BMI: 43.01
-1 pound day to day, -27.4 all in all. I'm getting really close to the 10% mark.
Anyway, I read a lot of blogs. I love blogs. I comment on many of the blogs I read (I love both giving and receiving comments). There are a few I read pretty much daily but rarely comment on. One of those is The Blubber Blog. Lynn, its author, just had weight loss surgery. Like just had it, as in a few days ago.
Lynn's a great writer, and I like her blog, but I have problems commenting on it because, well . . . I'm looking for a good way to say this. I think it's primarily that weight loss surgery makes me uneasy. It's not that I think it's wrong per se. I mean, we're all fighting the same obesity demon. Who am I to say that one way is less valid or less right than any other? Losing weight the old fashioned way is hard and I shouldn't cast stones at someone for choosing not to walk that road. Plus getting cut up isn't exactly easy. I mean, yes it is in that you're knocked out and lie there while surgeons do the actual cutting, but it obviously takes a whole bunch of courage to go under the knife.
Logically, all that, and yet. Maybe the best way I can put it is that while I don't think weight loss surgery is cheating, I feel like it is. I can justify in my head a billion ways in which it's not a wrong thing to do, but some part of me just can't get on board.
This road is hard. A few months from now, hell, maybe a few days from now, I might go off course. She'll have have a whole heck of a lot harder time doing so: weight loss surgery is pretty damn close to a permanent commitment device. It's easy for me to fall off the horse, she pretty much can't.
As I just wrote that last paragraph, I thought about a Freakonomics column from a few years ago that discusses weight loss and commitment devices, including bariatric surgery. (Also, while I'm discussing weight loss commitment devices, I can't not link to this op-ed about using money as a commitment device for weight loss.) I'm going to go ahead and block quote part of the Freakonomics column:
There are at least two ways to think about the rise in bariatric surgery. On the one hand, isn�t it terrific that technology has once again solved a perplexing human problem? Now people can eat all they want for years and years and then, at the hands of a talented surgeon, suddenly bid farewell to all their fat. There are risks and expenses of course, but still, isn�t this what progress is all about?
On the other hand, why is such a drastic measure called for? It�s one thing to spend billions of dollars on a disease for which the cause and cure are a mystery. But that�s not the case here. Even those who argue that obesity has a strong genetic component must acknowledge, as Bessler does, that �the amount of obesity has skyrocketed in the past 30 years, but our genetic makeup certainly hasn�t changed in that time.�
So the cause is, essentially, that people eat too much; and the cure is, essentially, to eat less. But bariatric surgery seems to fit in nicely with the tenor of our times. Consider, for instance, the game shows we watch. The old model was �Jeopardy!,� which required a player to beat her opponents to the buzzer and then pluck just the right sliver of trivial knowledge from her vast cerebral storage network. The current model is �Deal or No Deal,� which requires no talent whatsoever beyond the ability to randomly pick a number on a briefcase.
I think that passage from Dubner and Levitt maybe captures the ambivalence of my feelings. To someone who loses via surgery, I'm happy you won, just like it's great when people do well on Deal or No Deal. It's fabulous to get something (be it money or a new body) that will let you live your life as you'd like to. It's nice when good things happen to people, and I'm happy for them.
But to all the people doing it the hard way, I'm not just happy for you like you're happy for someone when something nice happens. I'm proud of you. I admire you. I respect you. You (and I) walk a long hard road doing it the old fashioned way. You're not likely to win as much money on Jeopardy as you would in an episode of Deal or No Deal, but my hat's off to you because every dollar and every pound was so hard fought.
There's nothing wrong with taking the easy way out, but there's something very right about doing it with nothing but your own willpower to keep you going.
How do you guys feel about weight loss surgery? Am I just entirely off base, or do you agree with me that there's something that feels off about the idea that losing weight via surgery is just as admirable as losing it on your own? Would you ever have surgery, and why or why not?
Thank you for all your wonderful comments on the photos yesterday. All the compliments definitely put a spring in my step. (And for those of you who asked, I did in fact get a new phone, upgrading from an original iPhone to a new iPhone 3G S.)
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