Tag Archives: surgery

Is Obesity Acceptable?

Posted on September 19, 2016 | 3 comments

obesityaction_friendsandfamily_-374-6-47-59-pm
© OBESITY ACTION COALITION.
(First published in The Huffington Post)

Last week, an article in the Washington Post announced a new program of the Obesity Action Coalition (OAC) to fight obesity bias. They want the media to change from portraying obesity in a negative unflattering light, which they are known to do. They want the media to use more positive images when portraying obese people and the OAC is providing them with free stock images to use when showing obese people. The photo with this article is an example of one of these images. As OAC’s James Zervios points out, the headless bodies with plates of junk food often used in the media promote a false stereotype about overweight people that is abusive as well as untrue. Many overweight people are hard-working citizens who eat healthy foods and are attentive to their health needs. They are not fat, lazy and stupid, an image the media is used to promoting.

At the same time there is a fat-acceptance movement you may have heard of that also fights bias and discrimination against overweight people and promotes acceptance of the condition as well as the people who have it.

In the Washington Post article, Zervios maintains that “Obesity is a disease whose sufferers are no different from those afflicted with breast cancer or asthma”. This leads many to take the position that there is nothing that can be done about it, and that people who are overweight should accept it.

Is Obesity Something we should Accept?

I am a clinical member of both the Obesity Action Coalition and The Obesity Society, an association of health professionals that treat obesity and its related medical conditions. I am also a behavioral therapist who solved my own 25-year obesity problem and helps others to do the same.

While I am a staunch supporter of efforts to fight obesity bias and discrimination, I disagree completely with Zervios’s position that obesity is a disease no different from breast cancer and asthma. Obesity can be reversed. By adopting habits of eating less, obese people lose weight and lose the medical problems they have because of it. It is not a matter of “perhaps” it can change. It will change, no if’s and’s or but’s. Cancer and asthma have no similar guaranteed way to get rid of the condition.

While creating change in habitual and addictive behavior can be difficult and complex, it can be done. There is no guarantee that the person can easily change, but it can be done. Like it is with alcohol and drug abuse, when the behavior changes, the problems caused by the behavior resolve. In 30 years, I have never had a patient not lose weight when they are able to eat less.

I and thousands of my patients, clients and readers have reversed our obesity and the medical complications of it. Please don’t let people think that being overweight and sick with it is acceptable. Don’t let them think that getting better is beyond their control. They need not be ashamed or abused because of it, but they need not stay overweight either. There is a sure-fire way to reverse the condition, unlike cancer and asthma.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He solved his own long-time weight problem, losing 140 pounds 30 years ago and has kept it off since. He is the author of The Anderson Method.

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Why are women losing the battle of the bulge?

Posted on August 16, 2016 | Leave a comment

BY ALLIE SHAH
Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Frances Traphagan has been battling weight issues her whole life.

For years, the south Minneapolis mom struggled to balance work demands and motherhood. After every pregnancy, her weight problem grew. Her habit of eating on the run also tipped the scales in the wrong direction.

Finally, at 240 pounds, the 5-foot-3 Traphagan chose to have bariatric surgery at the Hennepin Bariatric Center and Obesity Program at Hennepin County Medical Center in downtown Minneapolis.

“It was my very last effort to try to lose weight,” she said.

She’d tried everything before that – from Weight Watchers to the Atkins diet to the grapefruit diet.

“I did have some success, but nothing was ever permanent,” she said.

After a national report this summer showed that women have surpassed men in obesity rates, doctors and obesity researchers are searching for answers to why women are struggling more than men.

For the first time, more than 40 percent of U.S. women are obese, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The nation as a whole continues to struggle with obesity, with 35 percent of men considered obese. But while men’s obesity rates appear to have stabilized, women’s are still rising, the CDC report shows.

Dr. Maria Collazo-Clavell, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic who works with overweight and obese patients, has been working in the obesity research field for 20 years. She said the recent findings give her pause about whether public health officials are taking the right approach to tackling obesity.

“All of that makes you question: Are you on the right track?” she said. “The data would say no.”

That so many women are obese is cause for alarm not only because of the increased health risks for them but also for those around them, Collazo-Clavell said.

