Educating Family and Friends

[50for50 72]

A lot of threads recently on telling/not telling friends and family about our surgeries. I posted a lengthy article several weeks ago by Bariatric Surgeon Dr. Mitchell Roslin.

He makes some excellent points about how we as a society view this disease so I've excerpted two paragraphs that help me see the issue clearly:

"Besides surgery, there is absolutely no documented or successful treatment option. Laymen watch popular television shows like the Biggest Loser or daytime talk

shows and think that weight loss is easy. Unfortunately, the majority

of people that lose large sums of weight – regardless of whatever

method – suffer cataclysmic recidivism. Intuitively, most believe

that we can be trained or be taught to change our behavior and

maintain weight loss. However, science contradicts these widely-held

beliefs. The body resists weight loss. When caloric intake is

curtailed, we respond by becoming more efficient and reducing our

metabolic rate. A registry is kept of people that have lost

substantial sums of weight and maintained the weight loss for five or

more years. On average, to preserve their weight, at the new loss

state, they eat less than 1200 calories and exercise more than an hour

per day.

We must realize that behavioral modification

techniques that have not even succeeded in halting the rise in the

prevalence of obesity are unlikely to be successful as a treatment for

morbid obesity. Stated succinctly, prevention and treatment are

different. We prevent bacterial infections by washing hands and

avoiding contact with infected sources. We treat people, de rigeur,

with surgical debridement and medications such as antibiotics. It is

possible that if Vice President Cheney never smoked, he would not have

had a heart attack at 37 years of age. However, no one would treat

his heart disease by only having him stop smoking and change his diet.

While an important component, such efforts would be combined with

medications. Yet, in obesity, we still want to believe that the same

techniques that are used to prevent weight gain will result in successful treatment."

[balbuquerque 85]

Is there anything that you suggest here? Because I'm looking for answers which I think it needs to be prevented from birth.