I felt that my whole inner life was irrevocably changed.
Find out how on the next Roseanne Show.
You.
Wow.
Today, hi.
Hello, thank you.
Thank you.
We have treats.
Today, we're doing a healthy show today,
and so we have Jamba Juice as our caterer today.
It's good. Here, take this and pass it out, the whole thing.
Yeah. Take it.
Give them, make sure we get some.
There's other people, too.
We have healthy stuff next, we're doing a healthy show.
Because, you know, I've had a lot of people,
I can't tell you how many people have written me,
and they say stuff about, oh, you lost weight,
and how'd you do it, and all that stuff.
So today, I'm going to tell you how I did it.
But first, before I do, yesterday on my show,
I had on my friend Richard Simmons,
and here's what he had to say.
When you watch your portions, like I do, you keep the weight off.
If you stop the exercise, the weight will come right back on.
And that's the secret.
Isn't he irritating?
But even though I really respect Richard,
diet and exercise really do not work for everybody.
They don't work for me.
How many people here are familiar with what I'm talking about?
Maybe you go on a diet and you lose something, but it comes back.
You know, it's not a permanent, right?
Other people know it. Yeah.
Now, here's what happened to me.
After 45 years of diet therapy, drugs, diet pills, liposuction,
feelings of failure, depression, obsession, shame,
and the compulsion that I couldn't control,
I found myself at 230 pounds, which was my top weight.
I was 100 pounds overweight.
And we're not talking about 20 pounds.
We're not talking about I have 25 pounds to lose.
I was 100 pounds overweight.
And I was scared of being 45 years old,
looking at really big health issues, frankly,
with a three-year-old baby to raise.
And I simply could not face one more diet where I would starve,
lose 30 to 40 pounds, and then feel weak and binge out for days and days
until I gain everything back I lost and more.
Right?
So I investigated a lot of options.
I had all these people searching all over the world,
the Internet and all that stuff, you know,
because I can't even turn that thing on.
But, you know, they were, I was like serious this time
because I really didn't think I could,
another true thing is I really didn't not think I could stop myself either.
I knew I was headed for that, I was headed for 300, you know.
And I couldn't stop.
I'm telling you, for real.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Where you can't stop.
That was your, wow.
I heard about my first guess after all this research.
And, you know, I want you to know that I decided to take drastic medical action.
And we will talk about if it's drastic or not anymore.
I think there was a time where it was, but it may not be anymore.
Afterward, though, after I had this procedure,
it was like immediately I felt that my whole inner life was irrevocably changed.
The obsession with food and weight had been lifted from me
for the first time in my life.
And now, here we are nine months later, and, you know, I got some pounds gone.
But I don't even want to say how much because it's just becoming clearer
and clearer to me every day that my problems, they never were about food.
They never were about willpower.
They never were even about weight or exercise or dieting.
Contrary to what a billion dollar diet industry tells us every day in their messages,
it was about my feelings and how I handled them.
And on my show today, we're going to meet some people who've lost over 100 pounds a piece
in different ways because, you know, I don't think there's just one way to do anything
and there's not just one way to talk about stuff either.
The first person that I want to introduce you today to is the surgeon that changed my life, Dr. Mal Phoby.
Dr. Phoby.
Hello.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
You look lovely.
Thank you.
You sit down, Dr. Phoby.
I'm so glad you're here.
You know, I get so many people have had gastric bypass surgery is what it is, right?
Yes.
Will you tell us about it?
Because you've been working on it for how long?
Well, I've been doing gastric bypass surgery since 1977.
So I've been at this for 21 years.
We've done more than 5,000 patients, mostly in the Los Angeles area.
We'll have patients from all over the world, from Chile, Israel, Germany,
some even from Japan who've come over to have surgery.
And like you said at the beginning, when we were doing this, it was considered a drastic method.
But now it's very common.
This surgery is done at UCLA, done at USC, UC Irvine, and at Cedars where I work
and at Bellwood-Jerrah Hospital where I work.
So it's not even considered drastic anymore?
