Making Weight-Loss Surgery Work
One of the things that candidates for bariatric surgery nearly always say is this: “I’d do anything to lose this weight!” What they don’t say, note, is that they may not be willing to “do anything” to keep it off once it’s gone. And that’s actually more difficult to do than it is to make the decision for surgery.
Bariatric surgery needs more than just a laparoscopic scalpel in order to work: it needs the patient’s commitment, as well. After surgery is no time to discover that you really don’t enjoy exercise and that you don’t really see the point in it anyway now that you are slender.
To an outsider, it would seem that there’s a tremendous memory loss which sets in after surgery. People forget to maintain food and exercise journals, to consume their protein first anytime they eat, to stop eating sugar and fat, to drink enough water, and to take extra vitamins.
It’s as though everything they agreed to before surgery suddenly became optional-and they’re opting out.
How does this amnesia set in?
1.People develop extraordinarily bad habits regarding both food and exercise, craving too much food and … well, no exercise.
2.People don’t address the mind-body connection that first created the problem. Surgery has taken care of the symptom, and that’s all that they care about.
So here’s the warning: all that weight that came off after surgery? It could all go right back on. Bariatric surgery gives you a head-start on a new lifestyle; it doesn’t eliminate the need for that new lifestyle.
You may have a new lifestyle, but you’re still the same person you were, and any emotional scars, traumas, or problems you may have had before bariatric surgery aren’t going to get magically erased.
Before your weight-loss surgery, examine what has been driving you to eat. You may find it helpful to talk with a counsellor about it. Something made you depend on food for comfort, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum: you must replace the food with something else, something else that will make you feel good, will lower your stress, will tame your emotions.
And then … the sky’s the limit!
