Body Positive

There's a very incorrect idea out there that weight loss surgeries such as gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy are primarily obtained for cosmetic reasons. While there's no getting around the fact that weight has an enormous impact on how people are perceived in our culture, and that losing weight can definitely help people socially, at University Bariatrics we're committed to reminding the public this is serious surgery that is nearly always obtained for solid medical reasons.

We were reminded of the public's misconception of bariatric medicine while reading a post that appeared last week at the Time web site. Writer Trish Harms describes herself as a "body positive feminist." That meant that she had intellectually and emotionally accepted her weight and size as being perfectly okay for her. We don't doubt that the emotional and psychological benefits of this were very real for her.

However, what Ms. Harms found was what those of us in the medical community have long known. Obesity is not just a social issue, it is a medical condition that produces real medical harms. From a doctor's point of view, it's truly immaterial whether larger bodies are attractive or unattractive -- that is truly in the eye of the beholder. What we see are the very real medical harms that obesity causes both to the length and quality of life.

If you come to us for bariatric surgery in Thousand Oaks, you'll find that aesthetic or moral judgments about obesity are the furthest things from our mind. We like to think of ourselves as extremely body positive and we want people to be happy with themselves as they are -- it's just that we also want our patients to be as healthy as possible, also.