The way I like to consider it is it's the only effective treatment for severe overweight
at this time without missing words.
I like the idea that there are other methods.
But at this time, if you're looking at any method that will give you long-term effectiveness,
you have to go with surgery.
I think so too.
Well, for me that was true, and I know a lot of people.
Yes, we did talk about that.
Yes, we did.
Do you think that there's something about, what can you tell us about like just that whole being
on the treadmill thing that they keep feeding us about, you know,
I mean people who have 100 pounds or more to lose,
getting on that diet treadmill and more and more failure?
What's that about?
Well, the thing is based on the fact that when we went through medical school,
and I went to a very good medical school, I went to University of Michigan
and University of Cincinnati, and I got a good training.
But during that time of my training, I was never taught anything about obesity.
You see, my friends in the audience here will think that people whom we call fat have lack of willpower.
It has nothing to do with lack of willpower.
It's a genetic inherited condition.
It is a medical problem.
You see, what has hurt obesity is that the doctors for a long time did not get involved,
and so everybody, including my friend Richard Simmons,
who sent me a few patients, has become an expert in treating obesity.
But obesity is a medical problem that should be treated by doctors, specialists,
and the specialists want to treat this.
Dr. Fobby, why do they just keep putting, keeping more and more shame and scorn
on people who have this condition?
Mainly to make money?
It's a money-making scheme.
You see it on television.
If you look at the newspapers, if you pick up the LA Times today,
you're going to see more advertisement about different methods of weight loss than anything else.
And every night on television when I watch the late-night show after that,
there's somebody coming out with a new diet, a new pill.
You see, if you understand that the fat person does not need more than six or seven hundred calories to live on,
then you can see why the diets fail, because most diets bring you to a thousand or fifteen hundred calories.
And that is why people get depressed, because you go on a fifteen hundred calories and you gain weight.
And you wonder what surgery does.
And I'm not just talking about the Fobby pouch, which I do, but many surgeries which are very effective.
Surgery allows you to take only about five hundred calories, not only today.
You know, you came to me nine months ago, but you've noticed nine months later you can't eat any more than you ate then.
And that is the essence of surgery.
It's permanent and it maintains that weight loss for a long time.
And the methods we have now, you don't have protein malnutrition or any malnourishment.
And that is why we are telling people first, this is a medical problem.
Two, talk to your doctors. You don't need to come to a surgeon like me directly.
Talk to your doctors to get referrals.
There are other doctors who do this surgery in town and they will be glad to see you.
And there are different procedures. I mean, there are different surgeries.
I like mine because it works best for my patients.
But there are other surgical procedures and I think you should look into it.
Will you take us through your procedure, Dr. Fobby?
Okay. I hear there's going to be a...
I'm going to talk over a video here.
My procedure is called the Fobby pouch. It is a modification of the gastric bypass.
We cut the stomach leaving a twenty cc pouch, which is a tablespoon and a half.
And then we cut the small bowel and hook it up to that small pouch of the stomach up there.
First of all, we continue the small bowel by itself.
We put a band there to create the area of the pouch.
That pouch will hold a tablespoon full and a half.
So when a patient eats a tablespoon full and a half of food
and you meet some of the patients here today, they feel full.
So if you see Roseanne sitting here now, normally that is what she used to have for her cocktail,
but now that watch is going to drink that up.
Do you think that it's because you're not from this country
that you were able to look at this whole thing being a medical issue
instead of a personality and willpower and weak, lazy person issue?
No. To tell you the truth, it was an accident.
I was taking care of a young lady who had had the first type of surgery
that was done called the intestinal bypass.
And she had a lot of complications from it.
And she had gone back to get the surgery revised at UCLA, USC, and every place,
and I told her they had to take it down because she was having complications.
Well, she ended up at the hospital where I was at that time, at King Drew Medical Center.
When I talked to this lady for the first time, I said,
I made the same recommendations the other doctors had made.
So she told me, Dr. Fobi, if you take my surgery down, I'm going to be back to 349 pounds.
