Articles by Georgiann Davis,https://www.buzzfeed.com/about

Health

I Had My Stomach Stapled At 14 Years Old. That Surgery Didn't 'Cure' Me — Far From It.

285 pounds. Forty-three years old. Summer 2024. “Have you thought about GLPs?” my primary care physician asked as she listened to my heart. I laughed nervously. “No, but I am now.” Humor has always been my shield. She didn’t flinch. “Your BMI is over 40. You’re at risk for all sorts of health conditions. Why don’t you look into our weight-loss program?” My labs were fine. But that didn’t matter. My body size alone was enough to warrant a prescription. I left feeling ashamed, reminded once again that medicine sees fatness as a disease in itself — regardless of actual health indicators. This wasn’t the first time. In 1995, I was 14 years old and weighed 367 pounds when an endocrinologist bluntly told my mother that I would “likely be bedridden by 20.” He described my legs as “enormous” and referred me to bariatric surgery. Soon after, I underwent a stomach stapling procedure that left an eight-inch scar down my chest. At the time, pediatric weight loss surgery was quite rare. But to my doctors, my fat body made it acceptable — even necessary. The procedure turned eating into a cycle of pain and vomiting. Food lodged in the tiny passage created by the staples left me doubled over until I threw it back up. I became, in effect, a medically induced bulimic — praised, nonetheless, for my weight-loss “success.” Within a year, I had lost nearly 100 pounds. Friends, family and even acquaintances congratulated me. No one saw the violence done to my body or the damage it did to my relationship with food. They didn’t know the surgery left me dependent on ice cream, crackers and mashed potatoes because I could easily chew that stuff down to a pureed consistency to avoid the pain that followed whenever food got stuck in my staples. After the surgery, and even still today, I can’t tolerate most fruit — too acidic — nor many vegetables — too fibrous. Stomach stapling didn’t make me “healthier;” it only made me thinner. That surgery didn’t even “cure” me. More than two decades later, in 2017, weighing nearly 390 pounds, I went under the knife again, this time for a sleeve gastrectomy. By then, I had surrendered to the diet industrial complex, a multibillion-dollar ecosystem built around the idea that fat bodies are inherently flawed. The pressure was relentless — to fix, shrink and manage a body that medicine had always treated as a problem to solve. And the scrutiny wasn’t limited to exam rooms. In restaurants, on airplanes, at conferences, strangers felt entitled to comment on my body. I’ve been mocked for eating a donut, told loudly in a food court that I was “killing myself,” and subjected to humiliating requests to be reseated on flights. I’ve even overheard cruel remarks in a language people assumed I didn’t understand. Those moments left wounds far deeper than any heat rash or bruise from too-small chairs. Society’s obsession with fatness extends well beyond personal interactions. Fat people are consistently portrayed in the media as lazy, undisciplined or morally flawed. Research has documented how these stereotypes influence health care practices and workplace discrimination. This cultural narrative seeps into medicine, where clinicians — even those with good intentions — can unconsciously perpetuate stigma. Today, at 44, I’m on Wegovy. Reluctantly. When I started, I told my doctor my goal weight was 250 pounds — a number that, at 5’10”, felt right to me. Now I weigh 235, down 50 pounds in eight months. My doctor tells me to stay on it. And I’m not sure why I’m listening. Initially approved to treat Type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 medications like Wegovy are now viewed as a breakthrough for weight loss, but for me, they feel like another chapter in the same story: doctors offering interventions driven less by my actual health and more by the fear and stigma that surround fatness. Why do I take it? Because sometimes it feels easier to live with the physical and emotional side effects of medicalization than with the relentless judgment of others — and, most troubling of all for me, with my own internalized fatphobia. Here’s the truth: Fat patients aren’t blank slates waiting for salvation. We know the statistics, the risks, the medical language. What we also know — often more than our doctors — is the crushing weight of fatphobia disguised as medical concern.