What if a slimming organisation with 300,000 members was to declare that, while the benefits to long term health of its weight loss methods are enormous, the risk of following their method would result in 1 in 300 (1,000) of those members dying each year? Or indeed if 1 in 20 (15,000) were at risk of serious complications such as infection or gut perforations? There would rightly be enormous public outcry.
Calls from bariatric surgeons suggesting that access to NHS weight-loss surgery should be made more widely available as it is the “only proven successful method of treating the morbidly obese” are extremely misleading. Particularly when taking the associated risks of death and complications.
One refutation of the suggestion that obesity surgery is the only successful method of treating the obese is provided by the US National Weight Control Registry that shows that a significant proportion (20%) of the population can make sustainable healthy lifestyle changes.
Suggestions that increased access to obesity surgery is the best way to save money and NHS funding fails to take the real causes of obesity into account. The proposition positively encourages overweight people to think of themselves as victims and to do nothing except wait until they have someone else give them an ‘easy out’. It’s a cruel distraction at best and at worst, while the very people who need help wait around for this magic solution instead of taking action themselves, their problem – and their health – worsens.
Offering surgery as a solution for obesity takes no account of an overweight person’s state of mind, their motivation, their self-esteem or their confidence to make changes – changes that could save their life and improve their long term health.
Many overweight people will have tried to lose weight by cutting down or restricting the amount of food they eat and suffered the misery of hunger and shame of failure to sustain their ‘diet’. This leads to a nightmare cycle of blame and shame.
The overweight and obese need to be given several opportunities and ongoing support to try to lose weight through changing their lifestyle, by filling up on satiating foods that satisfy their often very large appetites, not by restricting them to unsustainable diets.
By the time a person considers surgery for weight loss they have probably tried many times already to lose weight by diet or exercise or both. Failure to keep to a diet that leaves them unfulfilled and hungry often sends them into a cycle of failure and plunging self-esteem.
By suggesting that surgery is the only solution to the problem we only serve to heighten these feelings of failure and lack of control, putting the solution well and truly in someone else’s hands and leaving the individual bereft of the very support they needed in the first place.
After surgery, the problem continues, the individual still needs support to make changes to old eating habits, unhealthy lifestyles and inactive routines. Who provides them with real and effective support then – after the NHS has spent in excess of thousands of pounds on surgery? In our experience – no-one does. They have no new healthy habits, they still find it hard to eat healthily and exercise regularly – they have no lifelong solution within their own control.
What’s more, nor do their families. Rather than equipping overweight people take choose control, rather than empowering them to make a new life for themselves and their children do we expect their children to wait for weight loss surgery to come to them?
We agree that urgent action should be taken to tackle the obesity epidemic – not to make surgery more available but to make sure we show people how it is possible to fill up on delicious and healthy food without hunger or deprivation and offer real and effective support to break the cycle of obesity being passed from one generation to the next.
At Slimming World, with 40 years experience of working with overweight and obese people, we have learnt that the key to long term weight management is a healthy, generous and realistic plan that allows those who struggle with their weight to eat to satisfy their appetite. Combined with effective ongoing group support it provides a real long term solution for individuals and for the whole family. What the overweight really need is compassionate support without humiliation or guilt that equips them to make lifestyle changes that are sustainable in the long term and that they can return to as many times as they need to, to succeed. The only risk involved is long term good health. -- ends --
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