Special Election Briefing: 5 Things You Should Know

Another broken promise.Sorry I have excuses

Ok look. I know I have been promising some new content and updates and yes an end to the political propaganda but I am honesty held up by two major events that are on the cusp of occurring right now and so until they have come to pass then I'm going to wait before putting anything outspoken up here.

A few things I do want to address and some questions I have been holding up on answering.

1- This website and onemansjourney or fatjewguy.com as you now know it is moving away from being just a gastric bypass political obesity issues whatever blog and is going to morph into being a more standard personal blog. I'll be speaking about many of the same issues but only from a personal basis. I've been posting content on a few different blogs that have been outdated, trying to consolidate where I was going to devote my energy (what spare I have) and each of my previous pages have each had their own targets. Humor, professional or other issues. So I have chosen this blog to morph into my personal one. It will still contain personal issues as it relates to gastric bypass and whatnot but only as it related to me personally. More on that and a new blog/site yet to come that seeks to have a dialog with people from all ends of the spectrum that speaks directly about issues of obesity, weight loss surgery and sociological weight issues.

If you are interesting in being a contributor for this new blog to come please contact me.

2- I have been hit by a number of questions about my admittedly heavy hand when it comes to comment moderation or to put it directly. I more often then not choose not to publish comments but rather answer them directly and actually prefer people to email me rather then allow discussions to take place in the comments area. I still leave it open for the people who haven't been able to find ways to email me or just are not interested in doing so but 99.9% of the time that comment will go unpublished and will be answered by me directly. The reason for this is rather simple. On a great many blogs, I feel that the dialogs or debates that occasionally occur around posts that are particularity sensitive take away from the actual post that leads the discussion. Hence, the inevitable flame wars in my mind detract from the whole thing. Normally if I get a particularly good comment or email I'll make that its own post. So there is the answer to that question.


3- The thing with Junk food Science- That one generated a lot of people asking the same thing. Yes, it was I.. How many Mark Blei's that write about this stuff can there possibly be? I did not link or comment on that article that Sandy posted until I drafted a reply to someone in the post today. That article the one that had the email with my name on it was not discussed here prior to today because I had nothing to add to what she said past the correspondence we exchanged and she publish with my permission . I still don’t have anything to add to it other then in the post below which was actually drafted more then a month ago . I did not nor do I think I have to validate what she wrote on her site by commenting any further then I have on what was in her article on her website even if it did have my name on it. I was not going out of my way to not mention her post before today. I just thought it stood by itself without any additional commentary required by me

Let me be clear it was I and was published with my permission. The materials stands by itself I have nothing else to add or say about it. . It was what it was; she didn’t change a word of mine when she published our correspondence so that being the case what else were any of you waiting for? It seems like some people think I needed to re address what was already addressed on her site. What am I missing?

4- A number of people and this may relate to something in the news I have missed have asked me if I count calories. So the answer is yes and no. I struggle in between being both ok with the way I am and not living in constant fear of having a weight gain. But I also do live in constant fear of a weight gain and would be lying to you if I said I did not. Mostly the last three years or so I spend my time worrying about the fact that I am not eating enough am underweight or malnourished and for the most part that is where my energy goes on foodstuff. . But there have been times or weeks when I have had my weight jump past my personal comfort level. What my personal comfort level is has nothing at all to do with what would theoretically be a healthy weight for me it's a personal thing that may in fact have some issues rooted in a small case of body dimorphia. The honest to god truth is I haven’t gone through all this bullshit to be overweight again…not even technically. The BMI index says that at 6 feet (I’m 5, 11 and three quarters. So close enough.) my normal BMI should be between 18.5 and 24.9 to remain in the normal range. This means at a weigh of 184 lbs I fall into being technically overweight.

I hang out at between 171 and 179 lbs. When I have been either very good about nutrition or very bad about junk food I have had times where I have had a jump up into the 180’s in fact I’m there at the moment (due to some great soup that was made specifically to help me put on a few pounds as well as a bad run with Reese’s pieces candy .. I know it sounds like a joke but it is not) Anyway that run put me into the 180’s. Before anyone starts I know that’s still regarded as small for a six foot guy. My fiancée would prefer me at 200 Lbs to be truthful and I also know that a great deal of that weight could be extra skin and I know that most people, I included think that BMI chart was developed somewhere in Auschwitz .

I don’t fucking care. I’m not gong to be in any way technically overweight for any reason after this fucking hell I’ve put myself through and so if get near the 180 lbs mark I start counting calories because there’s a good way to take off pounds which is a slow decline that keeps me eating and just consuming less then I burn. Being an office guy I don’t get out much and living in a cold weather country well, let just say that winters are long .so the good way takes a long time and is hard and requires me to count calories to make sure I have enough but not to much . The easy way is just to stop eating. This happens of it’s own accord enough that I don’t encourage that in my body, when I lose weight that way I’m actually losing muscle mass so it’s a balance and when I need to go back from 180 to the 170’s I’ll count calories and try and slowly decline so I don’t lose mass. That is the only reason I will ever count calories though and I suggest that you don’t either count calories or use the BMI chart but rather be healthy. What I say and what I do obviously are two differing things. I allow myself to be human.

5- Last thing. Many people who write me ask me for exact things from my surgical record. How much distal or how much proximal or how large exactly is my pouch, how much intestine and cut from the beginning of the tract or the end of it what about this or that nerve or method. I have no clue at all nor am I interested in knowing what the measurements are and what is where is not going to change anything at this point and would only be important if I was seeking a revision which scares me just less then signing on for experimental combined brain, heart and testicular surgery. I’m sure someone has it somewhere that it can be gotten from, but it is of no real use for me to look at what has been done because it’s not going to change. I use my weight and blood work combined with nutrition in order to determine what changes I need to make and then try and change them and I then either succeed or don’t.

