The Chef Who Left His Kitchen To Keep Off 200 Pounds

After undergoing gastric sleeve surgery, Matt Jennings went from being addicted to food to being addicted to the gym.

After Weight-Loss Surgery, a Year of Joys and Disappointments

Even as the pounds fell away and their health improved, two patients contended with the feeling that life hadn’t changed as much as they’d hoped.

Bariatric Surgery: The Solution to Obesity?

Early on a Thursday morning, I went to Beth Israel Medical Center to watch Roberts undergo the sleeve gastrectomy. Bariatric procedures—surgeries that treat obesity—remove no fat tissue; instead, they change the stomach and intestine so that a person feels full more quickly, or absorbs fewer calories, or both.

How Bariatric Surgery Changed This Governor's Life

It alone will not stem the obesity epidemic. It is not for everyone. It is not magic or a quick-fix. It doesn't replace a healthy diet and physical activity. But when done appropriately by the right surgeon and for the right patient, bariatric surgery can make a big difference in a patient's life.

I’m Scared of Who I’ll Become After Weight Loss Surgery

...I've decided on weight loss surgery—specifically the gastric sleeve. Roughly six months from now—after I jump through the health insurance hoops—a doctor will laparoscopically enter my abdomen and remove the majority of my stomach, leaving me with a pouch roughly the size of a banana. Some people will call it the easy way out. They're wrong.

Morbid obesity: Gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy are comparable

In Switzerland, 5,500 operations to combat morbid obesity are conducted every year. Gastric bypasses and sleeve gastrectomy operations perform similarly: patients lose two-thirds of their excess weight in the long term, as researchers from the University of Basel at the St. Claraspital report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). When it comes to gastric acid reflux, the bypass clearly shows better results.

My Gastric Sleeve and Me

So why am I sharing this? Because I don't think enough people speak up about bariatric surgery, about having had it, about wanting or needing it. Many are embarrassed that they ended up so out of control and overweight that it was necessary, something I'm certain comes from the fat-shaming that still seems to be okay and acceptable in the society we live in. Well, ENOUGH, I say!

My Gastric Sleeve and PCOS

I feel the difference. I feel normal. I have now lost that constant hunger that meant I was either thinking about food, thinking about my weight, thinking about my failing health… or eating and getting on with what I had to do. I am now on the right track to becoming healthy again.