And she showed me two of her friends who had had the surgery taken and had gotten back.
And this young lady, in so many words, told me that you don't understand what it is.
For the first 29 years of my life, I didn't have a life.
Now, at the age of 39, I'm 140 pounds. I have diarrhea all the time.
I have wrinkled skin, but nobody knows. Everybody treats me normal.
I am working as a substitute teacher, and this young lady proceeded to tell me
all the problems that a fat person has and all the depression in the circles.
And she would rather die than take that surgery down and gain weight.
And so as the chief resident at that time, I was forced to do a project
to find out how to help this lady without taking down her intestinal bypass.
And so I called a professor in Iowa, Dr. Mason, who had described the gastric bypass.
And he told me how to do it, and with my professor who was teaching me at that time,
we converted this lady from the intestinal bypass to the gastric bypass.
By 1978, this lady had referred 78 people to me who had had intestinal bypass
and whom we converted.
And by talking to these people, we realized that this is the worst prejudice situation
in the United States that still exists, being overweight.
And when I got to realize that, and I realized that there was a solution which was viable,
and Dr. Mason had been doing that work. I started in 77, but he had been doing it since 1966.
And when I reviewed his work and saw it was successful,
I figured there was something that I could do for humanity.
That's why we have quite a few patients, and we embellish them,
and they're my friends rather than my patients.
Thank you, Dr. Fobi. We'll talk more when we come back.
There's two other patients who say Dr. Fobi changed their lives, too.
Stay tuned.
...
My next two guests have had the Fobi pouch operation like I did with amazing results.
The first is Howard Lapidus, who lost about 150 pounds,
and is the guy I talked to on the phone the night before I went in to have the operation.
And the other person is Patricia Lewis, who's lost about 170 pounds
and says that the procedure saved her life.
Please welcome Howard and Pat.
...
I want to hear, first from you, Howard, where your mind was at when you knew you were going to go do this.
Well, I'd been up and down.
I'd been on every diet we all know about, every single diet.
And I heard you at the beginning of the show say, I just can't do this again.
I can't go through it again.
And I was worried about health.
We were relatively the same age when I made the decision the same time you did.
My daughter was one year old.
Everything in my life is going very, very well,
and I was worried that the next day I was going to drop dead because I was too big.
But I didn't know what to do.
And a friend called and said, these words are going to save your life.
And I said, what are you talking about?
She said, this is what I've done.
And here's Dr. Fobie's number that I wrote in my book.
And I sat and I stared at it for about four or five months.
And then I called him up and went and saw him, and he took it from there.
Where was your head at when you decided you needed to do this?
I was 324 pounds.
I had been on every yo-yo diet you could imagine.
I was getting sicker.
I had high blood pressure.
I went in to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor because I kept getting these sinusitis things, right?
And she took one look at me and she says, your color's changing.
Your eyes, something's wrong.
And I had been complaining for over a year about an obscure pain I had in the side.
And that's another thing, doctors, when you are a fat person,
they see you as a fat person.
And that's the only thing they continually treat, isn't it?
You complain about a pain here, a pain there.
It's because you're fat.
And so therefore, they were pushing pain pills.
They were giving me pills for pain.
And I didn't know how sick I was.
I'm surprised they wouldn't give me diet pills.
No, that's the other side of that coin.
But pushing the pain pills, then come back at me,
and then I was just furious when I found out that I had serious gallbladder disease.
And again, I had known Dr. Fobie for almost 25 years, at least about 20 years.
We had been at Martin Luther King Hospital together.
You should also know that when he told me what he was doing,
I said, this man's out of his mind.
Why is he doing obesity surgery?
What is that?
You know?
And this was about 20 years ago.
And do you remember?
He said to me, he said, you'll be back.
Because he knew I was hovering between 250 and 300 most of my adult life.
I've been a fat child, a fat adolescent, and a fat adult.
And again, approaching my 48th birthday at the time, and I said, no, this is it.
It's over.