I know many people put stock into how much of what was cut off and where but frankly it gives me the creeping willies to know exactly how much of me is laying in a dump in New Jersey somewhere so I don’t ask those questions nor do I have a copy of my surgical records on hand that I can quote you from. Frankly, I do not even know where one of my surgeons is . He decided I’m told that he no longer wanted to be a Doctor according to a secretary at my nurse practitioners old office though he still appears on the practice website. (Maybe they guy just never wants to see me again. The feeling is mutual), the other one who was a nice guy, and who I wished were my primary moved his practice way far away from where I was in NY when I had my surgery done to Long Island.

I’ll come back and say more as soon as I can. I have a move coming end of this month and as I said at the start am waiting on some official things to occur before I start talking more definitely about future plans.

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Someone on a web group linked the article that featured me on Junkfood Science

And when linking it . She described me as an unhappy customer. I kinda took umbrage at that and said that I was not so much an unhappy customer as I was an aggravated customer she called me on it, she's another blogger who's views on WLS I respect and she said that I certainly sounded unhappy. And if I wasn't what do would I use as the point of difference between being whatever I am and an unhappy customer.

This was my answer ( edited)

So to address your post down there. You are right. I'm not happy. What you asked is if I'm an unhappy customer. That's a different thing.

I'm unhappy that I had to do it at all, miserable in fact. I'm at times unhappy with the life I have with my bypass BUT, to me this was a necessary operation. I really think that if I had not done it , I would not be alive today or I would be worse then I am today certainly.

The main point of separation I use between an unhappy customer and I is that I waited past 4 times when they wanted to start the process of getting me my first date on the table. My dad took my first date, I said no the next two times they offered me a date. On the year of my blog I decided to restart the process because I had fought all I could and had reached the conclusion that I would not have a good quality of life or almost any without it.

I was in the Chemo stage, the stage where your at last resort and with the understanding that the cure might well be worse then the illness but have to try something because whatever I was doing wasn't working and things were getting worse. Take some risks because the alternative is looking very badly. To me thats the essence of the whole thing. I was well aware that their could be significant drawbacks before I went on the table. I even had started to read some of the gone wrong groups.

At the same time ,my surgical experience sucked, my post gastric bypass life until well after the first year was very scary, really horrifying. So I think me portraying myself on the blog as an unhappy customer is not as true as it is that I'm more unsure now three years later as to what my ,medical outlook is going to be then I was before.

That and I still have the fear of being fat which most people don't have if they have a hard post bypass experience. If that's being an unhappy customer in your book then in your book I'll take that designation

What scares me or more correctly pisses me off is that the industry is trying to make this into something that it is not.I have said this and said this and it bears repeating again, because each time I say it in a new way someone writes me a letter saying this time they got it.

I have problems with this being looked at as an elective surgery. Long-term I would like to see laws stating when you can and when you cannot suggest or advocate WLS surgery to a patient. The way it was portrayed and in fact the way that 60 minutes portrayed it is that, it's going to solve all your problems, you'll be thin, your sex life will be better , your life will be everything that you wanted it to be, but it's not. See the industry says that they try and make people understand that having this surgery is not going to solve all their problems and I would say if they aren't saying it they are more then certainly suggesting it or intimating that.

Lets hypothesize that in my medical records there was an indication that I had a history of depression and anxiety and was being treated for such, and might have even been hospitalized for it at some point in the past. Could be that, addiction could be in there as well, we are making up something -but I know enough people who's records had them in there that my point is still valid.I other words without giving out names I know post Gastric Bypass patients who have been at some recent point within the last 12 - 24 months been hospitalized for mental illness , depression, addiction etc. They seem to have more trouble then almost any other group we have discussed.

In my mind there should be a red light list that says if your gastric bypass candidate has been treated for depression, anxiety, addiction ..Whatever within the last 3 years then you as a surgeon must explicitly say "Hey, I see you have a history of having some depression or whatever. I want to explicitly tell you that even if your thin we have found that long-term if you aren't happy with your life fat, your most likely not going to become magically happy thin. It might take awhile for the honeymoon phase to go past but if you and your wife don't get along now, Your going to have the same issues thin,. Maybe more."

And just like when someone wants to convert to Judaism traditionally, you have to turn the person away three times before you even start the process. The doctor should say that these indications, depression, whatever, make you ineligible for this surgery unless you go through this intensive outpatient program that requires you to be there three or four times a week for at least six months and if you do that and if the feedback I get from those counselors then says that your in the right place to do this, and If I and you both still think this is the best option for you, then I will reconsider you for this surgery. But if you can't show me that you want this bad enough to take these steps to keep yourself mentally in check after the surgery by doing some upfront work, then I consider you too high a risk to do this surgery on you.

When I went in and for my one of my surgical consults( I went to a few before choosing). I was in a room with about 25 other women no older then 30 or so. As we waited for the thing to begin all the entire screen showed was a rotating picture screensaver with before and after pictures, rolling one after the other. Sad unhappy, unsmiling before pictures and happy, happy after pictures.

.How can you not say people are being screwed in their head. I counted 15 of those women who looked sad in their before pictures on that screen who were standing at the alter with a handsome man in their after pictures. Your not saying that that particular Doctor wasn't trying to intimate that losing weight via this surgery will find you a husband? I mean one , ok but fif-fucking-teen??

The discussion in the presentation was mainly for some reason about the after op diet, meaning the first six weeks, And then they said " after that you just eat whatever it is you like ,except for very fatty or sugary foods and in smaller plates ( but that won't matter you won't have any hunger) Oh and about one out of every 500 people die from this. (But Hey! one out of 500 die having heart surgery.) And some talk about dumping and whammo...Who wants to have their consultation with Dr. Perfect now?. Now that is not the Doc I picked but I assure you the consultation I went to was not that far off and in fact when I tried to go past the allotted, what? 15-20 minutes it got a bit hostile. Like how dare I have questions about stuff not covered.

So I'm not so much unhappy with my experience because independently of my surgeon and my process, I read everything and looked at everything and as they put me under I myself without any real help from medical personnel went out thinking, "You may just wake up worse and that may never go away" and as I thought." I'm ok with that".

