Surgery for weight loss

A sad thing for me is when weight loss surgery post ops come back and say "Oh Sue, I wish I'd listened to your warnings".

The warnings I've posted can actually be found on most weight loss surgeons' websites but they aren't in a very prominent place.

Moreover, people want to believe there is a quick way to doing this weight loss thing - so maybe many folks don't look for the small print like 1-2% of gastric bypass patients die within 30 days of surgery or like undermining the delicately balanced system we have for nourishing our bodies with the hundreds of nutrients we need on a daily basis, isn't a very good idea.   As one doctor put in it in a book I read in the 1970's, this type of thing is similar to trying to run our cars on French perfume... how long would they run? Sadly, we often treat our cars better than we treat our bodies! 

The body adapts in a way to various forms of starvation, but of course does not last very well in the long run as it starts to consume protein and macro nutrients from itself, like the brain, the heart, calcium from the bones etc.

It's meant as a short term way to survive a starvation period and not for something in the long term.

I remember when I started studying this stuff in 1990.  I called a medical provider, an intelligent well educated one, and asked him to tell me what he knew about the GI tract. He gave me a short basic explanation.  I asked for more details but he said that was all they got in medical school!

I ended up reading bunches of books and medical journals to get the rest of the information, a research which took more than 10 years of study (not counting the many books etc I read before my specific study on weight loss surgery - I'd been studying weight control since the 1970's and still am studying it).  Sadly, this is not easily available to the public and apparently many medical providers don't have the time or ? to study this in more detail.

Eating healthy and exercising at least 5 days a week (the only thing which strengthens our hearts is cardio exercise or as it was formerly called, "aerobic exercise") is the best way to go.  That's what they say if one studies the subject and I can attest from personal experience, it works.

Eating healthy usually means avoiding fast or fatty foods and eating mostly veggies and some fruits.

Not eating healthy and exercising raises our risks for heart disease, stroke, thrombosis and more.  I've lived through this thing of heart disease and clogged arteries - not in myself but in my hubby who never heard from a medical provider about a heart healthy diet or how important aerobic exercise is. I made him exercise daily but he only did 20 minutes most days.  Never-the-less, that 20 minutes is probably the reason why he's still living albeit required five major surgeries to fix his heart and clear out the clogging from his arteries. 

And all this, while seeing medical providers regularly and paying lots of bucks - where were the warnings he should have gotten?  

And basically, not looking for the quick way out of a weight problem because there is no quick way that is healthy and works.  Terminal cancer patients don't have a weight problem but I suspect most of us would not want to go there.  But having one's stomach and bowels cut up and/or rearranged in a very unnatural manner, as done in surgeries for weight loss, isn't a good idea either.

As Beverly Sills has said "there is no quick road to a place worth going!"