From Inclusionmagazine.com |
Quite a lead title for this post, don't you think?
This could go a number of very interesting ways, but for the purpose of this Blog post, I am going to center on their differences in terms of their participation and results of efforts and treatments for obesity.
I think I have stated before that women far outnumber men in our bariatric surgical practice, by at least a 3:1 margin if not more; it may in fact we may be closer to 80% for female patients in our practice.
I recently saw a post in Fairfield County's (Connecticut) bariatric surgery blog that highlighted a few of the reasons. Good post.
We all know men and women are different animals, and the same is true in respect to their proclivity to seek treatment, and what kind of treatment for obesity.
Why are our bariatric surgical practices so female-dominant?
While being overweight is not a female or male predominant situation (or disease as recently noted by the AMA), however, according to 2012 US data, it does favor males at nearly 70% of their adult group, vs. females at nearly 60% of their group. That's a huge group of people that are overweight and obese in the US, and while both sexes have this affliction, how they react to their illness / poor health (female description?) or their challenge (male description?) is markedly different. And that, in a nutshell, is probably the main contributor to whether or not a male or female seeks out surgical care for their obesity.
As far as medical treatment as a whole, it is well known that females are much more likely to seek care for health-related matters, whereas men tend to under utilize the health care system more commonly. Studies have shown that men tend to put off a surgical option for weight loss until they had a significant weight-related health problem that effected their daily functioning. The writer of the blog post from Fairfield correlates this with the parallel of not asking for directions until it's very late in the journey, and how that has always been a stereotype of men from women (before the advent of GPS assistance) :) .
Studies also reveal that men often have a bit more success with weight loss efforts on their own, in terms of utilizing diet and exercise to get to a weight goal. Men do have more lean body mass (Testosterone = muscle mass), and can build muscle easier to aid in more 'rapid' metabolic changes, with a similar level of exercise vs. what women experience from their efforts.
So, I guess if you have had a degree of success with lifestyle changes in the past, you can probably justify not considering that definitive surgical option, and delay it until you can just buckle down and give it another shot.
Not as easy as it sounds, but if it works (this time), go for it, for sure. If you don't need / want the surgical option, and you are successful losing weight and improving health and reducing your comorbidities, admittedly that is the best way. Waiting years to start this process, or letting your medical issues slowly get out of hand, with irreversible damage from them, can border on irresponsible. Spoken like a true procrastinating male.
And back to those women that make up the majority of our surgical weight loss practice, and likely the vast majority of clients of non-surgical weight loss businesses in the country, persistence does have its rewards. According to the ASMBS, their data shows that in the battle of the sexes for weight loss averages after bariatric surgery, women tend to lose more weight than their male counterparts, by 10% more.
"So there..." I can hear a female voice saying those words right now...
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