How much money do you want to spend to lose weight?
Name a figure, an amount of money that you’re willing to spend so that you can lose weight, feel better, become healthy. How much is it?
Here’s a chilling thought: whatever that figure is, chances are good that you’ve already spent it—and more—and without having lost the weight you need to take off and keep off.
You know what we’re talking about. New Year’s resolutions almost always include plans to lose weight, and companies bombard us through January and February with adverts for this diet or that pill, this piece of exercise equipment or that slimming belt. They all cost money, sometimes a great deal of money.
So people are investing in losing weight. Every day, someone sends off for the newest super-slimming pill, someone signs up to have specialised meals delivered to their home, someone starts a new diet. Every day, people are spending a great deal of money on weight-loss solutions that aren’t really solutions at all. If they worked, then people wouldn’t keep making the same New Year’s resolutions year after year, would they?
Yet year after year people spend more and more money on what doesn’t work. Be honest: haven’t you done that, too? If you’ve been trying to lose weight for years, you’ve been spending a lot of money, and that money has bought you nothing but frustration.
And yet people still say, “Oh, I can’t have bariatric surgery! I can’t afford it!”
The reality is that any bariatric procedure will cost money. Full stop. But there are two considerations that mitigate that fact:
Bariatric procedures work. If you follow the post-procedure directions, you will lose weight and you will keep that weight off
Bariatric procedures probably do not cost as much as the money invested throughout years of trying other weight-loss programmes. Moreover, financing plans are available.
There’s another cost associated with obesity: the cost of all the diseases that you may experience—or already be experiencing. Diabetes, sleep apnoea, heart disease, and hypertension all are costing you already: in money, in time, in quality of life.
So you have a choice: keep spending money in small amounts (which add up quickly to large amounts) while subjecting your body to the stress of dieting and continuing to risk the diseases associated with obesity—or spend the money now for a solution that will leave you healthy and able to keep your weight where it should be.
When you think about it, it’s not really that much of a choice, now, is it?
