"Half my life has been about trying to lose weight," Henry Roberts said. He was telling me about his decision to have a surgery that would reduce the size of his stomach by seventy-five per cent. Roberts (a pseudonym) is five feet six, and when we met he weighed two hundred and seventy pounds, giving him a body-mass index of forty-four; a B.M.I. between eighteen and a half and twenty-five is considered healthy. "I tried every diet, every regimen. I even had urine from a pregnant woman injected into me—that was a fad once. Have you ever tried a Weight Watchers cannoli? Weight Watchers didn't work for me, either, and I found the meetings humiliating." Roberts, who is sixty-eight and retired from his job as a public-school guidance counsellor, lives in an immaculate, art-crowded apartment in the West Village. He recently went through the breakup of a long-term relationship, but he remains close friends with his ex-boyfriend. Roberts grew up in Queens, the son of an M.T.A. worker who avoided the chemicals in canned foods "before that was fashionable," he said. Decades ago, he successfully quit smoking and drinking. Managing his weight has been more difficult. "You can't just quit eating altogether," he said. He had opted for a procedure called a sleeve gastrectomy—the stomach is surgically narrowed to resemble a sleeve—but this was not Roberts's first attempt at a surgical treatment for obesity. "I can't remember the exact year, but I know I had the lap-band procedure the weekend that Michael Jackson died," he told me. The laparoscopic gastric-band procedure worked for Roberts for about a year, but then he began to regain weight.
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/bariatric-surgery-the-solution-to-obesity?
