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Schiketantz family
Cindy and Erich Schiketantz horseback riding while on vacation. After Cindy's gastric bypass, she has been leading a healthy lifestyle. As a result, husband Erich has become more active, too.
Since research suggests obesity is contagious — if you hang out with people who are packing on the pounds, you’re more likely to gain as well — weight-loss surgeon John Morton wondered whether the opposite might be true.
Could slimming down be catching, at least among the families of gastric bypass surgery patients?
To answer that question, he enlisted 35 patients scheduled to undergo the operation. As is typical for such patients, four out of five were women. Their average age was about 43, and they had a total of 35 adult family members and 15 children under 18 living in their home.
Many of their relatives were also obese at the beginning of the study. They were asked to accompany the patient to all pre-op educational sessions and post-op visits at which healthy lifestyle changes were and post-op sessions.
A year after surgery, adult family members on average had lost a little more than 3 percent of their weight (a drop of eight pounds from 234). That might not sound like much, but, Morton says, it’s comparable to what women lost in a year in studies of weight-loss programs like Atkins and Ornish. And, he notes, it’s sure better than keeping on gaining, which is usually the case. In addition, the kids’ BMIs weren’t as high as their previous growth curves had predicted.
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The scale didn’t tell the whole story. Family members in the home started turning off the TV and exercising more, Morton and his coauthors explain today in a report in the journal Archives of Surgery. And adult relatives reported cutting way back on emotional eating and drinking booze (people are much more sensitive to the effects of alcohol after gastric bypass surgery).
As for the patients, they lost about 80 percent of their excess weight by the end of that first year. “My hope and belief is if you’ve got good family support,” says Morton, director of bariatric surgery at Stanford Hospital & Clinics, “that’s going to help you stay on the straight and narrow.”
Cindy Schiketantz can relate. The Kitchener, Ontario, woman has blogged about her weight-loss journey at “Sweeping Cindy” since undergoing gastric bypass surgery in July 2009. Schiketantz, 41, who’s not Morton’s patient, says she weighed 444 pounds when she walked into her surgeon’s office. She’s lost 250 since her operation.
Her husband, Erich, was never extremely overweight, but he’d been a lot more active before they hooked up, Schiketantz says. “I kind of dragged him down with me.”
No more. “Since I lost weight, we go out and do all sorts of things together. We’ve been canoeing, we’ve been hiking, we went zip lining together,” Schiketantz said. As a result, Erich has resumed an active lifestyle.
Not to put a damper on things, but it doesn’t always work out so well for patients’ spouses. In 2005, University of Tennessee Health Science Center researchers reported that three out of four obese spouses in their study actually gained weight in the first year. After all, the researchers suspected, with the bypass patients cutting back on their calories, somebody had to eat all that extra leftover food.
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My son did agastric bypass, and urged me to, too. I decided that at nearly age 60, it was too riskey. But I also decided to get my act together, and have lost 132 lbs.
Bravo and good for you, Mrs. R, Israel! I've lost 65lbs and all I had to do was stop eating the way I was and exercise. The hardest part was making myself get up and do it. Making those life changes, particularly my relationship with food, was not easy but I did it. All on my own and without reducing my stomach to the size of my thumb!
We have so much bad food readily available to us today that it's a miracle every one of us isn't 500lbs. 100 years ago eating was a chore in and of itself. Just acquiring food was work. Now we just spend 30 minutes a week at the supermarket and that's IT. And it's all filled with flavor enhancers, fat, sugar, etc to make it taste so enticing. If we traveled back in time we would think everything was bland and tasteless simply because it's natural!
Wow, that's impressive, congrats! And without surgery, too!
If the true risks of such surgery were exposed to the general public, few people would accept the procedure. But, as in everything else in our "healthcare" system, we are trained to turn over responsibility for our health to doctors and pharmacists, whose main talent is dispensing pills and potions and have little incentive to teach how to actually prevent illness in the first place. There's no profit in that.
HooperScooper - the doctors and pharmacists are not the ones who made the patients overweight. They did that to themselves by eating too much and not exercising enough. I despise the promotion of gastric bypass surgery, but the fact of the matter is that overweight people request the operation. No one is holding a gun to anyone's head. People have to take responsibility for their own health and well-being. Those opting for this surgery need to do their research.
In some cases, the person also needs the help to lose a lot of initial weight just so they can start exercising. I have a friend who physically can't get out and exercise, because he is so overweight. He is getting this proocedure so he can lose enough weight to be able to start walking around the track near his house and then move on to other exercises. He is a boxing and baseball coach, so he understands the need for eating healthy and exercising. One doesn't work without the other and sometimes a nudge, like this surgery, is needed.
Usually, when one partner starts to get in shape, the other gets motivated and does so as well, but this is not always the case. Sometimes, the other partner gets depressed when they see the other person making so much progress that suddenly, that person is getting compliments and gets noticed by others and treated differently. This can drive the other person into a depression that can lead to overeating and abandoning all efforts at losing weight.
This is so true, my husband had gastric bypass in March and in the six months leading up to the surgery, as he started his new "diet", I lost 15 pounds, and in the 7 months since his surgery, i've lost another 10 - 15 pounds. I started eating the smaller meals with him, we cut sodium out of our diet, we make more homemade things now instead of buying them processed, it is was a great diet move for myself, and we still do that months after his surgery. It's been great on our kids too, b/c they're eating healthier foods, which hopefully when they get older, they will continue to do. The surgery was such a wonderful thing for my hubby, who has struggled with his weight even when he was a child.
so the gastric bypass patient who's obesity was due to genetics, metabolism, hormones, (any reason but overeating), infects those close to them and their hormone/metabolism/genetic problem goes away too?
lol. more support for the FACT that most obesity is related to excess intake and too little activity.
"more support for the FACT that most obesity is related to excess intake and too little activity".
Actually, maridanne, it is just as easily evidence of exactly the *opposite*; the person with the issue had intervention that the other person DID NOT need!, and therefore, it was easy for the other to lose the weight.
Careful with those ASSumptions, they can turn around and bite'cha!!!
huh?
they lost that weight by matching meals with the partner that now has a smaller appetite. how can it be seen any other way?
@ scales67: all people have to do to get fat is follow the USDA's crappy dietary recommendations. They push way too many carbs (all those grains they want us to eat are totally unnecessary in a human diet). It's not just eating too much and not exercising that makes people get fat. I'm not fat now, but when I was I got that way from following the USDA pyramid chart. I've since learned more about nutrition and that they are dead wrong and are just catering to corporate ag telling us to eat so much grain.
This article is pretty lame. On the one hand they tell us that others in the patient's family lose weight too, but then they say 3 out of 4 obese spouses actually gain weight in the first year. Sounds like the surgery is only a benefit to the patient's family as long as they're not obese.
I have been obese since age 5, now have been learning to eat better and exercise prior to by-pass surgery. Surgery is ONLY a tool to eat less / you MUST eat wisely post-op to stay healthy or you die. Patient becomes good influence on other family members to make good food choices also you don't keep " bad " foods in the house. Being thinner I now am able to exercise which makes exercising more fun so I exercise more.
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