Have you ever wondered how hard it is to throw a dinner party if you yourself are on a rigid diet? Go one step further and imagine you’ve had weight loss surgery – which means you just cannot overeat or you’ll be forced to throw up in front of your guests – but you want to join in and enjoy the meal you’ve just served up? Well, last month, I discovered a pretty unique recipe book for a very specialist readership – but which is an absolute lifeline for anyone who adores food, loves entertaining, but has been through bariatric surgery limiting choices so severely that you’d wonder how they could eat anything but crudités and lentil soup. It’s called “Before And After: Living and Eating Well After Weight Loss Surgery”, and it’s written by an American woman who had a gastric bypass 7 years ago. She was a gastronome, and wanted to stay a foodie – so she’s developed a book of recipes that you can cook for others, and that you can safely eat yourself. You just have to weigh every gram of protein, fat, sugar and carbs at the recipe stage. Obsessively. Susan Maria Leach now runs a very successful business in the US selling everything from protein milk shakes and soy protein crisps (!)to baseball caps for the successful slimmer. But the pathos of her story comes over well – how she was called “Chubby” at school, tortured herself with dieting through her teenage years, ballooned to 20 stones, ultimately opted for surgery, lost ten stones, got her life back, and wrote this book. Weight loss surgery is no quick fix. As Susan says: “It takes great courage to embark on a journey of this magnitude.” “There is no jumping off the wagon for a holiday meal or special occasion. Bariatric surgery is not an easy way out – you have to accept the fact that you can never again gorge yourself on a multicourse meal. You have to deal emotionally with the fact that you can never eat all of anything ever again , no matter how good it tastes!” Most patients, she says, spend their pre-op night in clouds of self-doubt and even shame, wondering if they should just have tried one more diet. But they usually never feel that self doubt again. She says she is most inspired by her friend, Teresa, who was 25 stones and thought she was useless because that’s what she’d been told most of her life. Teresa was physically and emotionally abused by her husband and thought she deserved it, because she was so fat. Eventually, after her husband’s mistress taunted her about her weight, she plucked up the courage to have surgery. As her size diminished, her self esteem blossomed until she had the guts to leave him and create a new life for herself and her daughter. She lost 230 pounds of herself and another 280 pounds of husband. Now that’s a real recipe for success that I hope will inspire others. For those who are interested – it is on sale here in the UK, in all the usual places, and costs just over a fiver.