Do you get mad like me when you think about, like,
how cruel it is to tell people that their medical condition is a fault of their personality?
I used to get angry, Rosanne, but I got past that.
I think because I had really supportive parents,
I have a twin brother, and the two of us kind of yo-yoed together as far as the size we are.
And I had a really good sense of, hey, I'm all right.
I'm a good person.
You know, people think that fat people are chronically depressed.
Yeah, and chronically ill.
And chronically ill.
Or really happy all the time.
Yeah, either you're, and of course, you know, my brother called me fat pat all my life, you know.
So it's like that's a kind of thing that carries over in your life, and you have to just decide,
no, I'm not going to let this be me.
I'm going to go on and be me.
Now, I overcompensated like hell.
I'm a speech professor and go through a master's degree program, PhD program, doing all these things,
just overcompensated everywhere, everywhere.
I'm a speech pathologist.
I've always had two jobs.
I think you think, don't you like me, that if you run fast enough, they're not going to see how fat you are.
They're not going to say the mean things they say, but they still do.
They still say the mean things.
Most people say if you run fast enough, you lose weight, which is just so wrong.
And so many people, there's just such a lack of education about what Dr. Foley was talking about at the top of the show.
It's also like the function of the disease or whatever we're going to call it is a lot of isolation.
And isolated people are pretty easy to exploit.
But also fat is protective.
It insulates you from having to deal with a lot of crap.
When people come in your life and they're not really in your corner and they're not about what you're about,
then you can just dismiss them because guess what?
They're not your friend anyway.
So you just dismiss them and you go on about your life.
Well, every time we have to take a commercial by the way, every time we see these people on television who like weight,
and you know, big weight, they're always alone in a room.
Oh, yeah.
We have to take a break.
And when we come back, we're going to hear more from Howard and Pat and Dr. Foley.
Here we are back.
And while we're in commercial, we hit on something that we really, really got excited about.
And I really want to talk about it on the air.
How weird is it to feel full?
After the second bite.
After the second bite, but to feel it at all.
I never felt it.
Yeah.
And you know, Rosanne, I thought that was an emptiness.
You know, I thought maybe it was somewhat psychological and maybe emotional that that sensation of fullness wasn't always there.
My mother's from Louisiana and she cooks the Creole cookery of the gumbos and all of that.
And it's just wonderful food, right?
And granted, you can sit there and eat and eat and eat.
Totally.
And that's the design of the surgery.
You see, the beauty about the gastric bypass operation is that when you get a cracker like this and eat two pieces of cracker, you feel full.
It's so amazing.
It's just amazing.
I just want to have dinner.
Yes.
And the most, but again, let's let the audience know this will satisfy people who have this genetic makeup.
Because for someone like Howard or Pat here, these are people who can survive on 10 to 15 crackers a day with just a little pate of liver.
And we're looking at Howard had surgery four years ago.
Two and a half.
Two and a half years ago.
And he has not dissipated away.
Everybody thinks that small quantity of food would dissipate.
It's anybody.
But he still has a few pounds extra.
And that means that this is.
I found that the operation, what it did, another thing it did for me that messed me up, I mean shook me up psychologically, is all of a sudden food was just about being food.
Yes.
And it was not.
Nothing to do.
It was all the other stuff that they told me I was eating for.
It wasn't true anymore.
Now, right now you eat to live.
Right.
But I have to remind the patients who have had this surgery to have three to four meals a day.
One of the difficult problems I have is that people go for hours and forget about eating and become dizzy.
Right.
But let me take a minute.
This sounds so fantastic.
But let me point out that this is major surgery.
Right.
And also you need to tell us who should not have this surgery, Dr. Bobby.
Yeah, okay.
Let me first tell you the bad part about it.
And then I'll tell you who should not have it.
This is major surgery.
Just like any major surgery, there are risks involved.
You can die as a consequence from complications.
Thank God in our hands it's like one in 200.
But for that one person it's 100 percent.
Okay.
So we want to make that clear.
And we want to stress that.
But the thing is we are looking at a situation where we're helping 199 people.
