A Weight Loss Journey from the Islands
all right
today i’m going to talk about weight
loss surgery and living on guam it’s one
of the
fun topics i get to talk about sometimes
and uh the interesting thing some people
who have weight loss surgery they don’t
like to
to talk about it very much for for some
reasons and
that’s okay i’m going to talk a little
bit about it and kind of my journey a
little bit and some of the things that i
i work through in the process
you know there’s an old saying that
nobody ever goes hungry on guam
and it’s absolutely true everywhere you
go on guam there’s food everywhere
people will offer you food and people
want you to eat with them it’s
kind of socially expected that people
want to eat with you or offer you food
and it’s hard to lose weight and it’s
really hard to lose weight and so
there’s a some scientific literature to
show that
people who populated uh the small
micronesian islands
there’s a thing called the bat gene and
that is there’s a gene that they ended
up developing so they could go on long
open boat ocean voyages and so there’s a
theory that maybe people who
live on small islands have a genetic uh
propensity to being you know obese or
fat well
i think part of it too is social i think
we have a very
large social culture here that’s based
on food so it’s hard to diet
and so you take this issue about social
kind of expectations for food and
sharing food because if you don’t share
with people with people you can kind of
be a little bit rude or why don’t you
like my food or
you have all these dynamics going on
well there’s another secret about living
on water
the other secret about living obama is
temperature okay
it’s 85 degrees every single
day i mean without stopping you get up
in the morning
the average temperature is probably
going to be about 85 degrees
you’re gonna go to bed the next day it’s
gonna be 85 degrees again so for that
reason
life on guam feels like the same day
every day now i’ve shown some statistics
up here to show
various cities in the world new york
you have seasons the temperature goes up
and down on average san francisco
has seasons it goes up and down on
average you have four seasons
uh miller in australia four seasons
cape town south africa four seasons
london four seasons
on guam we don’t have seasons that tell
us the time has passed and so
days kind of get blurred together very
very quickly
the the way we perceive time is
different here
and that affects how we eat and how we
diet also because it’s
easy to lose track of time it’s easy to
lose track of
of what we’re doing exercise and fitness
and eating wise
so i first came to guam in 1996
and my by 1998 i gained some weight i
weighed like 220 pounds
not too much i was like 205 210 now
weigh about 220 pounds but then between
2000 and or between 1996
and 2016
in the space of 20 years i had went up
to 310 pounds i was
pretty pretty dang heavy now i’ve got to
tell you
that at 310 pounds i could care less
whether i weigh 200 pounds or 310 pounds
i could care less i
could care less how i looked i could
care less what people thought of me
weight-wise i just didn’t care
but one thing that wayne so much did
affect me was health-wise it was really
hurting on my health and that is it got
to the point where
i knew i had to do something but i
didn’t want to admit it i was in denial
and you know here’s the thing so i i
decided to go because i was having chest
pains or whatever i went to my heart
doctor
and and by the way guam you sometimes
have to go to medical care in like the
philippines or
other places so i went to my heart
doctor in the philippines
and he gave me a tough talk he’s like
you should put your affairs in order
because your weight’s killing you
and you know prepare to die so to speak
and i don’t really have the way of
putting into that scare me to death
and uh and you put it in terms like oh
you know you’re probably not gonna be
live long enough to see your daughter
get married that kind of thing so he
really like
put a lot of heavy duty pressure on me
and so i decided then to look at
solutions and the solution
um that i i found was weight loss
surgery
and uh and that’s the path that i went
down
and that was in 2016 early 2016.
it took nearly a year to go through the
insurance hoops and the
in the preparedness hoops because on
guam they don’t offer the surgery i had
to have it done elsewhere i had it done
in
in taiwan and so i had to go through a
lot of
pre-checks that were pretty you know
not inconvenient but you know their
hassles or normal
medical bureaucratic hassles i had to go
through and so all kinds of checks and
that went to one cardiologist who they
flagged me for my heart’s all your
heart’s not good after the surgery
and the cardiologist on guam who was
busy at the time
he was talking to me that was checking
my health
he asked me why am i having this
checkout how long i have weight loss
surgery
and the first thing the doctor told me
is it doesn’t work
and this is a medical doctor weight loss
surgery doesn’t work
you know you can do better just by
dieting and you know
and so you end up hearing opinions a lot
when people talk about weight loss
surgery and you hear opinions from all
kinds of people
and i have to say uh the surgery that i
elected there’s two basic kinds of
weight loss surgery i’m not gonna go
into the
specific terms for them but one type of
weight loss surgery is just where they
narrow and staple your stomach they make
your stomach maybe
significantly less sixty percent seventy
percent less
than in size and and you can lose weight
the other type of surgery is kind of
where they
reroute your your digestive tract or
your intestines a little bit
which is a little bit more radical
surgery so the surgery that i elected
was basically the one where they
narrowed your stomach it’s very simple
very delivered procedure it doesn’t take
very long
but it took a lot of insurance to go
through to get it done the insurance
company was very very helpful by the way
that worked with me for it
but uh it was mainly that getting
through the health checks and then
working around my work schedule because
i had a long time to go offline and get
surgery but the thing i want to mention
real quickly
about about the surgery is during the
time i was waiting
for the bureaucratic approval to get the
weight loss surgery i did what’s called
a pre-operation
diet and i lost in the space of
seven months that’s how it took me to to
get through all the hoops
in that seven month time frame i lost
about 50 pounds
