Opinions on surgery.

Read a great post today from "Tales of the morbidly obese". It's an old post, but will always be relevant I think.

"Sometimes I wonder about the people who stumble upon this blog from comments on other blogs or just from searches. Are they just disgusted like people are in the real world by morbidly obese people? Am I somehow even less since I used surgery to escape the prison of morbid obesity?

Just I am just starting to learn what it is like to travel in a regular size body. No one can know the cumulative effects of morbid obesity without having lived it. Every day is one indignity after another. While you are suffering through those, people expect a constantly sunny disposition. You feel beholden to give them the funny, smiling fatty persona they expect.

What about you? The ones who have stumbled on this blog. Look at my before pictures and tell what you would have thought of me seeing me on the street. How does your impression change by seeing recent pictures of me? Or does it? Is the fat lot cast?"

It makes me really regret my previous post about people who get surgery to 'release themselves from the prison of morbid obesity.' At the time (and this was only a week ago), it seemed like surgery was a cheat. That somehow, by paying rather than working for the weight loss, you somehow don't deserve it. It's taken me a week of drinking nothing but milkshakes to realise that being morbidly obese is payment in itself, and anything that you do to relieve yourself from that prison is a positive step, and one that everyone should respect.

Surgery is not for me, it's not something that I ever considered, but I would like to apologise to everyone who has 'gone under the knife,' because I realise that I've been trying to disassociate myself from you. In my arrogance, I've passed judgement on other people who have been through the social ostracism, taunts, and feelings of self disgust that have plagued me for most of my life, and I have labelled them cheats because they found a way out of it.

Do other people consider me a cheat because I've chosen the relatively easy weight loss plan of a Very Low Calorie Diet instead of stomach crunches every morning? Probably. This diet is the easiest thing I've ever done - I don't have to even think about cooking or washing up, and the weight is just falling off me. It's probably considerably easier than surgery, and involves considerably less risk, money and pain.

I watched Louis Theroux last night, doing a documentary on plastic surgery in which he actually wound up getting liposuction. It was amazing to see the confidence people gained from their surgery, and the happier they were in their lives afterwards. I'm still no fan of it, but who am I to deny other fat people their chance at a happy life where people don't stare at them as they walk down the street. From now, anything that makes someone happy is just fine by me.