My Life as a Thin
Person
People like Lisa Marie
Sohr, who lose 100 pounds or more with stomach
surgery, find that with their new bodies often come
new friends, new spouses, new lives. But happiness is
not a foregone conclusion.
 |
| Lisa
Marie Sohr After (Photo Credit: Danielle
Levitt) |
To see her
now—hips framed by low-slung pants, navel shot
through with a $500 belly ring—it strains the
imagination to envision Lisa Marie Sohr, a resplendent
Long Island hottie, as an obese woman. She moves with
the insouciance of someone who has always been 120
pounds, except when she stands up, when she looks a
bit as if she’s been fired from a slingshot.
(“It’s like, whoa—I’m used to going for
the big lunge.”) Yet Sohr can recall the day her
weight became not just an unsupportable physical
millstone but a metaphysical one: It was her 33rd
birthday. The New York City Police Department had just
forced her into early retirement. And, at five foot
four and 236 pounds, she had recently taken to
climbing the stairs of her Baldwin home on her hands
and knees.
In July 2002, Sohr
threw herself a combination housewarming-birthday-
retirement party. A week later, she went to Long
Island Bariatric Center. And on August 7, in a
five-and-a-half-hour laparoscopic procedure, a surgeon
removed her gallbladder and cinched a gastric band
around her stomach, making it very difficult for her
to eat large portions of food at a time. Within a
year, Sohr lost almost half her body weight, the
equivalent of an entire person.
Sohr says she
didn’t have outsize expectations of her surgery. But
she says she did expect her husband, an auto mechanic
in Glen Cove, to show a renewed sexual interest in her
and was disappointed when he didn’t. She also
noticed that a lot of the female company she’d kept,
many of them women who’d struggled with their weight
their entire lives, suddenly made themselves scarce.
So she found herself a newer, younger, mostly male
crowd. She started going out. She started acting out.
She went to the local bar and played darts until seven
in the morning. If she came home earlier, she’d sit
in the car and wait until she saw her husband leaving
for the garage, just to cross his path. It didn’t
have the desired consequence. In September 2003, he
asked her for a divorce.
“My ex was your
typical awkward-rocker guy,” she says today, sitting
on the sofa of her Tudor home, a cigarette dangling
from her hand. “Long hair, ripped blue jeans,
T-shirts with dragons on them, glasses. Very geeky,
played Dungeons & Dragons on his computer. But
when I was heavy, I thought he was all I was ever
going to get, and my mother convinced me I wasn’t
getting any younger—that if we didn’t marry, I’d
be fat and alone and miserable. But there was no
spark. All the way up the aisle, I was saying to
myself, ‘Oh, my God, what am I doing? Oh, my God,
what am I doing? I can’t even run, because my
dress will get stuck on a nail.’ ”
Back then, Sohr
needed a five-pound steel-boned corset to cinch her
39-inch waist into her custom-made gown. That wasn’t
the case this past month, when she remarried, rising
up through the floor of the Chateau Briand wedding
hall in an Ian Stuart size 6 (“which is like a size
4 in human terms”). Her new husband, a 32-year-old
Israeli hunk named Bari, was her own version of
Florence Nightingale: He sold her her first bikini in
ten years.
Lisa Marie Sohr
Before |
“My ex,” she
continues, “is a self-conscious girl’s guy.” She
points to Bari, whose long curls are gelled back into
a perfect seashell. “This is a wild woman’s guy.
Before, I was, like, on pause. And when you’re on
pause, you’re willing to tolerate a lot. But when
you’re not, you grow out of people.”
Sohr’s ex-husband,
Paul Ruppert, doesn’t necessarily take issue with
this interpretation, but frames it differently. He
sees a woman who, after reacquiring the body of her
late adolescence, started to relive it. “She lost a
whole person,” he says, “and became someone
different.”
It’s hard to
think of anyone in American life who gets the freak
sociological privilege of abrupt, overwhelming wish
fulfillment. There are the impoverished kids who sign
NBA contracts, perhaps, or cafeteria workers who win
the lottery; on television, there are the lucky
contestants who are selected for extreme-makeover
shows.
Yet for the morbidly
obese, the possibility of rapid and radical change, of
a near-existential reorganization of life, is becoming
increasingly common: Last year, the number of patients
who underwent weight-loss procedures was an estimated
140,600, according to the American Society for
Bariatric Surgery, more than double that of 2002.
Most people who
undergo this procedure are not doing it to look
pretty. They’re doing it to not die young, to save
their knees, to be able to walk to and from the
grocery store without gasping for breath. Yet the
procedure often has striking aesthetic consequences,
making conventional beauties of people whose
self-images were previously organized, at least in
part, around the very principle of invisibility or
unsightliness. For them, losing weight turns out to be
the least of their transformations. They don’t just
have new bodies; they have new narratives, new public
identities. “Many patients greatly underestimate
just how significant the psychological transformation
is,” says Warren Huberman, a clinical psychologist
who evaluates prospective bariatric patients at NYU
Medical Center. “I ask what they anticipate—and
what changes they think will be unpleasant.
They look at me like I’ve got three heads. They
can’t imagine anything will go badly if they’re
thin.”
In the annals of
obesity literature, this is not a topic that’s
received a ton of attention. But attend any bariatric
support-group meeting, and this much is clear: One has
to learn to be skinny. Even the smallest adaptive
behaviors take years to shake—buying clothes too
big, deeming a subway seat too small, refusing to be
first through a crowded bar. “I had a man come to me
a month ago,” says Christine Ren, a bariatric
surgeon at NYU. “He’d started out at 525 pounds.
Now he’s 250. And he says, ‘Doc, I don’t know
what to tell people. Am I man who lost 275 pounds? Or
who needs to lose another 60?’ ”
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