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The Incredible Shrinking Woman |
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Left: A “before” photo was hard to come by, since I’d ducked cameras most of the last decade. This picture was actually taken after my surgery, when I’d lost about 30 pounds.
Right: Not quite an “after” shot,
since I expect to lose more, but as visual proof of how far I‘ve come, a “during” will do nicely.
Most women do not care to reveal their weight, especially if the prefix “over” applies. And most women who aren't 6 feet 4 inches tall would be dismayed to weigh close to 200 pounds. I'm 5 feet 8 but proud to tell the world I weigh 197.
It's so much better than 333.
I'm also proud to say I did it “the easy way,” an odd accusation often leveled at those who choose weight-loss surgery—as if there were tremendous virtue in reducing a more difficult way, and as if major surgery and a lifestyle change are easy. Easy or not, the adjustable gastric banding I underwent was an answer to a question I'd been asking much of my life: If I can lose weight, why can't it stay lost?
Like most considered morbidly obese—a delightful term indicating a medically serious degree of excess weight, usually 100 or more pounds—I had dieted down to a normal size several times. Often I went years wearing sizes 8, 9 or 10, fighting an ongoing battle not to regain. But eventually, the weight always crept back on. And every time, I ended up heavier than my largest weight before.
This rebound talent makes me a good bet to survive famines. Not only do I hoard calories as fat instead of burning them for energy, my body “learns” from each strict diet and tucks a little extra away for a future dearth of food. In today's land of plenty, such an adaptable metabolism ensures a constant fight against fat—a fight more than half of all Americans are currently losing.
Even more discouraging: More than 90 percent of those who manage to lose considerable weight by dieting are doomed to regain it within five years, according to the National Institutes of Health. Given that scary statistic and my personal history, was there any hope?
It looked like hope soared highest in the operating room. According to the American Society for Bariatric Surgery, weight-loss surgery is “the only proven method of achieving long-term weight control for the morbidly obese.” Granted, that group has a bias—but nothing else I'd tried had worked.
Initially I looked at the gastric bypass, made famous by singer Carnie Wilson and, most recently, Al Roker of Today. I watched two of my family members go through the process, from surgery to goal weight, and envied their incredible, quick results. Although I certainly qualified for the operation based on my weight—at my highest, 333 pounds, roughly twice my ideal size—I was just too healthy to have insurance pay for it. Despite a decade of carrying 50 to 150 extra pounds, my body had not succumbed to any of the diseases or conditions caused or worsened by obesity. Not yet, anyway.
As I resigned myself to waiting a few years while trying to sock away the money to pay for the bypass, I heard of a similar but less complicated operation: adjustable gastric banding (AGB). The more I learned about this procedure, the more grateful I was I'd been delayed in my original quest.
Because AGB doesn't cut into any organs, as most weight-loss surgery does, its risks are fewer. Basically, it works by cinching the upper part of the stomach into a small pouch, so banded folks get full faster and stay full longer. Though AGB doesn't offer the speedy loss all but guaranteed by the malabsorption of the bypass, which takes part of the stomach and intestines out of the digestive loop, it also doesn't present its 1-in-200 chance of death. On my mental set of scales, the choice was easy: Lose 5 to 10 pounds a month with a small chance of complications, or lose two to four times faster with a far greater likelihood of surgery-related mortality (or other unpleasantries).
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