Cathy O'Neil also has a bunch of interesting writing about bariatric surgery:
https://mathbabe.org/2016/06/27/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/06/28/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/06/29/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/07/23/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/07/30/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/08/06/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/08/19/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/08/31/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/09/11/
https://mathbabe.org/2017/10/31/
A friend of mine had a job selling the band that surgeons put around the stomach to make it smaller. I've lost tough with him, but he seemed to make a good living at it.
The Weight Loss Surgery forum on Reddit had mixed feelings about her essay.
My impression is that she didn't do a good job preparing herself for it and now has catch-up to do. From what I read, she skipped over a lot of the prep by paying out of pocket, and that prep would have told her to come to terms with food issues and have a therapist in advance.
My sense after reading the article is that she's just so mad about the whole thing. Mad that she did it; would have been mad had she not. Mad that she's getting results; would have been mad had she not. Mad that the surgery is restricting her food. which is a thing she might have expected. She's just mad about all of it, mad about literally all possible outcomes. I hope that shrink helps her because that's no way to live.
Why am I reading the WLS forums? Because I'm four months into a gastric balloon procedure (done at Stanford, about thirty pounds down) and I can't find any active gastric balloon forums.
Making a balloon look like a stomach is easy. Like a little dog is harder, but I can do it.
Making a stomach look like a balloon is pretty easy too.
3: Huh, there were two Megans (not McMegan) from blogging 10+ years ago - the other was a friend of AWB's - and I never realized until now that I must never have seen a photo of you, and must have just mapped the other Megan's visual image onto both of you.
3: And how's your experience of the surgery and aftermath? Positive/mixed/or?
Positive. It was absolutely the right move. I was forty pounds heavier than my adult high weight (after three pregnancies, chemo/ abdominal surgery, Steadfast's infancy). Sadly, the balloons (which come out in two months! This is not surgery; they're inserted and withdrawn orally. No permanent alteration.) will get me back to ... my adult high weight.
But the additional mobility and progress has been fantastic. If you've got money to burn, I recommend the technique.
We can't have two Megans. I have enough trouble with the Daves.
Somebody should figure out how to make a balloon that lasts a couple of weeks and then is digested. Like whatever they put on Cap'n Crunch to stop it from getting soggy in milk, but maybe 50% stronger..
9: that's great. You've been through the wringer. Are you power-lifting at all these days?
I was a high school classmate of Roxanne Gay and made mild fun of her weight as did everyone else, albeit I wasn't enough of a monster to be mean to her face. Who looks like an asshole now (and then, too, I guess)?
13 made me snoop. I must have been at college with her.
Also, one of the assholes that started Twitter.
You've been one of the assholes that started Twitter?
I've been one of the assholes in lots of settings.
I literally just returned to the gym this morning. I've been out of that realm for three years. There'll be some ramp-up before I lift, if I even do. I am curious about the Gold Medal Bodies program these days. Might do that. I see myself as working my way back from ruin and I'm not that inclined to go hard.
I did go through the wringer, but it has been a pretty good couple of years. I'm definitely not deep in it anymore. By 2016, the grief and lingering chemo wasn't a dominant feeling, and now I've got the energy and enthusiasm to work back to a pre-collapse version of myself. Getting the gastric balloons felt like yanking myself onto a perpendicular trajectory, but it is working.
That's very good to hear. Babies are exhausting, even without any other issues.
I've been pretty happy to have a toddler/little boy rather than a baby.
I read Hunger and found it really foreign. Her relationship to food is entirely different to mine. There's a Simpsons line, spoken by Homer about TV, where he calls it "father, mother, secret lover." That is how she writes about food. It's comfort, protection, a trial, a curse, a carnal pleasure. I like her writing, but the food thing is totally foreign to me. I ended the book feeling sorry for her but lacking any identification. I am not sure I have ever read a memoir I found so completely unrelateable. It seemed like she must have turned herself inside out to produce it, and I feel sort of bad about not appreciating it.
3 seems kind of unfair. I don't think she's mad; I think that the most important relationship in her life just shifted tremendously, leaving her adrift. Being that large must be terrible in so many ways, but clearly, it worked for her somehow. It is weird to me that she spent so much time thinking and writing about her weight, years considering bariatric surgery, and yet seemed to terribly unprepared for what was coming.
Oh, and the links in 1 are really interesting. Thanks for collecting them into a set.
I guess there's no beer after bariatric surgery. Nothing carbonated at all.
What caught my eye was that, after she's talked about how she likes her body, she likes being strong and tall, she likes taking up space, what she hates is the way society makes her feel about her weight... someone shouts at her to get out of the way and she describes her response as "shuffling as fast as she can". That's as fast as she's been able to move for years: a shuffle.
26: In her Hunger, she talks about why she got fat. She was raped as a girl (preteen?) and put on weight in a form of self-protection (and comfort). Not a good coping strategy, but not uncommon. I think at some point, many folks with bodies that are uncooperative make a choice: radical acceptance ("I love my body"), ignoring their body as much as possible ("I'm a brain in a vat") or sticking with varying degrees of self-loathing. I think the former makes some sense when change is hard or impossible.
When I was a kid riding the subway to high school I overheard a conversation about a story idea. A man was horribly overweight. At some point, he managed to start losing a significant amount of weight. As he lost weight, his life changed. The discussion revolved around how this change would affect his marriage, his career, his self image. What things would hold and what things would fall apart. It was much more interesting than my usual eavesdropping.
Gay was eating to fill an unmet need. She was self medicating. Some people use alcohol, some use cocaine, some use nicotine, some use risk, some use food. They've changed her body. That's what surgeons do, and god bless them for it. Now, she has to change her psychology. From what I've read, this isn't always easy, but I get the impression Gay is stronger than she likes to let on. Her body is different. She will become different. She will also still be the same person, and she'll have to deal with that.
To keep the fight fair, if you go up a weight class, you should have weightier emotional problems.
1: Thanks for those links! I also enjoyed the This American Life podcast that Cathy O'Neil discusses.