When a really, really bad notion comes to be ‘common knowledge’ you end up with some very bizarre solutions to a very real problem. For instance, a long time ago it was thought that bad blood caused diseases, so it made sense to open up the veins of the very ill to allow that bad blood to escape. Bleeding treatments led to the weakening and untimely deaths of some very powerful and famous people.

The advent of the Scientific Method has greatly reduced the number of victims that bad science has generated, lately, but not all. Bad science still exists.

If you are morbidly obese you are right now the victim of bad science and the medical equivalent of Bleeding Treatment is the bariatric surgery, the Lap Band treatment, or gastric bypass surgery. What they are treating is how much you can eat, but the science behind thinking that you are obese because of how much you eat is flawed. You are not obese because you eat too many calories, or because you eat too much food–you are obese because of what kind of food you eat. Gastric bypass surgery will only let you eat a tiny amount of food, but because it is possible to eat lots of carbs in tiny amounts your results are not guaranteed.

Eating is not a simple mechanical process. Some people eat when they are not hungry, or should not be hungry. People who eat carbohydrates get hungry a lot. If you eat a gigantic bowl of spaghetti, you will be ‘hungry’ again in just an hour or so. You won’t really need the food, but because of the effect of the spaghetti on your blood sugar, which causes you to produce insulin to reduce the amount of glucose in your blood, you will be feeling hunger again as your blood sugar dips out of its normal range on the low side. This stuff happens even if you have a surgically altered tiny stomach. Fat comes from eating carbs, and it is possible to eat too many carbs even if you have the stomach size of an infant’s.

Being hungry all the time is no way to live. Getting your body changed so that you cannot eat a lot of food is correcting the wrong problem, it is treating a symptom of the problem. The problem is that you gain weight every time you eat ‘normally’. This is true because you should not be eating carbohydrates or any kind of sweetener. It is still unknown why some people react so much worse to carbohydrates than others, but it is no secret that the problem is sweets and starches because two out of three of us have this problem. But you wouldn’t know it to read the newspapers. They still spout the conventional reasons–calories and exercise–which leads people to think that they are fat because they don’t have enough self control to not overeat. 200,000 people per year in the US are victims of blaming themselves for not being able to lose weight and are so desperate for help that they would undergo surgery (even children), when the real culprit is the advice they are trying to take.

The number of victims of the bad advice are actually the 2/3 of all Americans that are now overweight. They are all trying to shed pounds, and the vast majority are trying to do it by ‘burning’ more calories than they eat. Fat doesn’t ‘burn’ in that way. Your body will not let you use more than you take in without you exercising great restraint. You are required to endure the continuous emotional and physical torment that comes in the form of hunger. If you exercise more than normal you will ‘work up an appetite’. As soon as you quit restricting your calories your body will put most of your foods right back into fats. This is the way it is designed. The advice “eat less, exercise more” does not work on 99% of the people who try it if you watch them for the rest of their lives. It might work for the six months it takes you to get back to a “normal” size, but once you go back to eating to eliminate hunger you will go back to putting on the pounds.

The hunger is the problem. In order to lose weight you have to eat when you are hungry. If you are eating carbohydrates you will be hungry all the time. If you are eating meats and natural fats you won’t. Here is the solution to the problem. Stop eating carbs. Getting your stomach surgically altered is curing the wrong illness, because you can still be very hungry if every time you are hungry you fill your tiny tummy with mashed potatoes. You will be hungry again very soon, but it won’t be because your stomach is tiny, it will be because your blood sugar has dipped because you ate carbohydrates. You will be hungry all the time and miserable. You will want to kill yourself to end the torment.

If you get the surgery your chances that you will kill yourself go up.

A Canadian study recently published in JAMA Surgery, led by Junaid Bhatti from the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, followed 8,815 patients in Ontario for three years prior to and three years after their bariatric surgeries. Nearly 200,000 weight-loss surgeries are performed every year in the U.S., and this new study suggests that people who have undergone the procedure are 50% more likely to commit suicide or self harm. Of the patients involved in the study, 158 had self-harm emergencies during follow-up, and 72.8% of the incidents were intentional overdoses.

Salon.com Mollie Hawkins

I cannot begin to imagine the horrific life that it must be feeling that you are beyond hope. You just got an expensive and difficult operation so that you can successfully lose all of the weight you have been fighting your entire life, but it has left you constantly hungry and tortured. Not only that, you find that you are once again gaining weight. What in the world can you do now? What hope is there for you, you obviously have no other choice but to diet for the rest of your life or to live fat and unhappy. There is one other choice if you believe the conventional wisdom on weight gain, you can just end it all.

Come on medical profession! I know that 200,000 surgeries a year is a big cash cow, but isn’t it time to start treating the human in a humane fashion? Isn’t it time to tell the overweight and obese that they are eating the wrong foods and as soon as they starting eating the right ones that they will finally live without HUNGER?

Hunger is the problem–not self control, not volume eaten. The fat man is not less than the thin man, he is the victim of your bad advice–and your bad science.