I wonder how many people woke up thinking. "Ok, where's my handsome new husband? and were a bit put off by the fact that if they were like me they couldn't eat at all for….well months after the surgery.

And I had a bunch of people who had the surgery the same month as me in a different support forums call me and were all like" Dude, I can't eat" I'm at nine weeks and I'm not eating at al. Much less "on a normal diet just smaller portions", I can't keep mashed potatoes down. I feel like I'm going to pass out when I stand up.

Those people they , they were unhappy customers IMHO because their Doctors failed to give them a realistic expectation of what post surgery life was like and they failed to do their own research and what being thin really means in the face of having yourself cut open and modified extensively.

I say I'm not an Unhappy customer because I went to sleep on that table knowing what could happen, what pisses me off is it took me four years to get past all the bullshit until I felt that good with it and then still, until you experience something, you really don't know how it's going to effect you and someone should be pushing that in the pre meetings as well. .

So even though allot of it sucks I went in there at the time with as much information that wasn't bullshit as I could find. Now three years later, I find that most of what I was relying on then was pretty much bullshit but at the time I had done as much homework as I thought could be done and I had spoken to doctors who thought it was a smart idea and doctors who thought it was butchery and I listened to them all and made my decision.

And now that it's turned out to be harder then I would have liked and I'm more unsure of myself then I would have preferred to be, am I an unhappy customer compared with the multitude of women I know who found out that the husband who appeared out of thin air when they got thin vanished just as quickly when they went fucking crazy?

Or that they guy they were in love with before the surgery . The guy they were doing this for so they could be together longer and have a better life and better love. Many of those guys just couldn't handle the process or whatever. Compared to them, I'm doing really well, I knew that over 80% of people end up divorced if they are married when they have this operation. I could not predict if or how I would go nuts . But I was well, aware of the fact that I might.

I still think now that some part of the aftereffects of WLS will kill me, But as of now I'm still pretty sure that I would have been on this earth less time then I would have been had I not done this. As of now psychologically and in most cases physically I'm doing much better then before and there were big huge bumps in the road. HUGE!! And the fact that I am doing good psychologically and physically?

That could change tomorrow, it might, and I reserve the right to change my mind. That doesn't make the 60 minutes thing any less of a lie and it doesn't get in the way of what I wrote Sandy or what she puts in her blog. They might be different sides of the same thing or different shades of the same color but I'm pretty sure I'm saying now what I said there.

Mostly what I say totally sticks regardless of if your saying that I'm sounding like an unhappy customer, or if you accept my version of not being one. To me that's a qualification that I don't think I've really attained because I just haven't said those words yet. Those words are "I wish I had not done this and if I could go back in time and undo this I would in a heartbeat."

And until the time, I say that I have issues with the process and how it's explained but am not an unhappy customer, I think the process is wrong and needs fixing, I think that 60 minutes thing was a violation of journalistic integrity but I wouldn't exactly say I'm an unhappy customer. I prefer to think instead I'm an informed one who wishes at times that things were easier.

Best Wishes,
Mark

Actual real content coming next week.

New blog, new content , updated stuffs and no naked pictures of me ever.


( but thanks for asking)

You want to know what my life is really like? This is it.

BBC article - Fat people are ruining the world

Obese blamed for the world's ills

The world's obese population is rising

Obese people are contributing to the world food crisis and climate change, experts say.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated the obese consume 18% more calories than average.

They are also responsible for using more fuel, which has an environmental impact and drives up food prices as transport and agriculture both use oil.

The result is that the poor struggle to afford food and greenhouse gas emissions rise, the Lancet reported.

It comes as the World Health Organization predicts the obese population will double by 2015 to 700m.

Transport and food policy and the importance of sustainable transport must not be overlooked Dr Phil Edwards, report co-author

In the UK, nearly a quarter of adults are classed obese, twice as many as there were in the 1980s.

The team found that obese people require 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 to maintain daily activities - a fifth more than normal.

The higher consumption of food has a two-fold effect, researchers said.

First of all the increasing demand for food, drives up production.

This means that agricultural processes are using more oil to meet demand, which contributes to the rising cost of fuel.

The cost of fuel is then passed on in the cost of food, making it more difficult for poorer areas to afford it.

Prices

What is more, the researchers said obese people are likely to rely on transport more and put more strain on that transport because of their mass, which again drives up prices and usage.

But the researchers said there was a solution.

Phil Edwards, who co-authored the article, said: "Urban transport policies that promote walking and cycling would reduce food prices by reducing the global demand for oil and promotion of a normal weight.

And they added: "Decreased car use would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"Transport and food policy and the importance of sustainable transport must not be overlooked."

But Dr David Haslam, of the National Obesity Forum, said it was "stretching it a bit" to blame the obese in the way that the study appeared to do.

"Really, it is discriminatory towards obese people. They are an easy target at the moment, but I think the causes of climate change and rising food prices is much more complex."

People ask me why I immigated to Canada . I'm so tired.

Obama Faces Racism in West Virginia - Watch the top videos of the week here

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And yes , I'm still and American an yes, And if I can manage it, if they don't change the laws about duel citizenship then I'll always still be an American. I'm tired, tired of watching the land that I love so much self destruct. I'm tired of watching the rest of the world pass us by in ethical morality. In humanity and I'm tired of letting the George Bushes in the world set the tone in my country.

Revolution isn't such a bad concept if it's done for the right reason's. It's time for a change, but right now I'll help that change from another country. people say if you don't like America then leave it. I've spent the last two years immigrating to Canada , I could have taken my Fiancee and immigrated them to America. But this is the America they see, this America scares them.

Barak Obama if he does get elected , might be that revolution. I have my absentee ballot .

Learn truth and Vote ...Vote not based on smear campaign's, vote not on what your television feeds you. Go out, travel,learn..ask people in other countries why they fear America and then make your decision.

Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies

Photo Retoucher Says He Improved Images in Controversial Campaign

By Jack Neff

Published: May 07, 2008

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Dove's "real beauties" may not be so real after all, at least by the account of a renowned airbrush artist.