But who should have this?
You should be at least 100 pounds overweight.
And then have medical problems like diabetes, arthritis, sleep apnea, hypertension, or some reason to have it.
It is not for those who need to lose 15, 20 pounds.
It is not for those who need to lose 30, 40 pounds.
For those exercise watching your diet, controlling the choosing your food would be helpful.
I think you have to really think about your family history.
My father died at the age of 53 with obesity related heart disease.
I never knew my grandparents on my father's side of the family because they all died with obesity related heart disease.
On both sides.
I'm blessed my mother is still with us.
And she just visited her 90 and 94 year old sisters in Louisiana.
And so I'm hoping my genetic code will switch over.
And I'll be able to live a long healthy life as a result of this surgery.
I mean it may or may not.
My mother happened and my father was thin and had no weight problem.
But if you start to go back that's what you find.
Okay when we come back we're going to talk to a woman who feels that the phobia pouch is not right for her.
And she's lost over 100 pounds on a diet and exercise program right after this.
Music.
My next guest is an award winning columnist who took a leave of absence for one year from her job on the Denver Post.
She used to live in Denver.
And she tries to lose 200 pounds with diet and exercise.
So far she's lost 130 pounds.
Please welcome Carrie Smith.
Thank you.
Do you want to first talk about what decision you made to change your life?
Sure.
I got to the point of weighing about 460 pounds which was a real shock.
It's hard to imagine what that looks like.
I was just really fat and I'm 5'7 so I just looked really big.
And what happened is I got older.
I was 37.
As I got older it got harder to carry around so much weight.
And my weight, I started out as a fat kid who got heavier in adolescence and as an adult just kept gaining weight.
I actually dieted about 75 times.
I estimate I've been on 75 diets.
I've tried just about everything.
Yep.
We all know this story.
We've all been through the exact same thing.
I'm sure many people in the audience know exactly what I'm talking about.
You try and you try and you try.
And I think that for me, I specialize in a lot of investigative work.
And at one point I thought there's got to be a reason for this.
There's got to be some reason that I eat basically what my friends do and I'm enormously fat.
There had to be something causing this.
I knew I wasn't crazy.
I knew I wasn't lazy.
I knew I wasn't this enormous overeater all day long eating.
So I figured there had to be an answer.
So I went to my editors and I said, I'm going to take a year off and I'm going to investigate me.
I'm going to find out what causes obesity, why I got so fat, how this happened to me and how to fix it.
What did you find out?
I found out obesity is a medical condition.
I found out that with me showing up as a fat child at about the age of seven that I was a typical genetic obesity case,
I have an extreme tendency to store fat and add fat.
My body is always in a fat acquiring mode.
And as one obesity researcher said to me, you have been cursed genetically in terms of this.
In other ways, intelligence, other ways, you know, blessed.
But this is a real problem for you and it will always be a problem and this will never go away.
Now you've decided you're not in any way going to have the surgery.
I decided to try this other way first just because what I became convinced of for me is that I had watched myself on diets before.
And I noticed that I am a really sedentary person.
You know, left alone, I won't do any, sex is it, you know.
I mean, no other exercise.
I don't like to sweat, you know.
And so I thought what if, if this is, what they're saying is true, then my body exists on so few calories compared to other people.
You can only take your food down so much, so long, you know.
Your body then slows its metabolism and to match that intake.
So I thought what if I could boost it up with exercise.
So witness this, I mean, if you can imagine, I think we have some pictures here of me at 440 pounds lifting weights.
When I first got on the exercise bike, I could barely fit on the bike.
I started out exercising in little five minute increments because that's all I could do.
And, you know, when I hear those words lifestyle change, I just want to throw up on the person's shoes, you know.
It's like, don't even say that B.S. to me.
It's ridiculous.
But, you know, what happens is I wanted to see, I wanted to experiment with myself like a guinea pig.
How much could I do?
What would happen if I did this and that?
I tried the protein fasting that drove me straight into insanity.
