Have you seen the pictures of Carney Wilson in this month�s Playboy? Hubba, hubba! She looks fabulously slim and sexy... got a great set of tits on her, too!

I�ve been interested in her weight-loss surgery transformation ever since I heard about it a few years ago. Although I never got around to reading her first book, I did read a few magazine articles about what she�d done and why, and all the ways her body and life were changing, and I�ve always been really happy for her. I�m not really crazy about celebrities and their arrogant self-absorption in general, but Carney has a quality of seeming very genuine and vulnerable. While she claims it wasn�t THAT bad to be �the fat girl in Wilson Phillips,� I always felt sorry for her in the sense that it couldn�t have been easy to be so heavy and have to stand up there and sing next to skinny, sexy little Chynna and Wendy.

I didn�t even know she was doing Playboy until I read it in her second book �I�m Still Hungry� which I thumbed through at Borders on Saturday night. I�d been wanting to read that ever since I saw it in the store a couple of weeks ago, partly because I�m just interested in how she�s doing, but partly also because the idea of having the surgery myself has recently come to seem like less of a farfetched idea.

Now, I am not a person who turns to the medical profession for help very often. I�m a big pussy about pain, and I�m not too awful crazy about the big medicals bills I always get stuck with either--oftentimes, for doctor visits which turned out to be no help for what ailed me at all. I�d much rather go the �do it yourself� route when it comes to managing my health. (Knocking wood here that I never have to remove a tumor or a kidney with only the aid of my trusty Exacto knife and a dog-eared self-help book on alternative healing.)

But as much as I dislike the modern medical system, I�m becoming more and more intrigued with the weight loss surgery success stories I keep running across on the �net. I know it�s not an easy answer to the problem of obesity... for several months I followed the online journal of a woman who had it done, and even though her surgery was successful and uncomplicated, the first few months after surgery were far from a breeze. There was plenty of pain, exhaustion (from her body consuming it�s own resources so quickly,) frustration at getting used to a new way of eating, and severe ill effects from dumping (a word used to describe a bad reaction to sweet or fatty foods after WLS.) Even as she got recovered, the fatigue lingered on for weeks, and she even began losing hair for awhile.

However... HOWEVER... she did lose the weight, and lost it fast! Fifty pounds gone in something like three months, and she continued to lose at a fast pace until she reached her goal.

The surgery truly seems like a miracle for some people... I remember a few years ago I went to a birthday party for my niece, and I was helping out in the kitchen area and there was some guy I�d never seen before who was kind of in the way. So I just smiled politely and said �Excuse me� and started to walk past when I noticed he was grinning at me, and he said �You don�t know who I am, do you?� And I looked at him and tried to figure out where I knew him from and he laughed again and said, �I�m Chuck. Ronnie�s dad!� And here it was my sister-in-law�s father who I�d seen and talked to at plenty of family gatherings in the past, but there was only about a third of him left! He�d been a BIG dude, and had the surgery for health reasons on his doctor�s recommendation, and it turned him into a whole new person. He couldn�t have been happier with the results, and it was truly amazing to see how he�d transformed... how happy and HEALTHY he looked, when before he looked lik the poster boy for an impending massive coronary.

I keep running into people online, too, who have had the surgery and lost a great deal of weight, and I haven�t heard one person say they regret doing it. The weight comes off like magic, and more importantly it seems to STAY off. And they go on to have tummies tucked and boobs lifted and they work out and buy new clothes, looking fabulous and feeling as though they�ve finally begun LIVING after years, decades even, of looking and feeling bad, feeling terrible about themselves, and I�m hugely, terribly envious. I want that. I want this problem with my weight to go away once and for all so I too can feel free and happy and healthy and attractive again. I don�t feel like a fat person on the inside... ever since I gained weight I�ve always felt like I was imprisoned in a body that is not really mine and dammit, I want out NOW.

