REALIZE® Band Bariatric Surgery: When Did You Choose To Have This Procedure?

Andrea:
Hello, my name is Andrea. I am a patient of Dr. Johnell’s and I had a REALIZE® Band placed approximately two years ago, and my peak weight was 342 pounds and I have lost 170 pounds.

I realized that I had a weight problem for years. The point for me, the moment when deciding and realizing that I wanted and needed to do something about it and it got sort of complicated for me.

I was going through therapy following a divorce and learning working on with parenting my children and relationships and how I wanted them to see me and it wasn’t necessarily that I wanted them to see me as not an overweight person, but through all of that I found that I really felt the need to change and to do something different with my life and partly it was the counselor helping me realize.

I kept thinking that I should be able to do it myself. It’s pretty simple – you exercise more and you eat less, right? Since then I have learned a lot about that and why it is so hard once you become overweight to do that, but it was my therapist at the time that helped me decide that I could do it, that it was worth it, and that it wasn’t a cop-out.

I thought, “Having surgery is a cop-out and that you just do it and then magically all the weight disappears,” and I found out a lot more since then about why it’s so difficult and I truly did not believe. Dr. Johnell calls that REALIZE® and LAP-BAND® a tool, and that’s exactly what it is and it’s a tool that I desperately needed to help me “dig myself out of the hole”.

I thought about it that way, “Digging myself out of the hole”, and then I realized later that, we call the REALIZE® Band a tool and it just really fit for me, that it was the tool I needed; the metabolic hole, how your body changes and how it’s different and that you need an extra push and extra help to make the difference and to start actually losing weight.

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Tags:

• Bariatric Surgery