If true, the allegations that the Dove 'real beauties' were airbrushed could seriously undermine an effort that already has subjected Unilever to considerable consumer and activist backlash in recent months.

In a May 12 profile in The New Yorker posted online, Pascal Dangin of New York's Box Studios is quoted as saying he extensively retouched photos used in the Campaign for Real Beauty, which, if true, could seriously undermine an effort that already has subjected Unilever to considerable consumer and activist backlash in recent months.

Models 'a challenge'
"I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual 'real women' in their undergarments," wrote Lauren Collins in the New Yorker article. "It turned out that it was a Dangin job. 'Do you know how much retouching was on that?' he asked. 'But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone's skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.'"

A spokeswoman for Unilever didn't immediately return calls and e-mail for comment. An attempt to reach Mr. Dangin was unsuccessful at press time. But a spokeswoman for the campaign's creator, Ogilvy & Mather, cast doubt on the account of the celebrity fashion photo retoucher, though she said the agency is still attempting to collect details of his work, if any, on the ads.

"We are unsure right now what he did," the Ogilvy spokeswoman said. "He works with Annie Leibovitz, the photographer. And we don't have any record of him actually working on any of the Dove campaign.

"There was no retouching of the women," she said. "If there was a hair that was up in the air, that might have been the kind of retouching that was done. But until I know what he actually worked on, I can't comment on it."

Leibovitz appears unscathed
While Mr. Dangin long has been known to work with Ms. Leibovitz, she wasn't the photographer on the earlier ads in the campaign that appear to have been referenced in the New Yorker profile.

Ms. Leibovitz was the photographer in a December 2005 shoot that ultimately became the basis for the Dove Pro-Age version of the campaign that broke in early 2007. That effort featured women in their 50s and 60s nude, not in their underwear.

If true, the news could be devastating to the nearly 4-year-old Dove campaign. The most famous execution to date -- and one that won both a Cyber and Film Grand Prix for Unilever at the International Advertising Festival last year -- has been the "Evolution" viral video, which shows an attractive but rumpled woman transformed through a variety of makeup, styling and retouching tricks into a billboard bombshell. The kicker: "No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted."

The viral has been viewed more than 15 million times online and seen by more than 300 million people globally in various channels of distribution, including news coverage, by the estimation of Ogilvy Chairman-CEO Shelly Lazarus.

Last year's follow-up to "Evolution," "Onslaught," took a harsher tone in criticizing the impact that distorted images in beauty advertising have in encouraging such problems as eating disorders.

Axe to grind
That in turn led to charges of hypocrisy from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, because Unilever's Axe extensively uses buxom, attractive models in sexually suggestive ads.

A parody of the video, "Onslaught[er]," also became fodder for the environmental activist group Greenpeace to wage a successful effort in recent weeks to get Unilever to back a moratorium on clearing of Indonesian rain forests to grow palm oil. The group claimed Unilever, a major buyer of Indonesian palm oil, has been killing orangutans through its purchasing practices.

The Pro-Age effort in particular also provoked controversy, and Dove's sales growth appeared to slow, then stall last year during the Campaign For Real Beauty's third year, according to Information Resources Inc. data.

Things I've learned so far this week

1- Don't try and talk with either your fiancee or your 12 year old soon to be stepdaughter after having spilled a drink on your crotch area earlier that day...Ain't nothing getting through until you deal with that.

2- Don't insist that, yes, in fact the cat does have a speech impediment if you have any hope of seeing your fiancee naked. it's apparently a mood killer.

3- When calling the FBI about getting your fingerprint's taken so as to prove to a foreign government that your not a wanted criminal it's apparently bad to say" For as often as I've done this in the last few months I should think you guys would know me by name by now" If your looking at keeping a low profile ..or ever, you know, flying again without a rectal exam.

4- When your fiancee has finally gotten past the cat comment as made in point two, don't as the clothing starts to fly in a moment of idle pondering give voice to the thought " Man , you would think a half gallon of Prune juice would get the fucking mail moving. eh?" While you'll score points for using the proper Canadian "Eh?" it's not at all true that love is quite that absolute.

5- When admiring oneself in the mirror wearing your Circa 1985 eyeglasses because you obliterated your current pair by sleepwalking over them. Don't turn to your beloved and say
"You know, I kinda look like Mark David Chapman in these." and upon her look of horror do not further dig yourself in by saying" What you don't like The Catcher in the Rye?"

6- When in a company wide meeting, don't use your personal on line contact form* as an example of why on line contact forms prevent spam, thereby giving every douche bag in your company with a free minute on their hands the opportunity to spam you with gay porn URL's .

7- *= When submitting this post to places like Digg, Fark and Reddit to show people how clever and funny you are, don't link your personal on line contact form to...your personal on line contact form. Thereby giving every douche bag on those site's with a free minute on their hands the opportunity to spam you with gay porn URL's.

8- Try and remember that when your talking to your fiancee and recalling a comment she made -by saying with a smarmy asshole smile on your face "Why thats sounds almost Anti-American darlin." That she is in fact a Canadian.

Found on an advice board

I need help

I am getting married in three months and I have 9 of my 10 maids of honor already asked. The problem is my sister. She is excessively obese and I fear her presence will ruin the pictures so I was going to ask her to be a hostess instead. She has been asking about dresses and stuff and I keep putting her off. What would be the nicest way to do it. I really want my wedding to be special, I mean I am going to remember it forever. Thanks.
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My response---

Subhater The problem is my sister

The problem is that even though she's your sister your still willing to relegate her to the background because your ashamed that people will see your fat sister in your pictures and gross everyone out or will it just gross you out? Or your ashamed that someone who shares DNA with you has the dreaded fat? The only thing you can do is be honest.

Tell her that because she has a weight problem you see her as less of a human being and as such you want her to go hide somewhere when the camera comes out. In fact why not just give her a coupon for Pizza Hut that day and get her to take a miss on the whole thing.

