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A new season of My 600 lb Life started this month on TLC. Right now this is only one of two shows I watch for regularly—the other one being reruns of Match Game on Buzzr). The TV is typically showing Peppa Pig and Frozen because I have a 4- and 5-year-old kiddos, but when they are sleeping or otherwise not around this is what I watch.
Back when I was 300 pounds and pretending to lose it, I would watch for entertainment purposes, but I would also feel guilty and afraid that Dr. Now would be disappointed in me for not following his advice. But in October 2018 when I chose to get serious, I used Dr. Now as a motivation. I followed his general dietary advice (not the same diet he gives the bariatric patients on his TV show). I especially cut back on my sugar intake. That helped me a lot in the first few months before I discovered Healthy Wage and DietBet and got obsessed involved with those.
Now that I am close to my forever goal weight, and working on how to keep off all the weight I lost, I like to watch the new shows to see the similarities between my journey and those of the featured patients. After two episodes of successful patients (at least after a year of care), the third episode of this season features Bethany of Oklahoma.
Bethany has a food addiction, stemming from dysfunctional parents and sexual violence at age 14. She’s married with 2 daughters who are also obese (although her husband is not). She really likes to eat a lot, as a coping mechanism for the childhood trauma she had.
After visiting Dr Now and getting his bariatric diet (1,200-calorie-no-carb-no-sugar, lose-turdy-pound-in-one-munt), she struggled to adhere at first, but eventually lost enough to get a sleeve gastrectomy. After that her weight loss slowed down to almost nil.
The big problem was that she wasn’t developing new coping mechanisms to deal with the earlier psychological trauma. She went to a therapist but was going through the motions. Dr Now had to do a procedure to verify she wasn’t damaging her sleeve by eating too much (she wasn’t—yet).
In the end she did a video call with Dr Now and told him she was quitting the program. Dr Now told her she was welcome back at any time and warned her she would stretch out her sleeve if she kept eating the way she was.
So at the beginning of the show she had all these motivations to lose the weight—can’t work outside the home as an addiction counselor (!); can’t shop for groceries, because she’s too big to ride in the mobility scooters (!!), kids are getting obese, all the other typical problems with being over 600 pounds. At the end she has a gastric sleeve that she is at risk of destroying, which adds even more health risk. That’s a lot of sources of motivation to rely on—and still it wasn’t enough.
Just like me. I should have had enough motivation to lose weight many years ago. Even after my father had his heart attack and had to get a triple stint in his LAD artery, that wasn’t enough for me. I screwed around for another month before I idly took my blood pressure at his house and got an insane reading. Everything changed after that—it was that reading that did it.
Programs like Healthy Wage and DietBet, where you risk money to lose weight, are just another motivational tactic. Although some people think it’s unseemly, but if it does the job for some people then I think it’s worthwhile. But I also think the most successful losers—whether they use HW or DB or no—can call upon multiple sources of motivation to move them along when the going gets tough.
I’ll review some of the other episodes as they are aired. Hopefully Bethany will turn it around.
Weight Betting Odds 