Why I’m On a Path to Bariatric Surgery
My weight started becoming a problem as soon as I grew old enough to start feeding myself. It concerned my mother enough that she took me to a parade of doctor’s appointments I was too young to remember.
Every doctor she talked to brushed her concerns aside, writing her off as a fussing mother with some variation of “he’s a big kid, he’ll grow into his weight.”
I didn’t grow into it.
For a time I think the worst of it was held in check by how active I was. I spent nearly every day after school playing sports, doing my best to keep up with everyone else. As far as I knew I was just another kid.

It wasn’t until around 5th grade that I realized I was fat. Maybe it was something about kids getting older and testing boundaries, but suddenly I started getting made fun of.
One kid in particular tormented me about my weight ruthlessly from the morning when I walked in the door until the afternoon when I went home.
This is when I started developing my two key defenses to being made fun of:
- Act angry all the time so people keep their distance.
- Pre-load with come backs so if someone does say something mean to you, you can slam them back down so hard they don’t dare make fun of you again.
This one-two punch proved fairly effective, and after that I almost never got made fun of in school, but it dramatically changed how I interacted with the world.
If you look back on photos of me before that shift I’m always happy, if you look at me in photos afterwards I’m viscerally uncomfortable.

In many other photos I’m literally hiding — either physically concealing myself behind scenery, or if I couldn’t manage to escape I’m either covering my face or turning away from the camera.

It only took me a few years to go from open and excited about the world to wanting to hide from it.

Recognizing What is Beyond My Control
I cannot explain the profound shame I’ve felt about being unable to regulate what is a fundamental biological process, and then having to wear the results of that failure around with me every single day.
When I walk into a room the first thing people know about me is I cannot control my eating. Before I even have the chance to open my mouth and make any positive impression, I start way behind the eight ball.
This has driven me to try to lose weight over and over again throughout my life. I’ve put myself on extreme diets, made even more extreme by my intense self-hatred and my perfectionist tendencies. I’ve put in beastly workouts trying to fight against what my genetics and my own choices have done to me.
At one point I went to the gym for 280 straight days and lost nearly 160lbs, but of course a lifestyle like that isn’t sustainable. I went through a series of severe traumas at work and before I knew it most of that weight was creeping back on.
I’ve lost triple digits of weight and put it back on several times. The toll that takes on a person mentally and physically is hard to describe, but I’m at a point now where I recognize that simply forcing my body to make a physical change is not sufficient without addressing some of the underlying causes both in terms of my psychology and in terms of the physical parts of my body that do not function properly.
How I think weight loss surgery can help
I recognize weight loss surgery is not a panacea, and it will not help me be perfect. That’s not in the cards for me. What it can do is help give me some tools to make weight loss more manageable in the short term and more sustainable in the long term.
The procedure I am currently leaning towards, a sleeve gastrectomy, will help me in three ways:
- In the short term there will be a physical restriction in the amount of food I can eat.
- As a result of the surgery my body will produce significantly less ghrelin, one of the primary hormones that creates a feeling of hunger.
- After surgery my body will produce dramatically more PYY, one of the primary hormones that tells your body you’re full as you eat.
As nice as #1 is, #2 and #3 are far more important to sustainable weight loss.
Currently when I sit down to eat, I feel no difference in fullness from the start of a meal to the end — that’s a factor of the PYY my body is almost certainly failing to produce enough of. I have never felt a normal sensation of “fullness” the way you probably do. The closest I’ve felt is the sick feeling from overeating when I go way too far, but not the normal satiated feeling most people describe.
Increasing PYY levels should make that possible.
What it Could Mean
If bariatric surgery can help me lose the expected 70% of the weight I need to lose it would dramatically transform my life. It would open up travel, career advancement, dating — all kinds of things I’ve essentially given up on. As my weight has bounced back and forth and gotten worse, I’ve grown more and more isolated and given up on anything outside of work.
This could be one tool, along with therapy, a support network (that I’ll have to build), a trainer, and a lot of other pieces, that could help me approach some kind of normalcy for the first time in my life.
Where I Go From Here
I’ve completed filling out the initial paperwork for my bariatric surgery consultation. Now I have to submit it and wait for them to schedule me for my evaluation. How long the process takes after that I don’t know.
When I started thinking about this I looked at it as an exercise to get more information, but the deeper into it I get the more I’m convinced this may be the right thing to do.