So fucking cruel ..The horrible shit is I know people like you exist and are so vain . One day sister your going to wake up and your man is going to make a little joke about the cottage cheese that's growing on your thighs and your world will fall apart and your going to start to have an inkling of what your sister feels like 24 hours a day.

No my mistake you'll be to busy rushing to get Lipo done while your sister will be out living her life and trying to get over the fact that her closest blood relative doesn't love her because she's fat....

Why is it when South Africa had an aparthied system we all boycotted it, yet India has had one forever thats's apparently not worthy of a boycott

In this Horrible CNN article a man pushed a 6 year old girl onto burning embers for walking on a road that wasn't designated for Untouchables? If the girl was put into a fire because she was walking in a white's only road the political outcry would serve to cripple India's already hurting economy and we would force it to change.

When did 60 Minutes stop doing news and start doing Infomercials?

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It's taken me five days to get this post out. It's taken me five days to try not to make this post so full of vitriol and so that I could make a coherent point.

I waited five days so I could try and write this because I had to get my head straight.

See, as a Gastric Bypass blogger which I guess would be what I am, when I write here-I don't want to be radically of one unbending opinion. I want people who are considering doing this to come here and read what I say and believe that I'm not going to take a dump on something just because my experience is negative (which it has not been universally) - I want you dear reader to come here and not think I'm an anti-anything.

It's like (when you read an article by Anne Coulter)...you know that regardless of how valid a point is going to be, she's going to take a shit on it if it's suggested by a Democrat. That's not what I want to do. What I want to do is try and spread some information to conquer some of the disinformation which is being spread by people who on the whole have a hell of a lot more money and resources then I do, or more than anyone I know does.

The medical community makes a good deal of money on this type of surgery and because of that, frankly they want to present it in the best light possible.

I am saying that what you're being told is a partial truth that has some key important health related issues left out about bariatric surgery. And before you go and do this, I want you to know exactly what could possibly happen to you so that you can make the most informed decision on what you are going to do with your life as possible. – That’s why I and other people write these types of posts.

I’m not against the medical community, I’m grateful to it. I’m not (as someone suggested), trying to keep any more fat people from getting to be thin.

I don’t hate my surgeon more than hating his bedside manner.

He did what I asked him to do-and in fact, I make it a point to try not to hate at all.

I guess that what I am shooting for here is trying to be as unbiased as someone can be, and still be affected. I have a gastric bypass so there is only so much balancing I can do, because what I write has a slant of coming from my experience which is really only mine and not anyone else's, even if they have a gastric bypass. As I have pointed out ad nauseum, while there may be a commonality of side effects or complications, none of us have the same combination so we are each unique.

While to some extent I certainly write these articles for my own health, part of me hopes that I'm also writing it for yours. If you have had WLS, if you're considering having WLS, if you're a support person for someone who is considering or has had WLS, I want you to come here and get some real information. Because one thing I can assure you of and I promise no bias about is that what you see mostly in major media is misinformation- hell, to be honest- a great deal of it is bordering on blatant propaganda.

We bloggers, citizen journalists, nerds whatever... or at least most of the good ones try and get proper source material, look at the issue from both sides, sort the shit from the truth and then post an honest article based on the evidence that is available mixed with personal experience and to a certain extent then take our personal opinion and, well- we try and justify it. And if we cannot then and if we are doing this correctly and morally we don't publish the post, or we do and go back and edit it, or go back and delete it or something.

So here is what I want to know. Who Paid off Leslie Stahl? Or the producers of 60 minutes? Or the CBS Corporation to put that boldly biased piece of shit that they are trying to pass off as a news item?

Did someone catch a producer or someone of importance or maybe Leslie herself banging an underage prostitute or something? Is this the blood money they demanded in order to save someone's career? This dangerous commercial that is kissing the ass of every bariatric center and surgeon in the world. Because I can't see how any organization which wishes to have their news department looked on as actually reporting news in a fair and unbiased way… so they can maintain their journalistic integrity, would allow that over hyped, untrue, dangerous story to be presented in that way.

Yes, losing a great deal of weight via Gastric Bypass can cure diabetes (in a way). So can eating the pancreas hacked out of a small baby with a chain saw but I wouldn't quite say you should do that and yes, WLS will help with your apnea , so would cutting your head off at the neck but again I think that’s a bit extreme. Though apparently CBS news thinks that presenting what is arguably that equivalent in my opinion is fine.

But what really gets me is the one sided view of the whole thing. Where is anyone more then a year out on that panel eh? That's what I really want to know. Gastric bypass prevents cancer? Almost all cancers can be prevented by losing weight via WLS? Not just losing weight but losing weight specifically via WLS is what they talked about and nothing else. And if you think that there are not people too scared or ignorant to not have thought of the whole losing weight without WLS thing you are wrong. Some misguided soul who’s borderline overweight but paranoid is somehow going to have this done to themselves because of this thing they put out there. I suppose that prophylactic radiation or chemotherapy might prevent many cancers as well but I would again say that’s a very extreme answer for that.

If it is true Leslie that this surgery is such a lifesaver and a walk in the park, why couldn't you find one person who had this operation in say 2005 or 2006 and had them discuss their outcome or their feelings? Yea, ok...it cured Diabetes for some people- hell- it even cured it for me. You know what I have in place. I have at the least a very severe case of Hypoglycemia.

What I do know is that while I may not be a diabetic anymore , about three times a week I wake up at 2 or 4 AM needing sugar so badly that I have to crawl down my staircase for fear of falling down it, just to drink juice for an hour or two so I feel like I'm not going to drop dead on the spot, I keep hard candy by my bed because when it happens it feels like I'm going to die, and I thought that was really something that was very unique to me. But when I went out and talked to several nutritional experts on WLS it turns out that that's one of the most common things that happen to people who have WLS, but most WLS people are not as lucky to be sugar tolerant like I am-they have dumping syndrome instead. So what do those people do…when you cure them of diabetes but they have Hypoglycemia? So it's not Diabetes but it'll kill you just as dead and I saw nothing about that on 60 minutes.