“That’s kind of the tip of the iceberg,” she said. Women are often the primary caregivers in a family, and their eating and activity habits can influence their children and others in their family.

An example of that ripple effect: Collazo-Clavell is starting to see some of her previous patients’ children and is working with them to help manage their obesity.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what is causing women to struggle more with obesity than men, but doctors say there likely are many factors at play.

Women typically have two times in their lives when they are at risk of gaining significant amounts of weight: childbearing (during pregnancy and after giving birth) and menopause.

Collazo-Clavell hears from many new mothers that they find meal planning and preparation tough after giving birth. Also of concern, she notes that women as a group are going into pregnancy heavier than they were 20 years ago.

It makes it harder to manage a healthy pregnancy weight if they’re already overweight, she said.

An epidemic

One of the country’s leading health problems, obesity can lead to serious diseases, including diabetes and heart disease.

Body mass index (BMI) is calculated by dividing weight (in kilograms) by height squared (in centimeters). Anyone with a BMI of 25 or more is considered overweight, while those with a BMI of 30 or more are obese.

For example, a woman of average height in the U.S. (5 feet 4) would be classified as obese if she weighs at least 175 pounds. An average height American man (5 feet 9) who weighs 203 pounds or more would be considered obese.

Dr. Guilford Hartley is medical director of the Hennepin Bariatric Center and Obesity Program, where 100 surgeries for weight management are performed each year.

He sees many more female patients than men. Part of the reason, he said, is that women are more likely to seek medical treatment for a weight issue than men.

“In our culture, when a man’s overweight, nobody pays too much attention,” he said. “But we have such an emphasis on being thin for women that we’re culturally forcing women to be more concerned about their weight than men. The social pressure if you’re overweight and a woman is higher.”

Those seeking surgery often have struggled with a weight problem for a long time.

“Usually by the time I see them, most of them get here saying, ‘I’ve done this all my life. This is my sixth yo-yo,’” he said.

He found the recent CDC report on obesity rates concerning. “Up until these reports, it was looking as if the so-called obesity epidemic was kind of plateauing.”

In analyzing the new data, Hartley and Collazo-Clavell point to societal changes that have led people to become more sedentary.

“If you were a clerical person, 20 years ago you’d have to get up and put the piece of paper in the file cabinet. Now you never have to get up off your chair,” Hartley said. “We have engineered … physical activity out of our workplace and out of our home place.”

The prescription of “eat less and exercise more” does not address the kind of vigorous activity needed to tip the scales.

“When we tell them to exercise more, we mean get on a treadmill for an hour, three days a week,” he said. “And the kind of exercise that it takes to have a significant impact on weight is more like if you’re a hardscrabble farmer and you’re working up a sweat for eight hours a day just to put food on the table.”

Constant fight

It’s been 10 years since Traphagan had a surgical band wrapped around her stomach to make it smaller. The band makes it possible to consume only 1.5 cups of food at a time. But it’s still possible to overeat, she said, which is why she had to learn how to eat healthfully to control her weight.

Today, she has poached eggs instead of doughnuts for breakfast and drinks plenty of ice water throughout the day. She has maintained a healthy weight.

“It’s been real hard, though. It’s not easy,” she said.

“I got down to 155 pounds. My goal weight is 124. I’m still working on that, and I hope to achieve that this year.”

(This article first appeared in: http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/health-care/article95803902.html)

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Gastric Surgery Now Prescribed For Diabetes – Weight Loss a Side Benefit

Posted on May 25, 2016 | 5 comments

Bariatric surgery

Gastric surgery is now being prescribed to treat diabetes, with weight loss being a side benefit. International diabetes organizations are calling for weight-loss surgery to become a more routine treatment option for diabetes, even for some patients who are only mildly obese.

Of course, don’t forget that you still need to change your behavior to keep from being overweight. That’s why gastric surgeons refer their patients to The Anderson Method. 

This is something for people with diabetes to study.

Here’s a link to the whole story:

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/diabetes/obesity-surgery-good-way-treat-diabetes-groups-agree-n579531

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Can a Drug or Surgery Solve Your Weight Problem?

