Weight Loss as Success
This chapter explores the “honeymoon period” of bariatric surgery: the six to eighteen months after a gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy, when weight seems to melt off an individual’s body.
Abstract
This chapter explores the “honeymoon period” of bariatric surgery: the six to eighteen months after a gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy, when weight seems to melt off an individual’s body. The authors’ own ethnographic data, contextualized within a small but rich literature on this subject, indicates that this is a time beset with everyday adjustments necessitated by new physical limitations imposed by surgery but that these adjustments are offset by the feelings of hope and success that accompany accelerated and profound weight loss. On the one hand, people had to adhere to very restrictive and careful eating habits or risk dumping, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness, dehydration, and micronutrient deficiencies. On the other hand, people could visibly track the weight they were losing weekly, in addition to the steady cessation of symptoms ranging from joint pain to sleep apnea to type 2 diabetes.