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Review of Obesity Surgery: Stories of Altered Lives

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This is a book every prospective or new WLS patient should first devour and then digest leisurely. Next, they should share it with their loved ones and any health care provider, medical staff member, or support group leader who may be under-informed. Why? Because this book will tell you, by way of other real patients? stories, the unforeseen and often mind-boggling extent to which WLS can change a person . . . in the head. Obesity Surgery: Stories of Altered Lives is a collection of interview excerpts from thirty-two RNY patients with interspersed commentary and explanation by the psychologist authors. The excerpts are divided into chapters with sections like ?Receding Weight?Romantic Advances,? which explores patients? reactions to positive sexual attention, and ?Is There a User?s Manual to the New Me?? in which the interviewees describe how they take on new and unforeseen challenges in life without their weight to shield them. The patients describe in concrete detail how losing a hundred pounds or so has profoundly affected their marriages, families, jobs, and their own self-concepts, for better or for worse. In one particularly poignant interview, Abby explains that her weight loss helped her become an active, involved parent: she was finally able to take her 10-year-old daughter into the shower and show her how much shampoo to use, how to rinse her hair, how to wash her body. Indeed, parenting was one area of life that interviewees consistently found improved after WLS.

The authors also explain how obesity surgery could upset many relationship dynamics so that some previously stable marriages and long-term loves fizzled, faded, or went down in flames. Surprisingly, one woman?s boyfriend told her after their break-up, ?I liked you better when you had no self-esteem and were heavy because I could control you. Now I can?t. I liked it when you were home all the time because I knew exactly where you were at, who you were with, and what you were doing.?

The reason to read and share this book in order to understand the myriad changes WLS can have on your life can be summed up in Erica?s comment: ?There is a major detail missing from the brochures explaining the impact of surgery. We hear a lot about nutritional support, but no one talks about what the weight loss does to you.?

February 2009