Is Weight Loss Surgery the "Easy Way Out?"

Burnt Toast by Virginia Sole-Smith

Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark!

It’s time for your April Extra Butter! This month we’re answering a thorny mix of listener questions:

Do we ever get tempted to buy back into diet culture?

Is weight-loss surgery (and meds) not “doing it the old-fashioned way?”

And what should you say when your daughter’s pants don’t fit—and she hates all her other clothes?

Both of these letters bring up a lot of complicated issues. CW for discussions of intentional weight loss, anti-fat rhetoric and weight loss surgery.

To listen to the full episode and read the full transcript, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier.

Subscribe now

Extra Butter now costs just $99 per year.

If you are current paid subscriber, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total. We’ve had some (very understandable!) confusion about this, so I asked Substack to break it down:

• If you JUST subscribed (like, yesterday) for $50, you’ll take that full $50 off the Extra Butter price.

• If you’re halfway through your annual membership, you’ll get $25 off the Extra Butter price.

• If you’re at some other point in your subscription, or paying monthly, your mileage will vary, but you’ll still get some kind of discount.

• No matter when you joined us, upgrading to Extra Butter extends your subscription by a full year. So you’ll be renewing your membership AND getting more content.

In addition to these monthly episodes (where we get into juicy stuff like the anti-diet to alt-right pipeline, is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet? and my post-divorce body), you’ll also get a comp to and access to our monthly live thread discussions — our next one is next Wednesday at 12pm Eastern!

Plus Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!

(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc [e-mail].)

---

Extra Butter Episode 6 Transcript

This episode may include affiliate links. Shopping our links is another great way to support Burnt Toast!

Photo by Gravity Images via Getty Images

Are Weight Loss Surgery Survivors Just “New Money Thin?”

I listen to your podcasts, read your essays as well as your book Fat Talk and I feel that I am completely done with diet culture and the way I get lured by the promise of thinness to give you a better life and all the layers and complexities that come along with dieting/body image. I love what Sonya Renee Taylor said about just stepping off of the ladder and removing yourself from this type of social hierarchy we place on each other, ourselves and our lives.

BUT THEN....

I see news reports of Oprah having lost weight and looking skinny and I find myself feeling a panic that 'I need to get back on that ladder (or treadmill).'

Do you ever get tempted to buy into all of this again? And if so, what do you do?

Also, what is your opinion on weight loss surgery? Just today I met two people who have recently had it. I feel all kinds of things. On one hand, I feel sympathetic towards them. I don't want to judge anyone for how they deal with living in an anti-fat world. I know one of them has had health issues as well as body image issues for the majority of her life. I want to feel happy for her that she ***will*** (?) find some "peace" now. But then there's the bitchy side of me that thinks it is an easy way out

The bitchiest thoughts are using the awful judgements like the concept of 'old money' and 'new money' and seeing her as only a newly thin person (it even hurts to write this out) OR .....if I want to lose weight, I will just do it the old fashioned way not through this magic surgery.

The more loving/mature side of me thinks that the surgery is just another way to give into the type of thing- anti fatness, fat shaming, diet culture- we should all just change.

Thoughts?

Thank you,

Diane.

Read more