Bariatric Surgery?

While doing research on bariatric surgeries this morning, I found a short video on the WebMD site interviewing several post-operative patients and Julie Schwartz, the registered dietician at the Emory Bariatric Center. I wanted to find out what the mortality rate was for such surgeries and the percent of the patients who actually achieve their ideal weight. I'd read some time back that very few bariatric patients ever achieve normal weight, and I was shocked. I'd also read that the mortality, or death, rate was rather high.

I knew very little about this type of surgery until a close writer friend had it done several years ago. He was probably 150 pounds overweight, and he'd had a lot of trouble walking. His bones just couldn't take the weight. (Read my blog on The Sinking Balcony - May 16, 2010). Anyway, he died within a few days after the surgery, and he was missed terribly. Not long after his death, I decided to become an Ideal Weight Coach.

I'd known for years that diets don't work, because they don't address the real issue behind the food binging - emotional immaturity. What this means is that, for some, there are certain feelings that we desperately need distraction from: feelings that we never became comfortable with, feelings that never matured. For men, it may be feelings of shame. For women, it may be feelings of fear or insecurity. For either sex, it could be feelings of happiness. (Read my blog on Happiness Can Cause Weight Gain - January 30, 2011) Regardless, overindulging in food or drink is almost always a reaction to an uncomfortable feeling.

Many of my clients say, "I just love food!" But when I ask them about what happened right before the binging began, I discovered that there was ALWAYS an uncomfortable situation that they did not know how to deal with. ALWAYS. Yes, I know that there are exceptions to every "rule," but I haven't found an acceptable excuse yet for binging.

So, back to the video, which I found quite enlightening! Every patient interviewed agreed with one premise: the surgery was NOT a magic bullet. Each and every one of them had to make major changes in their behavior. Schwartz even stated that unless people make the necessary behavior changes, they are not likely to lose much weight, if any, with the lap band procedure. With the bypass procedure, patients would lose weight, but, again, without the necessary behavior changes, they would likely gain it all back. With or without surgery, people who want to achieve their ideal weight AND keep it off, MUST make changes to their behaviors.

And that, my friends, led me to this question: If you have to make behavioral changes anyway, why not work on those changes first, before undergoing a $30,000 plus surgery that has a ten percent complication rate and a death rate - within thirty days of surgery - of about one in three-hundred. (I read one article that stated the mortality rate as one in two-hundred and another one as one in four-hundred.)

Coaching works without the surgery - although some of my clients have said that coaching can be painful. Coaching works when the client is willing to look at what's triggering the binging behavior, and that's the painful part. The good news is that once old programming is discovered, new programming can be implemented immediately. Simple? Yes. Easy? No, but with a coach who understands, you can and will achieve your ideal weight.