Obesity Surgery: Breaking the 'Quick Fix' Stereotype

May 25, 2007— -- At her sweet 16 party, Stacey Halprin weighed 250 pounds.

In the years that followed, she more than doubled her weight before she decided five years ago to opt for gastric bypass surgery.

"What I inherited was depression," she notes, "and it manifested itself in food."

A lot of food. Halprin says she could never get full, and recalls eating entire pizzas, half-gallon containers of ice cream and whole pies.

As an actress, Halprin concealed her depression from the public eye, using her stature and charisma to land roles in an off-Broadway production and the movie "The Dress Code," which had her acting alongside Shirley MacLaine.

But even on the set, her weight took its toll.

"I could barely get through the filming," she says.

Coincidentally enough, it was a world-changing event that spurred Halprin to make dramatic changes in her life. On Sept. 11, 2001, when she was at her peak weight of 550 pounds, Halprin received a call from her friend.

Minutes later, she watched the Twin Towers collapse from the window of her Manhattan apartment.

"I vowed to myself that if the world made it through this," she says, "I would lose the weight."

Halprin's situation made her an ideal candidate for gastric bypass surgery. After all, she says, she'd tried every diet solution available to her at least once.

Still, she was reluctant.

"I did not believe in gastric bypass," she says. "To this day, I don't believe in it unless it is medically necessary. It is a really terrible thing to go through."

Yet, as the morbidly obese population in the United States continues to grow, so too does the popularity of a wide range of procedures designed to limit the amount of calories the body absorbs from food.

"This has gathered a lot of publicity, because obesity is now so prevalent," says Dr. Dominick Artuso, a bariatric surgeon based in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. "What we are seeing now is that more people are becoming candidates for this procedure."