Thin After Surgery And Still Sad

Last year, more than 140,000 morbidly obese people turned to bariatric surgery to help lose weight and improve their health. But what is it like for a formerly obese person to navigate life in a new, thinner body?

The Early Show correspondent Melinda Murphy spoke to two women profiled in New York magazine with surprising stories to tell.

At 43, Gloria Cahill weighed 275 pounds. Daily life had become difficult, so in August of 2002, Cahill underwent gastric bypass surgery. Eventually, she lost 140 pounds.

"It's not the end of the problem," Cahill says, "It's the beginning of the solution."

Though her physical recovery was tough, she says the "invisible complications" were even tougher.

She explains, "The invisible complications really came down to dealing with the fact that people treat me very differently as a thin woman. I get a lot of compliments that I don't know what to do with."

Because all her life, Cahill endured nasty remarks about her weight, the memories still sting.

She says, "You know, they say inside every fat person there's a thin person waiting to get out. Well, inside this thin person, there's a fat person who remembers. Excuse me."

With tears in her eyes, she says it is still painful.

It hurts, she says, when people come up to her and say she is a completely new person.

"What makes that complicated is that when they say it, they're saying it from a very heartfelt place," she says, "But to say that I'm a different person discounts who I've been for 46 years. Fat or thin, I'm the same woman."
Lisa Sohr understands because she struggled with obesity, too, but not all her life. In fact, at 23, she was a New York City cop, weighing a healthy 130 pounds, but wanting more heft to do her job.

"I had intended to put on about 20 pounds," she says.

But 10 years, and more than 100 pounds later, Sohr had bariatric surgery.

She says, "My father was 51, and died of morbid obesity and organic heart disease. So I looked at it, like, this is my future. If I don't lose the weight, I'm going to be crippled, and I'm going to die early."

Sohr lost 130 pounds. She also lost her marriage.

"I think that it was important to him to be needed," she says about her husband. "He did a lot for me when I was ill and couldn't really work. One would think, you know, looking better, being healthier, having a peppy, happy attitude was going to help. Instead, it kind of pushed him away."

Warren Huberman says, "It's especially difficult when their relationships change." He is a psychologist who works with bariatric surgery patients.

"People will lose the bulk of their weight within the first several months or one year," Huberman explains, "Yet to make the changes of getting accustomed to this new body, and how you relate to friends, family and the world, and how they relate to you often takes much longer than the year."

Huberman says patients need to understand the weight loss can't solve all their problems. It's only a first step to becoming healthy inside and out.

Sohr says, "I don't think I'll ever have the confidence of someone who has been thin all their life."

But being thinner did give Sohr the confidence to meet Bari Sohr, her second husband. He sold her her first bikini.

But she says she doesn't think he would have talked to her on a personal level if she didn't look thin.

"I don't, I think he would have definitely talked to me," she says, "Whether the conversation would have involved dancing and dating, I doubt it."

Asked about the difference in dating between when Cahill was heavy and now, she says laughing, "I do. That's the big one."

And she enjoys shopping at places she used to avoid, like Ann Taylor Loft.

Cahill says, "It used to be just a chore, and kind of painful, but now I really enjoy it."

There's much to enjoy living as a thin person. But for Cahill, the joy is mixed with her memories.

"I relish it. I glory in it," she says. "All that stuff is great. But there's that witness on my shoulder who remembers and has to."

Both women say one of the biggest changes in their lives is their relationship with food. Cahill described it as ending a love affair with a lover that was very bad for her.