Forget me, take the hundreds of thousands of people who have had WLS over the last five years alone and you're telling me that 60 minutes couldn't find one person to be on that panel that might have had a less than rosy experience, so they could give people some perspective before essentially putting in a bold endorsement of this procedure via faux scientific news? That fluff piece about how you should go and have your stomach chopped up, resectioned and stapled down and have a few feet of intestine rerouted? That’s a little funny isn't it?

Hell, I have sustained my weight loss. I've never gone over 175 since the day I hit that mark. I was operated on at 388, I’m three years post op, and if you will go back through this blog, I have never ever said yet that I am totally on the side of wishing that I had not done this. I mean I’ve had my days but I'm not seeking a reversal and am pretty sure that yes, knowing what I know now I might still do it again.

Even though for the most part it sucks and yeah, I still think it will probably kill me; I don’t know how much faster the weight related issues would have killed me. Maybe in the end it’s a wash. There is that whole quality of life thing though and right now to a point it’s still better than it was on my good days at nearly 400 pounds and I guess I will have to wait and see what happens with that.

Why didn't 60 minutes call someone like me? The Bariatric association didn't approve the call or something?

Don’t tell me that CBS couldn’t find another guy like me? Shit, my Mom always said that I was a unique little snowflake and I wanted to believe her.

But I’m not a unique little snowflake. There are plenty of people, some not even like me at past a year or further who are more happy, even thrilled with their experience who still could have provided some actual real perspective that yes, even though they were happy, that it's not a tea party and it is hard work- frustrating at best, possibly a mind fuck and at worst it could kill ya dead.

And even those of us with the decent outcomes (and I guess I would consider still putting myself there) because I feel ok most of the time would say that it's hard work and has a real strong emotional component that is in a great deal of the cases and for a great many people is sometimes overwhelmingly negative.

One question about suicide from an “expert” (when are surgeons experts on Psychology by the way?) who says," Yeah, well, we don't know about suicide yet, because some people realize that being fat wasn't all the problems they had in the world.” And then back to the parade of health benefits

I'm sure I'm not the only guy in the world who kept their weight off (but don't think that I won't be at all surprised if a year from now that changes too and I'll be equally unsurprised if it does not)…why couldn’t they have a few people a few years out? Maybe one, two people whose experience was less then rosy.

So know this. This clip above ...it's fluff, it has no real journalistic integrity, it's untrue and CBS should be shamed for presenting this to people like they have.

To reach out to me please send an email to blogger(at)fatjewguy(dot)com

And sometimes all you can do is cry- The sad ending of a weight-loss struggle; Husband doesn't regret wife undergoing gastric bypass: She had to do it

Via St Catharines Standard Click Here for Original Article

Cheryl Harvey has stopped eating. She vomits white foam.

Her medications have not stayed down for days. Without the Zoloft and the Lorazepam, her depression and panic are growing.

It is 3 1/2 months since she had gastric bypass surgery.

Those around Cheryl are concerned.

Is this what it's supposed to be like after the surgery?

"She really bottomed out and couldn't eat anything," says her husband, Don. "We began to suspect the stomach was closed off. Food wasn't going through properly."

He takes her to Hamilton General Hospital. Doctors suspect there

is something wrong with her gastric pouch, but nobody there is an expert. They send her to McMaster University Medical Centre to see a gastrointestinal specialist.

It is decided Cheryl needs to go back to Humber River Regional Hospital in Toronto where she had her bypass.

When she gets there, it is determined there is indeed a problem. She has a stricture. A tightening where her small bowel joins the gastric pouch.

"It's a very minor kind of thing," says Dr. John Hagen, her surgeon. "It happens fairly often and was very mild in Cheryl's case."

Cheryl is operated on for a second time. This procedure is quick. The stricture is opened. Cheryl is sent home the same day. Everyone is relieved when she immediately begins to eat again. For the first time in three weeks, she is able to digest food.

She says she can't feel her feet. They are tingling. Her left one is worse. She is afraid to stand or walk. Cheryl has had a lifelong fear of falling. Now, having gone so long without being able to keep her meds down, Cheryl's anxiety has escalated.

At home in Hamilton, she is unable to make it upstairs to the washroom. Don puts a commode chair in the living room, next to the brown floral couch Cheryl lives on these days.

"I was concerned about her not being able to walk," says Don. "I was afraid she would become an invalid."

On Sept. 14, Don takes Cheryl to the cottage. The quiet will do them some good, he thinks. His sister is with them, visiting from New Brunswick. The problem is, Cheryl is still emotionally distraught. Although she is back on her Zoloft and Lorazepam, they haven't really started taking effect yet. It takes a while for that to happen.

"She got worse after we got to the cottage," Don says. "She reverted to a psychological state she hadn't been in for a long time."

On the evening of Sept. 17, Cheryl is sitting on her walker. She falls off it, onto the floor.

"She has a very, very serious panic attack. She thought she would never get up," says Don. "We had to call the ambulance. It took five men to get her up. There are no handles on people."

Cheryl weighs 267 pounds.

She spends the next two nights in the Haliburton hospital.

Her blood pressure is high and her vision is blurred. For a while, one eye is open, the other shut.

A physiotherapist tries to get Cheryl up and walking. She only succeeds in getting her to a commode chair. Cheryl, too afraid to fall again, refuses to walk.

Doctors in Haliburton contact Dr. Greg Curnew, a cardiologist at Hamilton General Hospital.

It is decided Cheryl needs to be closer to home. Her case is complex. She would benefit from being able to see her family and friends. Don will have support, too.

On Sept. 20, a Thursday, Cheryl is discharged from Haliburton hospital. There is a bed waiting for her at the Hamilton hospital.Don, his sister and a highly agitated Cheryl set out after dark that night for the three-hour drive.

"She had an exaggerated feeling of things happening around her," Don explains. "So driving in a car was bad."

He takes her straight to the hospital.

