Obesity and Dealing with It

I am in my late sixties now and I have dealt with weight issues for almost all of my adult life. I was born a healthy baby and I was always slightly on the heavier side throughout my childhood but as I got older I just kept packing on the pounds till I was already about two hundred and fifty pounds or so when I was eighteen even though I stood just five feet and six inches tall. By the time I was almost thirty I had lost the battle with weight loss completely despite many different techniques that I had tried to lose weight and a number of different weight loss programs I had joined and then left soon after. At age thirty I weighed close to four hundred pounds and was desperately searching for a solution to my weighty woes. My doctor referred me to a weight expert and he suggested that I get a surgery called a vertical banded gastroplastywhich is also known as stomach stapling.

The stomach of the patient is stapled with a ring at the top which restricts the amount of food that can go in at a time. Another ring or band surrounds the stomach and restricts it’s size to limit the amount of food that can be eaten and digested. This is a very dangerous operation and is hardly performed any longer. My operation was done in around nineteen eighty or so and soon and soon after it I started to react badly to the stapling. The operation requires that the patient follow a strict diet regime and any sort of overeating caused nausea and vomiting.

I was not able to control my diet well enough and about a year later the doctors needed to go in and undo the procedure with a vertical banded gastroplasty reversal which was even more dangerous. My weight, which had gone down to under three hundred pounds started to rise again and today I weigh closer to five hundred pounds than four hundred. I use a bariatric rollator to walk as I am not able to stand upright and balance myself.