Posted on June 10, 2015 | 2 comments

Successful Weight Loss
(Published first in The Huffington Post)

In a word, no. Can they help? Perhaps.

Last month I wrote an article that spoke somewhat favorably of the new weight loss drug, Saxenda. I said it was perhaps the most important weight loss medication ever developed.

Wow! Did I get lambasted! I got all sorts of email blasting me for going over to the dark side and becoming a drug pusher and lackey of Big Pharma. I even got an email from my favorite professor of counseling at the University of Massachusetts, now friend, Allen Ivey, Ph.D. Besides being a friend, he is a big shot in the counseling field, the father of Microcounseling and developer of “active listening”. He said he was “sad” to see that I seemed to be pushing drugs. He is the last person on earth that I would want to be mistaken about my views on the solution to obesity. We’ve since gotten that misunderstanding corrected, but I want to make sure it is clear with everyone who reads my blogs.

I am still the world’s staunchest advocate of the behavioral therapy I teach to reverse the condition of obesity. It works -like a miracle, some say. But not 100% of the time. For some, it is not enough.

After 30 years successfully helping people to lose weight permanently, I am convinced that a percentage of the population is dealing with a physiological condition that creates more persistent and intense degrees of craving and compulsion than the rest of us have to deal with. My approach teaches people how to overcome the habits and feelings that make them overweight but sometimes those cravings and compulsions are so strong that nothing on God’s natural earth will quiet them.

If you’ve ever had a blister on your foot or a pebble in your shoe, you’ll remember that your brain is getting the message loud and clear that you need to relieve that pressure and you need to relieve it right now. You will feel the drive to relieve it until you do. It won’t go away until you do whatever it takes. There is no “will-powering” it away. Something is going on in the body, physiologically and chemically, that is triggering a response in your brain that will bother you until you satisfy it. It isn’t exactly the same with the food cravings that some have, but it gives you an idea of what some people are dealing with. Hold your breath for as long as you can and see how powerful the urge to breathe becomes. This is the kind of relentless drive that a small percentage of the population is fighting in their attempts to stop eating too much.

For them, some sort of intervention or tool that would make it easier for them to eat less would be a Godsend. Then, perhaps what they learn in a good behavioral approach would be enough. Self-programming and cognitive techniques like I teach work like magic for many people, but they would be so much more productive for these folks with eating hyperdrive if we could reduce that drive, which the pharmaceuticals can do. Or in the case of surgery, an additional tool to use behaviorally.

Make no mistake about it, drugs or surgery will not by themselves solve your weight problem. To solve your weight problem, you need to make a permanent change in your behavior, made possible with behavioral therapy, taught in my book and by my therapists. Success comes with learning how to eat what you like in ways that keep you at your desired weight and it becoming habitual and a new “normal” for you. Now, with these new medical interventions, success may be possible even for those who have suffered from an abnormally intensive eating drive. Weight loss drugs or surgery may now enable them to overcome the obstacles that prevented them from being able to make those behavioral changes.

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How to Know When Weight Loss Surgery Is The Right Thing to Do

Posted on February 11, 2015 | Leave a comment

Bariatric surgery
When I was twelve, after countless days of torment over my weight and inability to control it, I would have given anything to have the surgery that would solve the problem for me. I’m glad it didn’t happen. I went on to discover how to lose weight permanently while enjoying eating more than ever, lost over 100 pounds after years of dieting failure, and went on to teach others how, and to write the book about it, The AndersonMethod.

Some think of me as the weight loss counselor’s counselor who is against bariatric surgery, so people are surprised to learn that I’ve recommended bariatric surgery to a number of clients.

In fact, I’ve worked hard to convince some people that weight loss surgery was something they needed to be open to and look into. At times, I’ve told them I think it must be done ASAP. And while my weight loss method is a behavioral approach, teaching people how to form the habits and unconscious behavior to achieve permanent weight loss, I work with many people who have had the surgery. That’s because, even with the surgery, you still need to change your eating habits and change them for life. More on that later.