That's the worst, worst, worst thing anyone could ever do.
That was very hard for me.
I couldn't do it.
I went to my dietician at the UCLA Obesity Center and I said, help me.
I'm losing my mind.
I'm obsessed with food now for sure because I don't eat.
So that's all I think about.
And she looked at me and she's like, well, Carrie, what do you like to eat?
And we devised an eating, you know, diet for me that's based on what I like to eat.
It's still difficult.
But what I found is I'm one of those people that I have a really stressful career, very high stress career, and I race around a lot.
We have to go to Brad Kenwall and we'll wrap that up and go to the audience.
They've got a lot of questions to ask us.
Sure.
Hey, if you're in the L.A. area and want to see my show, call 1-800-485-6885.
We're going to go to the audience and take some of your questions in a minute.
But we just wanted to wrap up and we were talking during the break where you said you're not really sure what you're going to do, if you're going to do this or continue on.
Right.
People ask me what's going to happen and the answer is I don't know.
Obesity is in an enormously difficult condition to overcome.
It is a medical condition.
It is something that doctors, if they're honest, will tell you we don't really know what happens with obesity.
If there was any easy answer, there would be no fat people because, believe me, living as a fat person is miserable.
So, you know, it's one of those things where I'm hoping that this is going to work for me.
If it doesn't, I'm going to keep trying because I'm really comfortable.
Well, we also want to say that not all fat people feel compelled to change or to lose weight or anything.
And they're not necessarily unhappy just because they're fat.
I really want to say that because a lot of people, they don't have that obsession like we have.
Over here first.
Hi.
As a mother of a three-year-old, didn't the relatively high mortality rates scare you?
No, not as much as going up to 300, 400.
I don't know where I was going to stop, 700.
I mean, I knew I was at the edge of a cliff and I needed to do something.
In my situation, the mortality rate of somebody that was the weight that I was at was much higher than getting the operation.
Much higher.
I said earlier, I didn't know if I was going to wake up the next morning and I had that fear.
I did a lot of praying, I'll tell you that much.
That's for sure.
Next.
Hi. I'd like to know, is it really worth risking your life to fit into life stereotypes?
It's not about stereotypes.
No, you're looking at it from the public perception.
That is what I'm hoping and thanks to Roseanne for exposing this issue.
This is not a stereotype.
This is not about being beautiful.
As I tell most of my patients, people who have a weight are some of the most beautiful people I've ever met.
And sometimes when they lose weight, they become the most nastiest people you ever met.
All right?
So, this has nothing to do about the stereotype about looking beautiful or nice.
It doesn't.
It has to do with your health.
You heard them talking here, they're joking, but they're not.
Crossing your legs in the audience, you take it for granted.
Bending down and tying your shoes, you take it for granted.
When you're 300 pounds, you cannot do those things.
Cleaning yourself, you take it for granted.
When you get to 300 pounds, there are certain things you can't do.
I can give you a whole litany of the problems of the fat person.
That is what convinced me to get into this field.
I think that her question, though, it's just so typical of, like, shaming people who are overweight.
Now you can shame us because we decided to take action and change it, too.
But, you know, there's just, like, the whole systematic hatred of fat people
and the discrimination that fat people, and I include myself in there because, you know,
always will be whatever, is just horrifying.
And you could not do that to any other minority group in the whole world and get away with it
and just be smug about it.
So let's try to go beyond, talk about stereotypes.
Let's try to go beyond that stereotype.
Yes, sir.
Hi.
Why do you think such a high-risk surgery is such a good idea
when you have people like Richard Simmons who have shown, helped so many people lose so much weight
with exercise and eating a healthy diet?
Well, I'm sure Richard Simmons and people like him have helped every one of us lose 100 pounds 75 times.
You know, it doesn't stay and it doesn't work and it's a myth.
It doesn't really help.
I'll give you the statistics.
All hours at the NIH consensus meeting in 1991, 1993, when they put all the diets from Weight Watchers,
Jenny Crick, everybody was there.
The failure rate of all programs except surgery was 98%.
