Just my opinion

In reading another blog today, the blogger shared a letter written by a WLS surgery patient who'd had surgery a few years ago, lost all of her weight, kept it off for a bit and has now put the weight back on, plus more.  She states that she regrets the surgery because before, she was just an obese person and now she is an obese person with vitamin deficencies, anemia, etc.  She also states that the bad foods are the only things she doesn't throw up.

It's impossible to read this and not shudder a little bit as a pre-op, but my take on it, while maybe being one of empathy, is not one of sympathy.  Please understand that I am only giving my opinion here as I do not know the WLS patient or even know where the blogger found her information, but common sense tells me a few possible things.

I don't care if you are a WLS surgery patient or just a regular dieter, you don't put on a hundred plus pounds without some effort on your part.  You don't become vitamin deficient by taking the vitamins you are supposed to be taking. And surely if the only foods that stay down are the bad foods, then you must have been experimenting with what you can get away with to some extent. The bad foods were not always the easy ones because the weight was lost to begin with after surgery. This surgery is not a cure all for the fact that we overeat or eat the wrong kinds of foods.  All of my research in making this decision has told me one thing louder than any other thing:  THIS SURGERY IS A TOOL!  Just as you can break a hammer, you can technically break this by not using it correctly.   

I refuse to be a negative statistic.  I know other people who are not negative statistics because they stick by the rules of the tool they have been given.  This is a last ditch effort and I will not blow it.  There is no food that can possibly taste better than not huffing and puffing up stairs, then being able to sit on the floor comfortably, to not having to wear the oh so sexy CPAP machine at night to sleep, to being able to bicycle with my kids or learning how to ride a horse, which has been a life-long dream for me.  Why in the hell would anyone lose the weight and then return to eating the way they did before surgery?  That kind of eating has not worked for me the first time around.

But as someone said, the surgeons are not doing surgery on our brains.  We have to do that.  We have to fight the head hunger and as God is my witness (doesn't that sound dramatic?  Very theatrical)after surgery, anytime I am tempted by something that will simply taste good and fulfill no other purpose, I am going to take that moment to do one thing that I was not able to do at my heaviest weight.  The list of those things is long.  Then after doing that, I will think again if that bit of chocolate or whatever is really worth not being able to do even that one thing.

I know the day will come when I will feel like I can eat anything.  I am the one making the choice however about what I eat.