The best, because it released me from the prison of a 300-pound body and was the start of a journey towards reclaiming my health, my sanity and my soul.
The worst, because it resulted in several years of health related complications, a chronic bowel condition, a life long altered digestive system, meaning the perfect organ I was born with will never work the way it was intended to again, a permanent inability to absorb the minerals and vitamins essential to thrive, and other various physical, functional, social and psychological ramifications which will remain with me for life.
Yes.
Yes, because at the time nothing was working. I lived life without hope. I lived life without ‘life’. My days were endured, not lived. My time was beset with solitude, misery, rock bottom self-esteem, constant physical pain and discomfort and mental ill-health in the form of severe depression.
The multifaceted ‘heaviness’ of the weight I needed to lose, the life I was not living, the ridicule I endured from others, friends, family and perfect strangers alike, dominated my every thought, dragged down my every day. Did nothing less than consume me.
And so, when finally, I relented, and gave in to my parents’ intervention, despite years of believing I could conquer the battle alone, and agreed to begin the process of becoming a bariatric patient, it was the start of a new dawn. Within four weeks I was on the surgeon’s table undergoing a major operation which would forever alter my guts and ‘hopefully’ forever change my life.
And change my life it did, for both the better and the absolute worst.
It will indeed leave you no other possibility than to loose considerable and extreme amounts of weight. Within my first year I’d lost 65% of my weight. The average that most bariatric patients achieve. (The surgery only takes you so far. The rest you do alone.)
However, when I saw my surgeon a year on, he was surprised that my weight was still off and commented that most of his patients have put it back on by this point – one of the main outcomes of bariatric surgery they neglect to tell you before you sign up.
Bariatric surgery of any kind, the bypass, the sleeve, the band, the balloon, are all the closer, more extreme, cousins of other ‘promises’ made by the diet industry. The powders and shakes that come in a shiny white box, all bought and paid for, arrive on your doorstop with the promise of a new tomorrow. Only by that actual tomorrow the artificial unappealing taste of a bag of dust isn’t so appealing and the natural human instinct for food takes over. The shiny white box goes to the back of the cupboard to be conveniently forgotten and the bags of vanilla, chocolate and banana flavoured powder sit and gather genuine dust.
And as for the current new trend of skinny jab injectables? Yes, apparently, they do work to stave off hunger. But as anyone who has ever been severely obese will tell you, we’re rarely hungry. The addiction to food runs far deeper than needing to satisfy hunger pangs. People addicted to alcohol aren’t drinking because they’re thirsty. Well, the obese aren’t eating because they’re hungry either.
When you’ve reached a level of extreme obesity it’s rare for anything other than ‘drastic measures’ to work.
People willing to spend thousands becoming prisoners of clinics where they’re locked away from reality and fed only 800 or less calories a day, or nothing but juice, sometimes even only water, will see a sudden, unrealistic, and impermanent result.
What then?
Someone who has never suffered the lonely life of obesity will fail to understand. ‘Why can’t they just east less, move more?’
Oh were it that easy.
There will always be the fraction who just love food, but to understand more, the series ‘My 600 pound Life’ offers clues. The majority of those featured, who’ve reached such dramatic weights, share childhood foundations peppered with various kinds of abuse or tragic experiences. Food is a comfort, an ally, also a weapon, a weapon we turn on ourselves. There was many a time I would indulge in food I knew was making matters worse and felt I deserved nothing less than the hell I continued to create.
And for one more reality show reference to reveal the impermanence of bariatric surgery, watch ‘1000 lb Sisters’. Weight was lost quickly and easily by all members of the Slaton family following their bariatric surgeries, but observe just how equally quickly and easily some were able to consume vast quantities of food in their months post op, and in the long run never make it out of the obese range.
A serious food addiction must be healed at the foundation. Skinny jabs, bariatric surgery, prison like diet camps can help, but at some point, we must have our own inner rudder which sets our course. I’m proof positive of this. I reached my goal weight, 65% through my bariatric surgery, the remainder through sheer will and determination and the help of extreme diet retreats. But soon two stone of it crept back on.
I had to change something fundamental to become the person I always longed to be. I had to create my own inbuilt structure. A structure that has permanence and can be relied upon, unlike any of the temporary tools sold to us by the diet industry. It is that model I created for myself which, along with other guidance, information and support, forms the basis of Arora.
The morning I woke up and faced a September dawn, the day of my bariatric surgery, felt like a new tomorrow. It’s a feeling I will never forget; intense, poignant, as real today as it was all those years ago. The shafts of light from a rising sun gliding over ribbons of indigo blue from the parting night like a path I would be following, the fading stars blinking out their own private messages just for me ‘This way, this way, you’re almost home’.
I felt like the only person on earth.
And a world that had felt impenetrable, cruel, friendless, and fierce suddenly felt conquerable and small.
It is that feeling of being able to take on the whole world I want anyone visiting Arora to come away with.
I’m neither advocating nor discouraging anyone from bariatric surgery, extreme diet centres or injectables. For some, they may be the only option.
Guests will experience what they would be able to eat, or rather not eat, the first months following surgery. They will understand the challenge of only being able to consume liquid and then pureed food for extended periods of time.
They will get a feel for the social and emotional isolation of only being able to finish an eight of their plate at mealtimes while others around them enjoy a complete dish.
I will try my best to explain the pain of ‘dumping syndrome’. Show the scars, and take them through the complications I endured, following 8 operations to rectify the lose skin I was left with after losing half my body weight.
And for long term achievements we give guests the tools they need to follow our own ‘Bariatric Diet’ so they can go forwards on their path and achieve the significant desired weight loss without the invasiveness of surgery. As well as letting them in on the ‘little secret’ that guarantees lifelong success. A secret they will already know, just need to accept.
My hope for anyone visiting Arora is that it will give them the gift I wish someone had given me. A way to achieve for yourself the same results bariatric surgery can bring without the surgical risks and irreversible complications, the financial cost, the intense pain, the unexpected difficulties, the emotional and physical suffering.
And more importantly, the parting gift of a tool that will work not only for 65% of the weight they need to lose, but for however much they wish to lose. A new way of thinking about themselves and about food.
A way to fall back in love with life, and with themselves, so the addiction to food, the rock-bottom self-worth, the inadequacy and embarrassment that has dominated them for so long and pervaded everything else becomes small, insignificant and as conquerable as the whole world seemed to me on a star blinkered dawn in September 2019.
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