Stomach op would change my life
Scotland has a weight problem – and for some, it’s a matter of life and death. A new documentary follows patients waiting for the operations they hope will end their suffering GRANDMOTHER Alison Allaun weighs almost 24st and admits she’s addicted to food – but she’s desperate to slim down so she can have a life rather than just an existence.
Stephanie Donnachie has become so overweight that her arthritis is now unbearable, and she is forced to walk with sticks.
Alison and Stephanie are just two of the obese patients featured tonight in a BBC Scotland documentary, Shedding The Fat.
Scotland has the highest level of obesity in Europe and surgery is increasingly being seen as a way to tackle the problem.
Ayrshire is one of the worstaffected areas – one in three people there are dealing with extreme weight problems which are endangering their lives.
Ayr Hospital has one of the country’s leading bariatric (the branch of medicine dealing with obesity) units. The film-makers go behind the scenes there to meet the people hoping to have life-changing operations as well as the surgeon treating them.
Patients are helped by a team who look at tackling BY MARIA CROCE their diet and any psychological problems that lie behind their problem eating, before they are ready for surgery.
Alison, of Auchinleck, is being assessed for an operation which will reduce the capacity of her stomach by 90 per cent. She’s hoping that losing weight will transform her life and allow her to be more active with her threeyear-old grand-daughter Laura.
As she eats a takeaway, she tells the film-makers: “I’ve lost the fight with the devil. The devil won and the devil is a Chinese.
“I could look at a cream cake and put on 5lbs. Lick it and I’ll put on 10lbs.
“We’re the same as ordinary folk, just fatter. We want to live – we want to have a life and not just an existence.”
Alison knows how important the operation is to her health. “If I don’t go through it and I keep on gaining weight the way it was going, it would be death,” she says. “This is life-changing for me and my grandweans and my weans.”
Stephanie, from Kirkmichael, weighs more than 24st and is struggling with the pain of chronic arthritis.
“Every step you take, it’s just bone on bone now,” she says. “I can’t cope without pain relief. I don’t want to live my life like this.”
Patients from outside the area are also treated at Ayr Hospital. One of them, Teresa Thomson, from Annan, Dumfriesshire, weighs 25st and is hoping that gastric balloon surgery will help.
She’s virtually housebound because she’s so overweight. “When you have an eating problem it all revolves around food,” she admits. “It’s a vicious circle which is hard to break.”
Surgeon Majid Ali is committed to helping the clinically obese but he’s also frank about the effects of a poor diet. He says: “Eating junk food like crisps is like trading hours of your life.
“The patients I deal with usually have some psychological baggage – low self-esteem, anxiety or depression. Bariatric surgery can give hope to people. It can increase the quality of their life, it can add years to their life and, for some, it can save their lives.”
Majid, the clinical director of surgery and endoscopy at the hospital, sees patients who have already become extremely obese. He believes more should be done to stop people putting on so much weight in the first place.
Morbid obesity is a Body Mass Index of 40 or more, or 35 or more with obesity-related health conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes.
Most patients seen by Majid and his team have health problems caused by obesity and can’t lose weight without surgery.
He says: “We live in an environment that encourages obesity and we have to change that environment to make it healthy.
“In schools, we need to make sure it’s implanted in the kids that this is what a healthy lifestyle is.
“More than 80 per cent of my patients, their food is usually takeaway and processed. If they have a dining table, they don’t sit at it. Usually there’s distractions like TV and there’s no set meal. More than 80 per cent don’t know how to cook a simple recipe.”
Majid says societies where food is part of the culture – and people cook and eat together – tend to be the healthiest. He says obesity is a complex disease and insists sufferers are not greedy – they have lost control and need help.
“The right and civilised approach is to help them,” he says. “We don’t do it for cosmetic reasons. It’s not a quick fix. It’s an operation that saves lives and adds quality years to your life.” Shedding the Fat is on BBC One Scotland tonight at 9pm.