Fears can be allayed with information.
Dr. Kelli Friedman and her colleagues at Duke University’s Weight Loss Surgery Center have found little to no valid research suggesting that WLS patients are more likely than others to get divorced.
And here’s what the doctors have to say:
You can help your spouse by discussing your plans and how you can work together. If you won’t be drinking alcohol after surgery, how will this affect your time with your spouse and your friends? Have a conversation where you say, “You know, I really want to keep doing the fun things we love to do. I’ve been thinking about our Friday night happy hours—let’s still go, but I’ll have a sparkling water and you can have a glass of wine. What do you think?” Together, come up with plans for several of your favorite “rituals” that will work for both of you. If you’re nervous about triggering emotional eating, say that too: “Honey, I’d love to go to the Cake Factory, but right now, I think it’s going to be too hard for me to eat there. How about the Crab Shack?”
And this to me is the heart of the article:
What spouses need is good, honest information. Mike attended a support group with his wife and asked questions; Bruce went with his wife to meet her surgeon and talked to the clinic team about what to expect. Howard explained that he needed time to process the information he was receiving, and that an ObesityHelp conference was where “the light switch came on for me to get on board with the decision
Anyway, take a look. I”m going to see if I can run down the Kelli Friedman study about divorce and weight loss surgery, and I’ll report back to you if I do.
