The post-WLS diet is "miserable?" News to me.

http://www.eje-online.org/content/174/1/R19.full.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3920787/

The point is (and this is the reason I opted out) that you CAN still regain weight. You have to maintain a special diet, not just immediately post-surgically, but for life. If you don't, you regain the weight.

So I asked myself: "If I have to eat that way even after the surgery, for the rest of my life, why do I need the surgery? I could just eat that way anyways without it." If, after surgery, I could eat all the great stuff I eat now and STILL lose weight, it might be a consideration for me. But I'd never be able to eat the way I eat now (which is not the way I used to eat, to be sure) if I had WLS. And I like enjoying food. I just do it differently, and a lot smarter now. I don't feel deprived when I'm fasting because I know I will be able to eat delicious stuff again soon. Knowing that I would never be able to eat whatever I want again, and was stuck for life with the miserable diet WLS requires, I'd be really unhappy. Now I get the best of both worlds, yay - eating what I want AND getting super healthy.

The fact is that if you ate the exact post-surgical diet even without having the surgery, you would see the same results. The fact is that WLS still requires you to have lots of discipline in your eating even afterwards. The only actual difference is that, post-surgery, it's actually painful/unpleasant to eat too much.

We all agree that in ALL cases, life changes are required to be successful. I find the life changes required by fasting to be far, far easier and better than the ones required by WLS.

Really? And what do you imagine they are? Proof, please.

They don't "openly state" it until you're already here. People come here looking for general obesity help, not just one method. It's deceptive.

It's nice to see someone else who has been successful with keto and fasting - in fact, the first person here who knws anything at all about fasting. So for me, I do both IF and eating keto when I'm not fasting. I'm also a Buddhist!

It seems like you initially had a problem with fasting because you were "eating calories lower than many of us do after surgery, which caused me severe issues". There's actually a big difference between "super low calorie" and "no calories at all". An odd thing about fasting is that while sever calorie restriction (like eating only a few hundred calories a day) doesn't work and is in fact counter-productive, while eating NO calories for periods doesn't have those bad effects. I've never talked to someone who weighed as much as you did - I'm not sure if there are any metabolic difference between morbidly obese and superobese (or whatever it's called).

Without responding to your message line-by-line, I have one general question. You said things like "there are stark differences", "the changes are significantly greater with surgery", "fasting and such does not cause a permanent alteration to glucose metabolism" (and I assume you are implying WLS does), "Surgery also works faster and the changes are stronger and more resilient. It immediately begins to reverse insulin resistance by permanently changing the enteroendocrine hormones that regulate obesity".

I am wondering on what you base those statements. Di you have any proof/studies that this is the case? If you believe this, then why do you think it is? What's the difference between fasting and surgery? what magical benefit do you think surgery has that fasting does not?

Thanks for the first intelligent, non-abusive response. You are a good buddhist! :-)