Excerpt: Khaliah Ali's 'Fighting Weight'

May 22, 2007 — -- At her heaviest, Khaliah Ali, who is 5 feet, 8 inches, weighed 325 pounds and said she'd spent most of her life yo-yo dieting in an attempt to lose the weight.

Even worse than being an obese American, said the daughter of boxer Muhammad Ali, was being an obese American whose father is a national hero in large part due to his physical prowess.

Finally, three years ago, Khaliah Ali underwent gastric band surgery in which a band is put around the stomach to shrink it. Different from gastric bypass (in which doctors bypass your intestines and staple your stomach), this procedure is less invasive and can be adjusted periodically (the band can be loosened and tightened) depending on one's changing lifestyle.

Khaliah, who is down to 158 pounds, has written a book, called "Fighting Weight," about her surgical success, which she hopes serves as a message to other obese Americans.

You can read a chapter from the book below.

Introduction: Claiming Your Life

Twenty million Americans can't pull an airplane seat belt across their laps. They can't run for a train, can't step into the bathtub without great deliberation, and can't push a child on a swing. Nor can they sit on a bistro chair or other fragile furniture because, quite simply, they'd break it. Most don't dare go to the beach, wear sleeveless shirts, hold out hope for true romance, or enjoy being in public.

All are candidates for weight-loss surgery. Beside the everyday morti?cation of literally not being able to ?t into life, they're susceptible to heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, interruptions in breathing during sleep, and a host of other debilitating, if not life-threatening, conditions.

Still, less than 1 percent of those eligible for obesity surgery come forward, largely because they fear the risks of the operation. I was one of them.

I know ?rsthand the shame of becoming morbidly obese; the lifetime of dieting off pounds, but never enough, and then gaining them all back and more; the aching joints, the inability to walk up a single ?ight of stairs without losing my breath -- all made worse by the fact that I was the daughter of a man who is very famous, in large part, precisely because of his ?tness and physical abilities. I remember well, too, the experience of ?nally coming around to the idea of weight-loss surgery but rejecting it because of the very real possibility that I would die on the table.

Frightened and miserable, I went five years losing and gaining the same ?fty pounds and didn't know which way to turn -- until a wonderful friend steered me toward Drs. George Fielding and Christine Ren, professors at the New York University School of Medicine. My friend told me they performed a type of weight-loss surgery that has been used in Europe for more than a decade but is only now starting to take off in the United States. The results of the surgery are just as spectacular as those of gastric bypass, she said, yet with only one-tenth the rate of life-threatening complications.

Soon, with their record of success and also their hand-holding through my own hand-wringing, they convinced me of the procedure's safety, and I was on the road to slimming down to a goal weight of 150 pounds -- not bad for a woman who's ?ve feet nine inches.

I have a debt of gratitude to Drs. Fielding and Ren that can never be repaid. How can you repay someone for giving you your life? So, when they asked me to do this book with them as a way of dramatizing what a very obese person goes through -- and how she can come out "the other side" -- I was thrilled to take part. Please be aware as you read that while the story is mine, all the scienti?c facts, ?gures, research, and medical explanations are theirs.

THE EUROPEAN SOLUTION TO OBESITY

The type of procedure I underwent is called laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding, or gastric banding, for short. (You can also call it stomach banding, because that's what it is.) It doesn't involve stapling your stomach and cutting your intestine in two, as does gastric bypass -- the surgery chosen by such notables as Carnie Wilson and Al Roker. Instead, it's relatively low-tech as operations go. A band is simply placed around the stomach and periodically tightened to reduce hunger sensations, as well as limit the amount of food you can process at one time. That's it.

The operation was perfected by Dr. Fielding, who developed the technique that is presently used worldwide to implant the band. It offers myriad advantages over gastric bypass.

1. It's reversible. If you don't like the band, you can have it removed. Gastric bypass, by contrast, is a decision you usually can't go back on because the complication rate for reversing the surgery is too risky.

2. Low rate of postoperative problems. There are fewer adverse effects from the operation and even fewer deaths -- one in two thousand, as opposed to gastric bypass's one in two hundred.

3. More patient follow-up because you need to have the band tightened every so often. It's a simple outpatient procedure that involves no anesthesia, just an injection of watery solution that thickens the band so it can wrap a little tighter around the stomach. I've had mine tightened a number of times now. It's about as eventful as getting your teeth cleaned.

4. No hunger. With gastric bypass, hunger eventually returns because the stomach softens up, or "stretches," and there's nothing that can be done, which is why the weight of most people who have gastric bypass drifts upward again. With gastric banding, the periodic band tightening keeps hunger at bay forever so the weight can keep coming off as you need, and stay off. Even dieting plateaus don't sabotage the weight-loss effort. Usually, when obese people reach a plateau and stop losing weight for a while, the hunger combined with the disappointment of not seeing the scale needle move downward decreases motivation, so weight starts to creep back up. I know the pattern all too well. But with the band, the plateau is bearable. It can be waited out until the next drop in pounds because there's no hunger involved.