The trouble is... do I have the will and the stamina to go through the pain and the exhausting months of recovery? What about school�could I keep up with my studies, or would I have to take time off? And what about the expense? Insurance might cover some of it, but I�d be surprised if everything was covered. My biggest fear, though, is what if something goes wrong? There are risks to surgery, but a bigger worry for me is that I�ll end up like my �Uncle� Bill.

Bill is an old buddy of my dad�s from way back in grade school, and even though Bill moved across the country a long time ago, they�ve kept up the friendship all these years. When I was a child, he was the fattest person I�d ever seen. In my childish mind, I just knew he must weigh 300 pounds�the absolute highest weight I could conceive that a very fat human being might weigh! In retrospect, he probably weighed much more... I�d now guess closer to 450, at a height of maybe six feet tall. He was BIG. He had to buy an extra seat on the airplane, take his own reinforced chair when he went places... just a really obese guy. (Also one of the nicest people you�d ever want to meet!) From what I understand from my dad, Bill spent years trying every diet that had been invented at the time with no success, before he finally had gastric bypass surgery probably twenty years ago.

He lost a fair amount of weight, but not nearly all he needed to lose. Last time I saw him, he probably WAS down to 300 pounds or so--definitely still obese but no longer having to carry around a special chair. But the scary part of the story is that he has not been able to eat in any way resembling normal since he had the surgery. He can eat only a few spoonfuls of food at each meal or he gets sick, and there are a multitude of foods that he simply cannot eat because they make him �dump�... a highly unpleasant experience of nausea, shaking, sweating, diarrhea and vomiting caused by certain foods triggering an insulin reaction in post-surgery individuals.

Basically, the result of surgery is that he is still fat, is sick alot and is almost completely unable to enjoy food. Granted, surgery techniques have probably improved a lot in twenty years, snd I have no idea how Bill takes care of himself... maybe some of his problems have been brought on by not eating right or exercising. But still... the idea that this �miracle� surgery could fail, that it could leave you fat and even MORE miserable and sick... well, that�s just plain scary to me.

Yet there are so many success stories out there...

So I read Carney�s latest book since I�m still tempted, and I just wanted to see what she had to say about the experience. By her own account, she�s still doing great. She looks marvelous and sounds happy and enthusiastic about her new life and seems to enjoy taking all the steps necessary to insure she stays slim and healthy. She gives lots of tips in her book regarding how to be a weight-loss surgery success story. Among the tips:

Eat plenty of protein because carbs are what put the weight on you.

Since you can only eat a limited amount of food, eat very nutritious foods so that every bite counts.

Stay away from sugar and fatty foods to avoid a dumping reaction.

Drink a lot of water to flush out the fat.

Take vitamins.

Exercise a lot.

Ummmmmm... I�m thinking, if I could make myself do all that, would I even NEED the surgery?

I suppose the threat of dumping might be more effective at making me leave the sugar alone than is the threat of it making me fatter; and not being able to eat very much would certainly be good for forced calorie control--although Carney says that you CAN gain weight even after the surgery if you snack too much! And snacking too much is the very nature of my problem... I�ve never been a particularly �heavy� eater, I don�t put away a lot at one sitting. But when I�m stressed or depressed or bored, I do eat little bits of junk food almost continually.

So would it effectively come down to this�that I�d be paying a doctor to fix it so I�d get miserably sick any time I ate something I shouldn�t? Put that way, it hardly seems worth it when I still believe I could eat better on my own if only I�d just DO it.

I have actually been eating somewhat better since quitting work. School stress doesn�t seem to trigger binge eating nearly as much as being stuck at work through long boring afternoons used to. I know boredom and stress are my biggest saboteurs, even when I�ve managed to get everything else on track. So really, fixing my weight problem should be simple... I just need to stay happily occupied and stress-free at all times. Wish me luck.

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Last Five
Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
Live from the dump - 2006-04-09
Kind of like a muzzle for your brain - 2006-03-29
...and then she fell ass-first into my cereal bowl - 2006-03-28
Playing catch-up - 2006-03-27

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