I weigh 17 and a half stone. I am 5 foot 3. Size 22.
I am hungry most the time. I wake up with a hunger, I have breakfast, cereal, or toast, or something else if I am on a proper "diet" (done them all - Atkins, Lighterlife, Slimming World, Weight Watchers, Cambridge, calorie counting, etc). By 9am I am hungry again. By 11am I am ready for lunch. By 1pm I am ready for more. I could go on but my obesity is not driven, in my opinion by greed (which would be eating way beyond which one is hungry) but by hunger. Genuine hunger for perfectly normal, even healthy food.
I know this is not the case with all obese people. But for quite a few it is.
I remember begging my Nanny to commence lunch proceedings at 11am one day. I was absolutely ravenous. I just wanted that sandwich so much. I could; have eaten 10 of them. I was 4 years old and had no idea what comfort eating was - I knew what tummy rumbles were, though.
My dad has never felt properly full. He stops eating, because he knows he'll get really really big if he doesn't, but he always has a knawing desire to eat. He exercises plenty of self control, which is why he is about 18 stone, not 27 stone, or 32 stone, or 36 stone and dead.
My mother has been on the dieting merry-go-round all her life (well, since she was 9). She has always been hungry. She doesn't actually eat particularly large portions, she's a bit of a picker, because she feels nauseous if she gets properly hungry due to medication she is on, but I can put way more away than her, though I try not to, as I am always on a diet. Being on a diet most the time and only breaking it when I can't stand it anymore is what keeps me at 17 and a half stone. I'd weigh more if I didn't exercise this level of self control. Its driven by fear for my health and vanity.
I recently sought weight loss surgery, looked at options, decided on either a Gastric Bypass or Sleeve Gastronectomy (gastric sleeve), and saw an eminent consultant, who approved me for surgery. The surgery will be funded privately by myself. We decided on the sleeve. The procedure cuts away the fundus part of the stomach, reducing your stomach size to 25% of what it was, but most importantly, removes the part of the stomach which is responsible for secreting Ghrelin , reducing that knawing, all consuming and unrelenting hunger that makes some obese people, well, obese. Its keyhole surgery under general anaesthetic.
I go on bike rides, walks, I do trampolining, dancing, the gym, enjoy the great outdoors, and running about with my kids. I am reasonably fit considering my size.
AIBU to think that obesity is not all about "greed", lack of self-denial (we are talking a lifetime, by the way, not a few weeks), "junk food", or "lack of exercise"? Is there anyone out there who thinks, actually, this is not my fault ?
AIBU?
to think that for some obese people, its not their fault, and surgery is a really good option?
NotMyBigFatFault · 05/12/2011 17:07
Oh bless you Fabby. You haven't read my other posts.
I have lost 6 stone once and 4 stone after that, plus 10 pounds to a stone and a half here and there over the years for the past 20 years.
I ate less than 500 calories a day for more than 6 months - no willpower, really? Seriously? Could you do that?!? Even on your silly little diet you eat cream crackers 
"Sorry I don't agree you should get surgery paid for"
Who by? Myself?
I've said twice now I am funding the surgery.
Having done the healthy diet exercise thing to death and found myself fatter than ever. Yes, clearly that's working
Thanks for your insightful post amicissima
"One is how much food and eating dominates your life. You seem to know all about diets, about nutrition, sleeves, bands, insulin, Kreb's cycle ... You are aware of your feelings of hunger. I'm surprised that you can find food so interesting in a world full of interesting things"
True - I do find it facinating. Bear in mind I have studied it at length - partly in an effort to find an answer. That's what fuelled the initial interest. I know this isn't necessarily healthy, the world is full of lots of other interesting things, to be sure, and I want to experience them all.
The other is how detached you seem from it. I feel as if you are writing about "a patient. There seems to be this overweight person who you spend your life working on. The answers all seem to be external - what you learnt in a nutrition course, what can be done for you by someone else: slimming club leader, surgeon, therapist"
There is a bit of this. If you are searching for an answer, it does start to become all about the research element.
"I find it odd that you use the word 'fault'. Yes, what you eat is your responsibility and your choice, but 'fault' suggests a crime, a sin, if you like. Eating is nice, eating is good. You need to be responsible about the quantity, but to eat is not a crime"
No, its not. The responsibility thing I totally agree with - I have never said its not my responsibility and that I haven't chosen to satisfy my hunger when I do decide to eat. But the fact that the hunger exists in a physical sense in the first place, seems to be beyond my control, and therefore that's where "fault" comes into play. I'm not talking about behaviour, and satisfying the urge - I'm talking about the origin of the urge when I mention fault.
"I don't understand your attitude to hunger. You seem to think it needs 'fixing'. As I'm going out tonight I'm not eating at my usual time, so I can fit in a nice restaurant meal later. My stomach's growling. This is good. This is natural. It doesn't need to be addressed."
How many hours a day do you spend hungry? How overweight are you for this sacrifice?
Do you have to be hungry about 12 hours out of 24 including in the night, sometimes the middle of the night, to the extent that you are tired and can't sleep, to manage to just about maintain a 15 stone size 20 body? And if you indulge it a bit just to give yourself a break, go up to over 17 stone? If not, I agree nothing needs fixing 
Thank you for your words of support, though.
NotMyBigFatFault - I'm a bit confused. You say that you want the surgery to stop feeling hungry all the time (& I get that!!!), but Hec (& others) have said that the surgery will not stop you feeling hungry.
You can lose the weight on the diets & just require the 'whatever it is' to stop you over eating when you get the weight off... how do you think the surgery will help with that?
I totally get the 'hungry' thing and absolutely get the 'just want to be normal' thing - however, the more thin people that post the more I realise that perhaphs the majority of thin people are just bloody hungry all the time and maybe that's actually more 'normal' that not being hungry?!
Hec - can you try to explain something? If the sleeve or the band don't stop you feeling hungry what is the point in it? Why wouldn't it just work to eat however little you can eat when you have had the sleeve/band? I thought that a big part of the sleeve/band was stopping the hunger 
...the majority of thin people are just bloody hungry all the time and maybe that's actually more 'normal' that not being hungry?!
That's exactly what I think and indeed what it's what I said earlier.
I don't know if I'm a 'thin person' but I fall into the 'normal' range for BMI.
I feel as though I'm always hungry. For hours per day, if I stopped to think about it I would say I was hungry.
I know for a fact that if I ate whenever I felt hungry, I'd become fat. I could bloody well eat until I burst if I let myself. 
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It stops you being physically capable of eating, Chipping. I wasn't hungry at first. It was great. But it didn't last. Plus the emotional need for food never went away. I had spent 20 years learning to shut up my pain with food. An operation never stood a chance of changing that. The only thing it did was make me physically incapable of binging. Which I still am.
If I was able to just eat a tiny bit of food and stop, I wouldn't have got into that state in the first place. It would be like saying to an alcoholic "just have a small whiskey and then stop". They can't. The sleeve removed the choice. I couldn't physically binge.
That then caused massive problems because there I was, stripped of the only thing I had in the world to shut up the actual problem. And nothing to replace it. From an emotional pov, it made things far worse. I didn't know how to feel the things I was now feeling that I had been stuffing shut with bread and cheesecake!
gawd. The only thing missing from that post is bloody violins sorry about that 
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