Читать книгу Freedom from the Diet Trap: Slim for Life - Jason Vale, Jason Vale - Страница 21

People’s desperation to get to grips with their weight and health doesn’t simply stop at radical, nutritionally unsound, diets or suspect diet pills. Going under the surgeon’s knife is getting more and more popular. In the United States alone, 177,600 operations were performed in 2007, according to the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery. One of the most common operations and now probably the most widely talked about is gastric bypass surgery. This works by making your stomach smaller and removing part of your bowel to make your digestive system shorter. This was also the operation Fern Britton famously had and it’s not for the faint hearted. Personally I feel Fern Britton was given a hard time when it came out her dramatic weight loss was not simply down to diet and exercise, as she had apparently claimed, but rather surgery. I don’t think some realize how low and desperate someone has to get to even contemplate surgery for weight loss. Gastric bypass surgery can be potentially life threatening and is usually used in extreme cases only. However, due to what they deem as the ‘success’ of such operations, the plan is to extend this ‘opportunity’ to those who aren’t necessarily morbidly obese (large chance of dying as a result of their weight), but just obese. Please understand that the way obesity and morbid obesity is measured at the moment is using an antiquated system known as BMI (Body Mass Index). This ridiculous system doesn’t take into account muscle mass and is completely inaccurate in many cases. This system even shows the extremely muscular and well-toned rugby player Jonny Wilkinson as obese! Pretty soon you will have slightly overweight people (who according to the BMI scale are obese) getting this surgery. It’s also worth knowing that we are already in a position where many children are now going under the knife for obesity, yes kids.

Once again though I have the same question – does this treat the cause or the symptom? Unlike drug pills I can actually see an argument for some types of weight loss surgery. There would, I believe without question, be some people who would be dead now without it. However, this type of treatment is getting more and more popular and for some, far from being the last resort, it can be seen as the ‘easy’ solution and one of the first things they try. Easy is not the word I would use for this operation, stomach bypass or any similar procedures. Remember, these operations don’t stop you wanting certain foods; you just can’t eat as much of them. So you still want to, but you can’t. This, for many, is a form of living mental torture. Many get around the problem by simply blending a load of junk food with some liquid and drinking it instead. So they are still often having their sugar and refined fat fix, just in a different form or chewing the same crap very slowly. This is why there are some people who despite operations like this, still have problems losing weight. One lady lost just 1 lb (0.45 kg) in the seven weeks following her stomach bypass op. She spent £6,000, went through the nightmare of being under the surgeon’s knife to have her stomach strangled, yet still has exactly the same problem as before. She still battles every day with the mental cravings she has for the chocolates, cola, cakes, and all the other artificial sweet things that are causing the problem – and she still consumes them. She is still on a permanent mental diet – still constantly trying to fight a desire to eat and drink certain foods. And exactly the same can happen with jaw wiring, the stomach ‘pacemaker’ (yes there is one) or any of the other drastic surgical methods used to try and shift the fat.