A few years ago, bariatric surgery started becoming a big business with magazine ads and billboards advertising the different competing hospitals’ surgical weight loss programs. Smiling doctors and attractive stories enticed people. Free seminars offered all your answers. Before and after pictures and stories excited anyone who has dreamed of solving their weight problem. It really bothered me because I knew that lots of people would be drawn to this and choose it, thinking it would relieve them of the need to change their eating habits. They thought that the surgery would be easier than counseling in behavioral therapy, a way to solve the problem for many without the surgery, not to mention being a small fraction of the cost. Many would ignore the risks and downsides of the surgery. They would choose not to consider that they would need to learn how to change their habits anyway and that many people who lost weight with the surgery had not kept it off. I know that weight loss surgery is not the right thing for most of these overweight people.

So, if I’m so sure it’s the wrong thing in many cases, what makes me think it’s the right thing sometimes? The main factor that leads me to advise people to have the surgery is emergency.

Sometimes, the threat from their obesity is so dangerous that life is at stake and there is no certain way to restore hope and eliminate the risk other than the surgery. Simply said, we’ve run out of time. There is no more time to depend on methods that are not absolutely guaranteed to produce immediate dramatic weight loss to prevent further deterioration we may not recover from.

The cases where I’ve prescribed surgery all involve clients who have made sincere heroic efforts, but have been unable to overcome the forces that prevent them from losing weight. They have all reached the point where they have given up hope that they will ever be able to lose weight. Now, let me be clear, it’s normal to become hopeless, even regularly, for people who try to lose weight, but in these high-risk cases, the hopelessness spirals them downward to a deterioration they might not recover from. With most of us, after a while, we are able to see things differently, learn more, and resume the work to get control of the weight and eventually succeed.

What is this deterioration that I say is so dangerous? In some cases, it is mobility. They are just not able to move around without great pain and difficulty, reducing their movement while destroying their spirit. With some, it is a profound hopelessness where nothing but misery and an early death is imaginable, driving them further down a black hole that is dangerous in itself. Some are so medically compromised with dangerous heart conditions and diabetes that they are a ticking time bomb and time is running out. Nothing has worked and they are getting worse.

In all these cases, as soon as the decision to go ahead with the surgery is made, hope is restored. They are able to believe, without doubt, that they will be able to lose weight, because it is the new physical condition, the alteration of their gut, that will cause them to lose weight. They don’t have to depend solely on their own efforts.

Another characteristic that may be present in those I’ll recommend for bariatric surgery is an unusually powerful eating drive that I am certain is biologically based. It is a drive so strong, like that associated with the worst addictive drugs, that we are unable to overcome it, even with the best behavioral interventions we employ. With most people, we are able to answer the cravings in a way that overpowers them, and also employ methods that will reduce or eliminate them. In these worst-case scenarios, the people are unrelentingly tormented by these drives that cannot be overcome. The surgery acts as an additional tool in their toolbox that strengthens their ability to manage their eating, physically limits what they can process and absorb, and may have an important impact on the production of hormone, as we know it does related to diabetes, that influences eating drive and behavior.

How has it worked? I’m happy to say that I am hearing “I’m doing great! I have my life back, better than ever” more often than ever, more often than when I only offered behavioral therapy in my weight loss counseling work. My clients who were spiraling down are getting better, having hope. They are able to apply the behavioral techniques with increased effectiveness. Like my other successful clients, they are mobile again, with less pain and discomfort, ridding themselves of the diabetes and high blood pressure and the medicines they needed to treat them. They are happier with themselves and their lives.

If you have been chronically overweight and unable to achieve the weight loss you want, rest assured that it can be done. Your habits will have to change for life, but that does not have to be by sheer force of will alone. There is a whole body of behavioral technique that I teach, that can be learned, that makes behavior change possible.

But, if you have done all that, learned all you can from me and tried your best, and things are getting worse and you are running out of time, weight loss surgery might be right for you. So says the weight loss counselor’s counselor who people think is totally against bariatric surgery.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor who specializes in weight loss, eating disorders and addictions. He is the creator of “Therapeutic Psychogenics”, which helped him lose 140 pounds permanently thirty years ago after years of obesity and dieting failure. He has written a book about it, The Anderson Method, and he is teaching these techniques to individuals and therapists all over the country.

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