Susan Maria Leach has always loved food. For years, she didn’t think of it as a problem. It wasn’t until she realized she could not comfortably ride on the back of her husband’s Harley or fit into the seats of amusement park rides that she acknowledged the need for change. When she heard about the experience singer Carnie Wilson had with gastric bypass surgery, Leach weighed 278 pounds. She decided it was time to take action and scheduled her own gastric bypass operation.
Leach details the lifestyle changes that led her from 278 to 135 pounds in her book Before & After: Living and Eating Well After Weight-Loss Surgery. This book is written in three main parts. The first part consists of selections from Leach’s private journal – her thoughts on life before surgery, excitement about the surgery, and changes in her life after surgery. The second part is a series of questions and answers about weight loss surgery. The final part of the book is about the nutrition needed after weight-loss surgery and includes recipes that Leach uses herself.
The idea behind this book is a good one – sharing real-life experiences with weight loss surgery. In telling her story, Leach does a good job of showing how it is possible to still enjoy food after surgery, while maintaining a healthy relationship with food. That is sure to be inspiring to many people. And the recipes she provides sound fantastic.
The down side to this book is that Leach doesn’t seem like “a real life person” in many respects. She talks about flying to Germany with her brother to pick up a custom BMW for one of his clients and then spending time alone in a posh London hotel before returning to her home in Florida. In another journal entry, she talks about a spontaneous trip that she and her husband took to Las Vegas. In both cases, she describes the rich foods that she was able to eat.
The menus she describes consist of filet mignon, jumbo shrimp, crab cakes, and lobster. She talks about desserts of mousse and cheesecake, and how she has now trained herself to eat only a few bites of the rich tasting foods and leaving the rest behind rather than risk getting sick. Her self-control in these situations is admirable, but in all honesty, how many people can afford to eat like that? How many people can order the most expensive items on the menu, eat less than half, and then walk away, without feeling the pinch, in the wallet area?
The glaring contrast between the disposable income Leach and her husband have and the penny pinching lives many in my community are forced to live, made the journal section of this book too much for me to handle. Still, I would recommend the book to others who are considering any type of bariatric surgery. Leach does not claim to be an expert and clearly states that the answers she gives to surgical questions are purely based on her own experience. Reading the answers to those questions from someone who has lived the surgery is refreshing. It helps others to relax and get a better perspective of what to expect from bariatric surgery.
To read more about Susan Maria Leach or to see some of her recipes, be sure to visit Bariatric Eating
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