That means only 2% of people who try any diet, any pill, succeed.
And I'll tell you those 2%, the 2% that keep it off, oh boy, am I going to get in trouble for saying this,
the 2% that can do it, that's because they're making a load of money keeping that weight off.
That's it.
Thanks.
Yeah.
Sir.
My name is David.
I had the phobia pouch procedure in 1996.
I weighed 591 pounds.
And these were my pants.
That is a typical example.
That is in two years.
And he does not have to think about food.
As a matter of fact, when I see David now, I tell him, you've got to eat three, four, five times a day.
Food is not part of his vocabulary anymore.
How has it changed you?
We'll talk about lifestyle.
Forget lifestyle, it's changing your life.
How has it changed you?
Like he says, now you're so busy doing other things you don't have time to think about worrying about,
you know, I'm bored or I have something to do or you think everyone's been telling you it's your problem.
You need to push yourself away.
You watch what you eat.
If you just stopped eating this or didn't eat that, you'd lose the weight.
And it's not the way it was.
Now I don't think about food.
I just eat when I'm hungry or when I'm supposed to eat.
And it's, you know, my life, my medical problems have started accumulating for myself.
Is the world, how is the world different?
Basically now it's like relating with everybody.
You know, when thanks to you, they don't look at you differently now.
I mean, you can walk into a room you're not noticed because of your size.
You can walk in, you can mingle, mix.
You know, no one would never know that I was 600 pounds less, you know, two years ago.
Thank you.
We have to take a break.
And when we come back, we'll hear more from the audience.
Be back in a minute.
Let's talk about what a big freaking drug addict you were.
Hi, we're back.
We got more people in the audience with stuff to say.
Should I go to you, mister?
Hi.
Hello, how are you?
My name is Stefan.
Dr. Fobe, you performed a surgery on my mother in the late 70s, a bypass surgery.
And it was successful as far as the weight loss.
But my question is then and as well now is, well, what type of adjustments are made to the diet to compensate for, like, you know, vitamins, minerals, proteins, and fats that are essential to your health?
Because, I mean, you're saying they get full after one or two crackers.
I mean, how is that possible that they're going to receive all the nutrients that are necessary for something that small?
Good question.
Yes, we do do a lot of counseling in terms of nutrient intake.
But all patients who have had this surgery, including Roseanne here, have to take certain specific vitamins every day for the rest of their lives.
These are the fat soluble vitamins, A, D, E, and then they have to take B12.
They have to take iron and calcium.
And then when you have this surgery, we monitor you once a year, do your blood work, and make adjustments.
Nutrition is very important.
But the American food is so good and well balanced that we very rarely see malnutrition in our patients.
I like, I'll order all the food I really like now, and I'll get like this great big old dinner, you know, and then I take like probably four bites of it.
And like everyone around the office eats what I don't eat.
And I order four different kinds.
The thing that's so amazing is that everybody here is gaining weight except me.
That's right.
So I'm still ordering in restaurants the whole way.
The beauty of surgery is you have a variety.
You can eat whatever you want to, but only in small quantities.
But you know what, I'm starting to like want, actually want, and I never thought, this is a miracle.
I actually want salad and lean chicken.
I actually want the stuff.
The good stuff.
The nutritious material.
That is what we're finding out.
Well, it's easier to eat, too.
It's easier to eat the nutritious stuff than to eat the...
See, if you have to eat fat, it has a lot of fiber in it, and you have to trade, which is what is delicious for you and me.
I have a little pot belly, so I like a steak every so often.
But when you have this surgery...
Mine is a pot belly.
But when you have this surgery, you have to chew your food very well.
Oh, yeah, that's number one.
And you find you cannot chew those things that the rest of us like.
Yeah, right after the surgery, I was chewing water.
But it all goes down, and you do learn how to chew food.
But it's so weird, because this miracle happens in you that you only want the stuff that you used to have to eat to lose weight.
But that's what you want.
But that's what you don't have.
Oh, it does good.
