Last night, we sat down to watch an episode of Big Medicine that we'd recorded earlier. The show airs Monday nights at 9/8c on TLC, and it explores the world of bariatric surgery. It's an interesting program, but I found it pretty discouraging.
What discouraged me most was how many people try dieting and fail. All of the people on the program (with the exception of one bedridden man who was fed excessively by his co-dependent mother) had tried diet after diet and failed. These people were basically at the end of the line, and nothing worked for them. The whole idea of going in for surgery to have my insides permanently re-routed sounds horrible, and I don't want to find myself in the same position.
There are too many things that one can't eat after bariatric surgery. I don't want to give up beer, drinking with my meals, and having to worry about the possibility of dehydration or malnutrition. I don't want to have to completely give up empty-calorie, high-fat foods like ice cream or chocolate, either.
No thanks.
Even the bariatric success stories were discouraging. There was a 20-year-old woman who had lost more than 100 pounds, and her skin just sagged. Her belly looked like a 70-year-old's with unbelievable sags and wrinkles. Her breasts hung almost to her navel, and she ended up having cosmetic surgery to remove all the excess skin. Although I know my medical insurance would probably cover bariatric surgery (especially right now when I'm so overweight) but there's no way they'd cover the procedures to remove the excess skin afterwards. Plastic surgery is expensive, and I don't know how I could manage to come up with $10-20,000 to remove all my sagging excess skin.
Now I'm starting to wonder: which is worse, being overweight, or having so much sagging skin that you look like one of those Chinese wrinkle dogs?
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2 comments:
You know, i have been thinking about this a lot lately. for the last few days i have wondered if i would be one of the people who lose a lot of weight and are no worse for wear. Or would i fall into the category of loose hanging skin...which to me looks no better whatsoever than being obese.....so its kind of a catch 22. i look at the people on Biggest Loser...see their bodies and i am encouraged....they lost 100 lbs or more and they seemed to bounce back fairly well. not too much hanging skin. yeah, there are the jello jiggler arms but a lot of people who have never had a weight problem have jiggly arms.
in particular i paid close attention to Shannon....she was the closest female on the show to my actual current weight…and on the grand finale i could not detect any unusual hanging skin. (who knows what those spandex shorts were hiding)
i definitely dont have the money to have surgery to remove loose skin...but if i end up having the loose skin...i will probably work toward having the surgery one day.....bc heck, after all the trouble of losing the weight, i dont want to have body image issues of a different sort.
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