and so i went from like 310 down to
about 260 pounds
just getting ready for the surgery which
is what you’re supposed to do and i
didn’t know that at the time but that’s
the ideal way to do it you kick off your
weight loss surgery
by the time i showed up at my doctor in
taiwan he’s like are you really sure you
want to do surgery it looks like
the the diet is working well for you
like no no no i i need the surgery
and so i had the surgery in december of
you know people say obese and overweight
i’m not obese overweight i’m fat
and i want to be really blunt when i say
that now i may not
look back to some i mean look really bad
at others it’s all
out of perspective but in my mind
i’m still 310 pounds i’m not
200 pounds because i think like a 310
pound person
hungry all the time well and
sometimes not all right seafood and i
want it and quite often people who are
overweight or are bad have food
obsessions you see
the stomach surgery that you might have
or the surgery you might have to lose
weight
really isn’t needed what they need to
develop one day is brain
surgery for people who are overweight
and
that’s the reality they need to fix your
brain your behavior
and that’s the hard lesson i had to
learn but i know
that without the weight loss surgery as
a tool i wouldn’t have been able to lose
the weight that i just know myself
but you know that’s the key thing i
think is behave
so you know i have a few basic rules and
i wanted to share them with you three
basic rules and a little advice
for doctors medical doctors in
particular
first rule i want to share with everyone
whether you’re
overweight or not overweight my biggest
piece of advice to everyone is
throw your scale away stop weighing
yourself
every day unless you have to for some
work reason or something you have to
weigh yourself but in general i found
whether i’m overweight or not overweight
my weight might vary by
five pounds on any given day and people
become emotionally attached to the silly
numbers on the scale
and you know uh the biggest piece of
advice in that regards is throw away the
scale don’t stop looking at the scale
stop fixing your happiness to a number
on a scale that’s my my first thing and
when people
want to get the weight loss surgery or
they get the weight loss surgery they’re
obsessed with how much
how fast can i lose it’s all about
this fixation that people have on the
scale so that’s my first
piece of advice throw away the scale my
second piece of advice
is one that kind of shocks
people who are overweight is if you want
weight loss surgery to work
when you go and you eat eat until you’re
full
and then whatever is left throw it away
don’t pack it up and put it in the
refrigerator
don’t store food in the refrigerator eat
exactly
what you need and don’t look at it
anymore because remember
if you’ve had the surgery or you’re
thinking about this
weight loss issue what’s happening is
your brain
is still the weight that you started at
and i found that when i store food in
the refrigerator i don’t need i’ll think
about it all the time
and the first moment i get i’ll go and
eat it when i can
and so when i throw it away it’s forget
about it
and that shocked some people but it
worked it really works well
same thing when i’m in a restaurant when
i’m full i call the waiter over and
that’s it i’m done i don’t care how much
i’ve eaten if i’m full of people
people who are overweight often have
obsessions with food and if you look at
the weight loss websites people who want
surgery they constantly talk about food
they’re just totally obsessed
it’s really interesting
the third piece of advice i have is
learn how to throw away the opinions of
others
you know especially when people are
giving you advice about your health
or weight loss surgery or dieting or
anything else
or how you look or how you should feel
throw away those opinions
stop listening to people you know i
can’t tell you the number of times
people have told me oh my brother had
weight loss surgery
it didn’t work my cousin had weight loss
surgery it didn’t work
well you know it’s like those urban
legends i want to know who their
brothers are
you know i’ve even looked up people who
told me that
and i looked for their family online i’m
like no that person didn’t have
weight loss surgery now i mean for
whatever reason
people love to tell you negatives or oh
you took the easy way out
yo you had weight loss surgery oh that’s
the easy way out no
not for my health there’s no easy way
out you have to do what you have to do
for your health
it’s not about happiness and my regard i
was happy at 310 pounds
health-wise i was very ill and so i had
to have the surgery and it helped it
helped me a lot
you know i have some final advice if you
are considering weight loss surgery
talk to real doctors and real medical
professionals
don’t talk to idiots on the internet
this world is full
of idiots on the internet and they’re
all over the place they’re on these
weight loss websites they give each
other advice the worst advice i’ve seen
i did a count study one time at one of
the social media websites
where people were pretending to be
weight loss surgery patients
i estimated 40 to 60 percent of the
people
giving opinions on that site had never
had surgery because i
do social media investigating no way
they had surgery
they probably just looked something up
on the internet or repeating or
parenting
what they hear from other people to make
themselves feel important or something
it just it drives me crazy
that people will allow the internet
to be more important than the advice of
medical professionals
and on the point about medical
professionals the medical community
needs to make up his mind about weight
loss surgery and come up with some
fairly consistent standards because
there is a large variance
in advice various surgeons have and i
think
as as this surgery becomes more popular
these
the protocols and things like that will
become more standardized
so some doctors will say you should diet
this long before the surgery or you
should not eat this or that after the
surgery
they need to maybe come to more of a
consensus and that’s my
my my larger point mainly for the
doctors and doctors
especially the doctor told me the
surgery wouldn’t work he was wrong
you know that’s the other thing you know
doctors are not gods and coach they’re
guys and gals with opinions and a lot of
time they’re right
sometimes they’re wrong but if you want
advice on weight loss surgery talk to a
doctor or medical professional somebody
is an expert in it
thank you very much