I am SO Angry!!!

Fat: What No One is Telling You is a PBS documentary, and I’m angry about it.

What really ticks me off is that they paid so little attention to behavioral change, and that they nearly ignored the consequences of WLS gone wrong.

They showed picture after picture, for example, of Carla and David Hurd exercising. They are spending their Microsoft wages (Microsoft money is worth more than your average dollar, isn’t it?) on a company supported program to make a comprehensive change in lifestyle. They have engaged a team of personal trainers, doctors, dietitians and psychologists. The program is about healthy living, not just losing weight. Yet the filmmakers give short shrift to the counseling they are having, and they even show Carla talking about how she chose ice cream when she knew she had other options.

There are many other characters in the show as well, and it’s worth watching, even if you don’t agree with everything you hear.

The show acknowledges that the odds haven’t improved in the last 50 years: most people still do not lose weight, and they do lose some, many gain it back, and the end result is that maybe 5% of people actually lose weight and keep it off.

When is the world going to understand that, regardless of how you lose the weight, it will always come down to which choices you make inside your head, and how you respond to the challenges life gives you?????

WLS in general is scary, but this show made me think further. The Harvard doctor talks about how the nerves in the digestive area can strongly influence the ability to lose weight. I believe it’s called the vagus nerve. Sometimes a WLS will crush and destroy the nerve, making the patient not feel as hungry anymore. That’s extremely dangerous, because it also contributes to breathing, speech, sweating and your heart rate. Is WLS worth that kind of risk? Instead of pointing that out, I see doctors bragging about how they destroy this nerve during surgery. Other doctors with more sense are studying the vagus nerve, and looking at applications to help treat epilepsy. My take on this matter is, if we can find ways to stimulate the vagus nerve to help epileptics, what can we do to stimulate it without the bypass? A nerve is an organic electric circuit. Let’s put a switch or a computer in there to see if we can help it without putting people at such desperate risk.