Cheryl gets up to use the toilet at the hospital, but that's it. She refuses to walk.

"It's like I'm on the outside, watching my life go by," she tells her husband.

On Saturday, her sisters, Mary Lou Ashcroft and Dorothy Hamid, pay her a visit. What they see scares the hell out of them.

"She looked absolutely terrible," Mary Lou says. For the first time since her weight-loss surgery, they fear losing their sister.

"The not walking was a problem," Curnew says."We needed to determine if it was a neurological problem. We had tests scheduled."

On Saturday, Curnew spends 45 minutes at Cheryl's bedside. They chat about her weight and hatch a plan to keep her healthy and on track once she leaves hospital.

"Her spirits were good and she was starting to mobilize," says Curnew, who adds that two-thirds of his cardiac patients have a weight problem. By Monday, the medications seem to be kicking in and Cheryl is a bit more like herself.

"She brightened up a lot over that time," says Don.

It helps, too, that Cheryl has a constant stream of visitors.

Don goes in for the morning, heads back home for lunch, then to his wife's bedside again in the afternoon.Her best friend, Jo-Anne Cairns, is there every day. Sometimes for four or five hours. Cheryl's sisters try to be there for meals. They believe their presence encourages her to eat better.

Today, two weeks before Thanksgiving, the siblings plan for the holiday.

Cheryl, still in her hospital bed, says she wants to host Thanksgiving dinner at her house.

Wednesday, Sept. 26, is shaping up to be a busy day.

Don gets to the hospital early.

At 10 a.m., a new psychiatrist meets with Cheryl. "She had a fabulously long record of Cheryl's history," Don says.

For some reason, nobody has called Dr. Valerie Taylor, who has been Cheryl's psychiatrist for four years. Taylor specializes in obese patients.Cheryl is cheerful. Talking about coming home. Still in bed though. Afraid to get up. She is scheduled for an EMG (electromyography) in the afternoon to look at the nerve action in her legs to find out the cause of the tingling.

At 12:45 p.m. Don slips home for lunch. Just before 2 p.m., the phone rings.

Don knows he and Cheryl are an unlikely couple.

She is 52, he is 66. It is her first marriage, his third. She is loud and boisterous. He is a loner. She, at her heaviest, weighs 421 pounds. He weighs 180 pounds.

"We are two people, poles apart, who complement each other. We mix together to make a whole unit. She was great company.... She was the social side of me. Without her, I didn't have many friends. With her, I had a world of friends."

Don is in awe of his wife. Of the way she can stand up and challenge those around her to pay attention to obesity. The way she calls for caring and compassion.

"For all the strength she had for dealing with politicians and bureaucrats, she has so much vulnerability. She could move mountains even though she was shaking in her boots."

Don answers the phone.

It is a friend, calling from the hospital. Don needs to come back in.

The friend had dropped in for a visit with Cheryl. But her room is full of doctors and nurses. Staff are coaxing Cheryl out of bed. They are trying to get her on her feet after days of lying down.

"If you're not particularly mobile, clots will form," says Curnew. As she struggles to sit up, Cheryl complains of having difficulty breathing. Then she collapses. Her vital signs are lost.

A blood clot, at the top of her right thigh, had broken off and was making its way to her lungs.

"I got there and there was a chaplain in the hall outside her room," Don says, weeping.

"I knew the chaplain was bad news. They were still working on her in the room. So we went to a quiet room at the end of the hall and just waited. It was 10 or 15 minutes before the doctor came in and said they couldn't stop it. They couldn't fix it."

Cheryl anne Harvey died four months and 10 days after having the gastric bypass surgery she hoped would save her life.

When she took her last breath, she had lost 120 pounds.

Cheryl's death is not officially considered a surgical mortality. To qualify for that statistical category, she would have had to die within 30 days of her gastric bypass.

Her death is, however, related to complications from surgery.

"It's so disappointing and so tragic when this happens," says Dr. Hagen, who performed the bypass. Despite the risks involved with the surgery, Hagen still believes it was the best option for Cheryl.

"She would have died a premature death without it," he says. "She'd done spectacularly. She was right on target. But still she was morbidly obese when she died."

"She was the perfect patient."

Dr. Arya Sharma, one of Canada's leading obesity experts who treated Cheryl in Hamilton before her surgery, sees it differently.

"I'm not an advocate for obesity surgery," he says.

Society seems to think the best way to deal with the country's obesity epidemic is to sink more money into gastric bypass procedures. "But the last thing I want to see is surgeons churning out patients with no followup care." "Patients need lifelong followup," he says. "Cheryl is not alone. She died from long-term complications from surgery. We must put out a call for more funding for bariatric care."

Sharma is now based in Edmonton, where he is professor of medicine and chair for cardiovascular obesity research and management at the University of Alberta. He is also the scientific director of the Canadian Obesity Network. Taylor, the psychiatrist, is having dinner with a woman who has started a support group for gastric bypass patients."

"Did you know Cheryl Harvey died?" the woman asks. "Two weeks ago." Taylor hadn't even known Cheryl was hospitalized.

She is so upset, she has to leave the restaurant.

Don says if someone had realized earlier there was a stricture between Cheryl's bowel and her gastric pouch, maybe she would have been able to have it fixed sooner and maybe she would have taken all her meds and maybe she would never have fallen and maybe she would not have spent days lying in a hospital bed developing a fatal blood clot.

But Don is a realist.

"It's like when my two-year-old son died. If any one of 10 different things hadn't happened that day he drowned, he'd be alive now. There is a combination of things happening all the time."

Don does not regret the surgery. Would not try to talk some other morbidly obese person out of it.

"She had to do it as far as I can see," he says simply. "She was probably looking at a dead-end street the other way as well."

"Cheryl had been looking her entire life for a way to help people," Mary Lou says. "But because of her lack of education and her size, she was limited. But this - sharing her story - this, she could run with."

Don gets the final word. He takes a moment. Head in hands. Clearing his throat. Eyes red from crying.

"They say beauty is only skin deep. Well, Cheryl's beauty ran very deep."