It does pass, and there does come a time, because it's been a little over two years.
Now, all of a sudden, I'm having cravings for cheesecake and a little bit of...
But that's just it.
But I can have two bites of cheesecake and be satisfied.
But it's really kind of fun, because it's not the same kind of eating.
I can have that little bit of cheesecake, and I can have that little bit of chocolate.
But doesn't it work like the food is like you want the stuff that makes you physically feel impelled to move?
I do want the vegetables.
I want the vegetables more than I want the meat.
And then when I eat the sweets, it's like, oh, that's a little bit of a sugar rush that feels good.
I don't know. This might be menopausal.
I like that sugar rush.
So who knows?
Let me just touch on something you said, which I hope the public and the rest of the audience can take.
The overweight person suffers from a lot of psychological stress that I hope society will be more responsible
and understand this is a medical problem and not make jokes about being overweight.
I get sick and tired every night.
I turn on the TV.
There's a comedian there making a joke about somebody fat,
because this problem is so difficult, as the young lady has portrayed here,
that the people who have this problem have tried.
She's been on 75 diets.
We've all tried.
And they've all been on.
So when you've been on that many diets and failed, you start having a poor self-impression of yourself.
And all you need is for some other skinny person there to stand there and make you feel lower in your own self-esteem.
So if Rosanna has done anything today, I want you to understand.
I don't want to stress the surgery.
We first of all have to accept this as a medical problem.
How much does the surgery cost, Dr. Colby?
In Los Angeles, the average cost for one-year treatment with the surgery is about $40,000.
But that is what it is.
But Medicaid pays me a total of, between the hospital and I, about $3,000, and we have to take it.
That's the way things happen.
So I just did a Medicaid patient.
If you watch TV, the 700-pound man, I'm going to get $900 for my surgical fees.
But what it costs, it costs more than we can afford.
But this is a medical problem.
We doctors treat the rich and the poor.
When Rosanna came to me, she paid every penny.
I sure did. I sure did.
And it was worth it, too. It was worth it.
I want to thank all of you, Howard, Pat, and Kerry, for being with us.
Thank you, Dr. Colby, for being here with me.
Thank you very much.
And thank you at home for watching.
We'll be right back. I'm going to let you ask me questions.
Thank you.
$600.
Okay, do you guys have any questions for me?
Where am I going to go first?
Over here, mister. Hi.
Did you ever think about maybe finding a doctor to do something with the genes
instead of having this really hard surgery to do?
Maybe they could like slice a gene or something so that they would cut off that obese
Yeah, maybe in the future they'll be able to do that, but they can clone a sheet. They weren't doing in Salt Lake City in the 1950s
I don't know sit down. Yeah
Hi Roseanne hi, I was wondering the the whole surgery sounds so complicated and everything like that
Like it leave like a scar. Yeah, I got a scar really. Oh sure all surgery you get a scar
I mean, is it really bad or no, it's just a line, you know? Just a line like this
No, not this way. It's straight down here. I'll show you after the cameras go off
No, baggie. I'll take this one
Roseanne you've never been one to shy away from the media and I've read ladies home journal and some articles that say
That some people in the limelight actresses and actors have had these things done
I'm not saying about dr. Phobia or so forth, but nobody wants to admit it
They come out with an exercise video or something. So what that I admire you
How'd you get brave enough to you wanted to reveal this?
Well because I actually because I know that there are so many people out there who are like me and who suffer and you know
I'm like dr. Phobia. I don't like people thinking it's cool to make fun of fat people. I
you know have children who were formerly fat people and
And for fat children who suffer like I did when I was a child. It's just not right
we've got to get over this and
I believe that
Treating it like a medical condition will change everything and I hope anybody who wants and needs help can find it
Let's stop all the pretense where everybody's getting rich all these charlatans using people and stuff feeding off the misery of fat people
the isolation of fat people
It's not right. So that's why I did it. I'm I are you for reviewing it. Thank you all very much
I want to thank all my guests today and the audience and all you at home and we'll see you next time
You