‘What’s the point in extending your life if this is your life’: A qualitative exploration of pre-surgery, short-term and long-term responses to bariatric surgery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examined experiences of weight, physical activity, diet, and quality of life of individuals prior to and following bariatric surgery. Twenty-seven people participated who represented three periods related to bariatric surgery: pre-surgery; short-term post-surgery (i.e., 1–2 years) and long-term post-surgery (i.e., 3–7 years). A qualitative descriptive design was adopted, with data collected through interviews and analysed using thematic analysis. Themes in the pre-surgery period were identified as follows: a) Growing up: Variation by family and ability, b) Weight gain: Transitions, traumas, and triggers; c) Perceptions of self: Hate, loathing, and worthlessness; d) Spiralling weight: Lack of control over vicious cycles of dieting and weight gain, and; e) Surgery: A final and essential lifeline. Short-term post-surgery themes were: a) Physical changes: Rapid weight loss and enhanced health versus hesitation and disappointment; b) Physical activity: Changes in engagement and perceptions despite ongoing barriers; c) Finding oneself: Increased emotional wellbeing, self-concept and confidence, and; d) Quality of life: Renewed physical capabilities and capacity but some continuing challenges. In the long-term following surgery, themes of: a) Weight plateau/regain: Disappointment and feelings of failure, and; b) Excess fat: Frustration and feelings of vulnerability emerged from the data. It is evident that participants go on an extended journey in the years before and after bariatric surgery and experience a range of both positive and negative outcomes. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of practitioners understanding individual’s overall journeys when seeking to help them lose weight and improve psychological health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.088 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".