See More here

A Gastric Bypass Rant

Recently studies (actually about four of them) have come out saying that the long-term data shows that overall bariatric or gastric surgery doesn’t guarantee that your health will be any better then it was when you started and that what’s really happening is that you’re trading one set of co-morbidities for another, it's just that the new set of co-morbidities are unknown.

As in many cases when things like this happen, there have been lobbying groups petitioning congress and the senate that denying people gastric or bariatric surgery is in fact denying rights or discriminatory to people of weight. In fact, a new cottage industry of lawyers has sprung up that now only fight and sue companies and insurance companies to get the procedure approved now that it's getting harder to cover.

I often think that when a medical procedure needs to start forming Advocacy groups like the OAC or a political action groups from industry associations that do lobby then the procedure needs a good looking at MORE INFORMATION HERE.


It seems that in many cases local state Medicare or Medicaid insurance have decided that they will no longer fund the surgeries due to what they say is a preponderance of evidence that it is turning out to be an non-viable or at best unproven solution in light of recent research on people five to ten years out, and that through looking at the RNY and banding the long-term side effects along the lines of malnutrition and other complications aren't worth their risk.


When state insurance decides that they won't cover a procedure then private insurance is sure to follow. That doesn't mean that all insurance is not going to cover it. My last company still does, and when I changed carriers this year I found out that my current one still does. Many providers are now moving to covering LapBand only, but now some say there is serious evidence that the LapBand can cause serious complications as well. Long term numbers on lap banding patients say that 25% or 1/4 of all Banding patients will need a further operation to correct something at some point and that ailure rates increase with time, up to 40% at 9 years.

Results Mean (range) age of the patients (male/female ratio 31:92) was 43 years (21–44). Mean (range) preoperative weight was 130 kg (92–191). Mean (range) preoperative body mass index was 49.28 kg/m² (35.01–66.60). Patients lost to follow-up was nearly 20% at 5 years and 30% at 8 years. Major late complications (including band erosions 3.3%, slippage 6.5%, leakage 9.8%) leading to major reoperation occurred in 30 patients (24.4%). Nearly 40% of the reoperations was performed during the third year after the operation. The mean EWL at 7 years was 56% in patients with the band in place, but 46% in all patients. The failure rates increased from about 15% during years 1 to 3 to nearly 40% during years 8 and 9. The success rate declined from nearly 60% at 3 years to 35% at 8 and 9 years.

Conclusions Complications requiring reoperations are common during the third year after the operation, and almost 25% of the patients will need at least one reoperation. Mean EWL in all patients does not exceed 50% in 7 years or 40% in 9 years and failure rates increase with time, up to 40% at 9 years.

SOURCE HERE

Let me make a strong point here. This is not me saying this. I'm just repeating what I have been reading both in the US studies and in Canada where I am spending most of my time these days.

Don't hit me with any hate mail here kids I'm just calling them as I see them and providing as much source material for you all to go through as possible. This is not an opinion, this is not a feeling and it's not personal. To get really deeper on this take yourself over to Junkfood Science and go and read Sandy's recent archives and whatever she's currently writing about. She says the things I wish I could better then I ever could anyway.

This whole thing came to a head for me a few weeks ago when I got an email from a woman I used to work with many years ago who unbeknown to me became a reader here. She emailed me and then called about how she had fought in her head for years to make the decision on if she should have the surgery and finally made the decision to go ahead and then her insurance dropped the procedure, her doctor became uncomfortable recommending it based on some new data he saw, and crying on the phone she wanted to know what I thought that she should do.


What do I think a person should do when we have our first real evidential studies that seem to indicate that the risks and complications of bariatric surgery for your average obese person outweigh the benefits, and your Doctor says he doesn't think it's right for you and your insurance is using peer reviewed material to make their decision? My answer would have to be, listen to your doctor and I guess don't have the fucking operation. And I've given this same opinion out twice or three times a day to different people, both here, and on FaceBook for the last three weeks since I started drafting this post.

You can't seriously expect me to either through this blog, or in an email or phone conversation tell you to disregard your Doctor and these studies. If you trust your Doctor and your Doctor says that he's not against it per se, but against it for what he thinks is valid medical reasons then you go with what you trust. If you don't trust your doctor, what the fuck are you doing being a patient of that Doc anyway? Or get a new Doc, or a new Job that covers it.

I'm not saying that we should have SWAT teams stopping people from the operations ,but if you’re going to ask me then I'm not going to tell you to disregard a licensed medical persons advice. So please. I don't mind the contact. But don't ask me that. Ask me how I'm doing or what I know but not if you should disregard a qualified medical professional so you look good in a bathing suit. I'm not going to tell you about doing that no matter what. I may give you an opinion or some information based partially on personal experience, but the majority of my opinion is going to be based on peer-reviewed studies that look at large groups of people. The majority of the real stuff out there mitigating the studies I'm using as reference material seem to be on web pages that belong to surgeons who stand to benefit financially from having this procedure covered by insurance.

If you don't want to hear that sort of information I suggest that you not solicit my opinion on the thing. I would tell you to listen to the research or the AMA or pay a buck and read the studies on PubMed- that’s what I would say.

And stop telling me how easy it is for me to tell people this or that because I got my surgery You’re talking about me like I won the lottery or something, not like I asked a Doctor to remove more than 95% of my stomach and a good long portion of my intestines.

This is the thing right here that really put it into perspective. There is so much fucking pressure to be thin, and society treats you so fucking badly that they could come out with a study saying that in 80% of the cases a fucking alien will brutally rip through your asshole a la The Movie Alien, killing you at about the ten year mark and I guarantee you most people would still want the operation.

I remember a good friend of mine and I talking about AIDS back in the day and he made a comment to the effect of "Aids was a bitch, but on the other hand he really would like to see what he looked like in a size small business suit before he died." And it was a joke and my friend is a decent guy and he's gay so I suppose he has a right to make off color jokes about his own morbidity , but the thing is he had an