The Bariatric Work Ethic

As much as you might wish otherwise, the work that produces weight loss success and lifetime maintenance is hard, especially when you’re already worn out from health problems and from lugging all that excess weight around and from one diet failure after another. You have bariatric surgery hoping that it will make weight loss easier. What’s the point of surgery if you have to take on this tough job and never retire from it?

THE WORK ETHIC

I don’t hear the term “Protestant work ethic” used much these days, but I heard it a lot while growing up in the 1950’s & 1960’s in a Protestant home with hard-working parents. The Cliffs Notes version of the phrase is this: you must demonstrate your deservingness for salvation through hard work and frugality. That’s a big job, performed not only for the God who can save you but also fellow humans who play God by judging your performance.

Religious beliefs aside, my personal belief is that hard work benefits the individual as well as the society in which she or he functions. The same principle applies to the work ethic of life after weight loss surgery.

IS BAND SUCCESS TOO HARD?

Every WLS patient is understandably irritated when a clueless acquaintance declares that “weight loss surgery is taking the easy way out”, but an opposite belief floats around in the bariatric community: that weight loss with the adjustable gastric band takes too much work. So which is it? Too easy, or too hard? Does doing something hard automatically earn you ethical or moral brownie points? Does doing something easy automatically brand you as lazy?

I agree that success with the adjustable gastric band takes a lot of work, and I’m not convinced that success with other bariatric procedures is much easier, since regardless of what happens in the operating room, we’re all dealing with the same chronic and incurable disease – obesity. But for the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that a team of scientists in Switzerland (historically a neutral country, even when war was being waged everywhere else in Europe) has studied this matter and can somehow prove that success with the band is indeed harder than any other procedure. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say that band success is hard.

It’s hard, sure, but is it too hard?

THE VALUE OF WORK

I don’t ever want to think I’m afraid of hard work. Nor do I want to believe that my attitude makes me morally superior to someone else, but it seems to me that there is something intrinsically good about hard work. How else can I keep myself moving forward, toward a better (and perhaps easier) life? I can’t rely on good luck to make my journey easier. Raffle prizes and lottery tickets aren’t going to pay the bills and keep (healthy) food on the table.

The thorough pre- and post-op education I received from my bariatric surgeon and his staff made it clear to me that I was going to have to work hard, and make some hard lifestyle changes, in order to succeed with my band. I knew from the outset that I was taking on a big job. I was going to have to learn a lot, take responsibility for my health, and do some things I’d really rather not (like exercise) in order to make my band surgery a success.

I realize that may make me sound like an insufferable paragon of virtue, so let me add an important and seemingly contradictory statement about myself: the reason I chose to have bariatric surgery was that losing weight “on my own” had been so difficult. I most certainly wanted to take the easier path to a healthy weight. I had spent 30 years messing around with weight loss “the hard way”, and not only was it hard, it was spectacularly unsuccessful. I was ready for a different, “easier,” and longer-lasting approach.

DIVISION OF LABOR

There’s nothing wrong with avoiding some hard work. My personal resources of time, energy, and knowledge are tremendous but not infinite, so in order to stay healthy and sane, I have to prioritize tasks and spend my resources on them wisely. In my family – the small community created by my husband, 10 rescue dogs, and 3 rescue cats – we also prioritize, so that the person assigned to each task has the better chance of doing it properly and finishing it. This is why I do not attempt to change the oil in my car, my husband does not attempt to sew draperies, and our dogs are in charge of the audio portion of our security alert system (for a demonstration of that, get yourself to Memphis, then drive north until you hear barking).

But…there’s always a “but”…the purpose of weight loss surgery is to improve your health and your life. Why should someone else – your surgeon, your nutritionist, your personal trainer, your spouse or your hamster – be in charge of something that essentially belongs to you? Of course you need help from all those people (or critters), but if you’re a mentally competent adult, shouldn’t you be the team captain who keeps everyone focused on winning the game? If you don’t want to be the captain, is that because you secretly want an excuse or a scapegoat when and if you lose the game? That kind of thinking – a basic assumption that you’re going to fail no matter what – is such a huge issue that I’ll have to save it for another article. For now, please just nod your head and smile when I tell you that you can win at weight loss.

PAIN & SUFFERING

A corollary of the “I’ve suffered too much from obesity” view is “therefore I deserve to lose weight without any suffering at all.” I don’t happen to believe that I deserve to have every wish of mine granted, be it weight loss, fame, fortune, or naturally curly hair, without any exertion on my part, just because I’ve suffered, or even just because I’m alive. I find it satisfying to work for something I want or need, to earn it myself and thank myself for it.

On the other hand, I don’t mean that I think we must all suffer in the sense of acute or chronic physical pain or inconvenience that entirely disrupts our lives. I mean instead that long-term weight loss success is going to require us to take a few side trips out of our comfort zones. You know the comfort zone, don’t you? At its center is your favorite armchair, a month’s supply of Reese’s peanut butter cups on the table beside you and the TV remote in your hand.

So our WLS success may involve an excursion into the Unknown. For example, if we’ve never tried lifting weights, we don’t know how difficult or painful that might be, but if we don’t give it a try, we’ll never know and never benefit from doing it. There’s a 50/50 chance that we might actually like it.

And sooner or later, we’re going to have to tolerate the discomfort of uncertainty, confusion, impatience, frustration, inconvenience, and/or disappointment. That kind of discomfort rarely lasts forever, though. I can testify that learning how to parallel park a car was not a fun experience and that I flunked my first driver’s test because of my parking ineptitude, but a year or so later, I had forgotten how hard it was and parked my car in whatever type of (legal) parking spot I wanted with skill that by then I took for granted.

Here’s another example: the first time I participate in a step aerobics class, I fell off the step twice and had to wonder if I was ever going to get the hang of it, never mind enjoy it. Since I was too proud to give up and walk out while the rest of the class sneered at my failure, I stuck it out to the end of class, at which point it seemed vaguely possible that I might do better if I tried it at least one more time. So I went back to another class, and another one, and eventually found myself hooked on it. Now it isn’t just exercise (work), it’s fun (play). If you had snatched the Reese’s peanut butter cup out of my pre-op hand and told me to get my fat butt over to the gym for a step aerobics class, I would have laughed out loud.

BUT WHAT IF?

But what if your journey on the Bandwagon stalls, or your wagon rolls off a cliff, despite all your effort? What-ifs and coulda-shouldas aren’t going to do much to fix that wagon’s broken wheel, so what can you do to get yourself moving again? I highly recommend a LBT article (by me, of course) entitled, “When Your Bandwagon Stalls.” The article won’t solve all your problems, but it may help you look at them in a new and more effective way. After that, the hard work (of course) is up to you. Click here to check it out: http://www.lapbandtalk.com/page/index.html/_/plateaus-and-regain/when-your-bandwagon-stalls-r130

Unfortunately, hard work is not absolutely, positively guaranteed to produce success, but I’m convinced that it does improve your chances of success. It will lead you out of the desert of failure and into a jungle where every exotic flower smells of success. It will increase your knowledge and wisdom so that when the time comes to evaluate, regroup, and choose a new path if necessary, you can make a good decision. Decision making will be the topic of a future article, so stay tuned!