Video: The New Me Coping Strategies

August 27, 2013

Here's an ObesityHelp (OH) Conference blast from the past!

At the OH 2004 Los Angeles WLS conference, Dr. Leslie Seppinni spoke about coping strategies for weight loss surgery patients. In the video included below, you can view several outtakes from her talk and learn more about coping after WLS!

Partial Video Transcript (Video below the text!)

Outtake #1:

What's going to be my new strategy for dealing with stress?

Food can't be a part of that strategy if your weight loss surgery is going to be successful. Because as you probably heard, you can out eat your pouch. You cannot lose the weight to the extent you want to lose it.  You'll lose some weight but not all of it. You can also cause yourself medical problems if you continue to graze and out eat your pouch. You can cause yourself physical health problems and gastrointestinal problems if you are overeating and dumping all the time.

Outtake #2

We are not talking so much worrying about how much you eat, but what you choose to eat. So your new coping strategy is to set aside the good snacks, prepackage them so that when you want to grab for something, you grab for the good snack instead of the bad snack. And we don't buy the bad snacks for the house.

You never eat in front of the TV.  When you eat in front of the TV you forget what you are eating, there are commercials inundating you and you are not paying attention to how much you eat.

You don't want to eat when you are overtired because when you are tired, you want to go for the quickest, fastest thing...the most sugary, salty thing. You just want have that feeling of being satiated.  And you want to move on to going to bed or doing whatever else... getting home. You don't want to eat when you are bored and tired. It's the worst time to eat and you are going to overeat and you can wind up dumping. And you don't want to do that!

Outtake #3

It's very easy in our old self to assume that every time something goes wrong, it's always about me. It must be me. That person wouldn't have done that if it wasn't something about me. If they didn't like me, if I wasn't smart enough, pretty enough, if I was thinner. So it's easy to be of the mindset of that my weight is always the problem and therefore I am the problem. And to take "I'm the problem" even after your weight is gone...with you.

Outtake #4

Your fulfillment in life is not about food. Your fulfillment is about you. And the behavior of what you do and how you participate with others and how you socialize.  So the focus is no longer on what you are eating and what you are putting in, the focus is on what you are putting out to others socially and how you are interacting with them. How you feel about your interaction with them.  How you feel about what their boundaries are with you and your boundaries are with them. It's about taking social responsibility rather than on how much can I take to self-medicate so that I don't have to deal with everything else around me.

VIdeo: Dr. Leslie Seppinni at the 2004 OH Conference!

We hope to see you all October 4-5 at the ObesityHelp National Conference in Anaheim, California!