Weight Loss Surgery Is Not The Solution.
It’s the Catalyst.
Weight loss surgery is not the solution.
It’s not the answer.
Weight loss surgery is the catalyst!
A tool. A jumpstart. An important part of the solution.
When I look up the definition of the word “catalyst,” I find a few variations.
They are all incredibly fitting with the idea I want to convey.
A catalyst precipitates an event - in this case, surgery precipitates a lifelong mindset shift and a changed relationship with food & nutrition. A lifelong dedication to a healthier lifestyle. A lifelong journey of weight loss and weight maintenance. A permanent commitment to yourself and what you most desire from this life. A new process for navigating emotions and stress. A new relationship with the challenges in your life. Weight loss surgery precipitates a changed relationship with yourself.
A catalyst is an agent that provokes or accelerates significant change or action.
This may be the most fitting definition of all!
Weight loss surgery accelerates weight loss. It speeds the process and gives you some rapid success to latch onto. It jumpstarts your journey and helps you to change your eating and build new habits. It gives you enough success to celebrate wins, enjoy victory, and recognize progress. It improves your health enough to move easier, live with less pain, acquire more energy, and it provides some relief from the reality and the cycle you’ve been trapped in.
A catalyst enables a permanent change faster & under different conditions than otherwise possible.
I cannot overstate how important this piece is. Surgery helps you drop enough weight to feel better - to finally feel good enough to keep going. The initial inertia of lifestyle change is a high barrier to entry when you’re fighting constant pain and exhaustion. Taking on more grocery shopping, meal prepping, recipes, and movement is beyond daunting when your baseline is feeling lousy. Surgery provides different conditions than would otherwise be possible. Enabling fast change and improving adverse conditions… this means giving your body more energy to work with to keep tackling the next hurdles.
The other interesting part of the chemistry definition of a “catalyst” is that the catalyst itself remains materially unchanged. It’s simply added to other ingredients to accelerate the change – it allows for transformation that may not otherwise be possible under certain conditions and accelerates results.
Weight loss surgery is not the transformation.
It provokes change. It doesn’t provide transformation – it requires it!
It enables and accelerates transformation.
Surgery is not the transformation.
I am the transformation.
This week I’ve begun sharing my decision with my family and with the world. Letting everyone know that I’m choosing to have weight loss surgery and have spent months preparing for it. It’s a mixed bag - the people who love you want what’s best for you… but also tend to have differing opinions about what they believe is best. The feedback I’ve heard the most is “I hope you’re prepared for a lifelong change and a long-term lifestyle shift.” I’m undergoing almost 6 months of surgery preparation and a pre-operative program that is almost 100% geared toward setting yourself up for lifelong change, a complete mindset shift, and mental & psychological preparation for the hard work and commitment that is required for long-term success.
I’m not preparing for a surgical procedure. I’m preparing for a 50+ year undertaking, a constant battle, a long and arduous journey, and a total overhaul of my entire life.
An upheaval – a violent and sudden disruption – of the person I’ve been and a conscious, intentional creation of the person I choose to become.
My fellow patients in the surgery preparation program have received feedback from their loved ones, co-workers, friends, and acquaintances resembling some variation of “You’re taking the easy way out.”
No one in my life has said this to me. At least not directly. I was the one saying this to myself. For years I believed I could do this on my own. I know how. I’ve lost weight before. I didn’t want to take drastic action and alter my anatomy when I believed I could do it alone. I could succeed another way. I could fight through this by myself.
I’d tell myself I could. I’d tell myself I should. I’d tell myself I would.
[A little Dr. Seuss tribute]
I’d beat myself up for not following through. I’d wallow in regret – lamenting how I got here and where I could have course-corrected. Replaying all the many places I could have turned it around. I’d wish for the opportunity to turn back time.
I’d judge myself, hate myself, blame myself, and berate myself.
I told myself I wasn’t allowed to take the easy way out. I’d created this mess and I needed to clean it up on my own. I couldn’t get some doctor to bail me out of this hell of my own creation. I created this reality and therefore, I deserved to suffer through it, live with it, and be trapped & held back by it. I wasn’t worthy of an easy way out.
Until one day I stood in my bedroom staring blankly at a coat hook (as we all do when epiphany strikes) and shouted aloud to myself in an empty house…
“THERE IS NO EASY WAY OUT!” It doesn’t exist. From where I stand right now, there is no easy way out. No easy way forward. No easy path to the life I want! Period.
Weight loss is hard. Obesity is hard. PICK YOUR HARD!!
Asking for help is hard. Being vulnerable is hard. Changing your life is really flipping hard! For many of us - for me - suffering in silence is so much easier.
Suffering, struggling, punishing myself, resigning myself… those are familiar.
Being vulnerable, reaching out, asking for help, seeking support… those are terrifying.
Every path from where I am to where I want to be will be hard. Instead of wasting all my time and energy punishing myself, sitting in regret, wishing I could turn back time… Instead of meticulously planning the life I could have had if I had done this differently, if I stuck with that habit, if I could go back to this point…knowing what I know today.
Instead of all that wasted time and energy…Instead of problem-solving the past…I could be honest about where I am today. I could drop the regret and the what-if’s and the if-only’s and spend my energy figuring out my best path forward from right here. I could support myself and give myself every tool, advantage, and opportunity to succeed. What a revolutionary idea. That’s an option that’s available to me. That’s the wisest and the kindest option available to me.
It was suddenly so clear. I only get this one life. I don’t deserve to suffer. I owe it to myself, to my family, to my future children, to the women who came before me… I owe it to all of us to do my best with this life.
That’s the day I called my doctor to ask for a bariatric surgery referral.
Because I’m done wasting time. Wishing, regretting, and shaming my life away.
I get to fight for the best version of me. I get to create the life I want.
It won’t be the easy way out. It will be ridiculously hard. It will be heart-breaking, empowering, crushing, exhilarating, awe-inspiring, vulnerable and downright joyful.
And above all, it will be worth it.
