14 DAY TRIAL // Comedienne Lisa Lampanelli knows a thing or two about weight loss and how difficult it can be to find the motivation to finally change something about your current, unhealthy lifestyle. At her heaviest, she tipped the scales at 248 pounds (112.5 kg), but she’s lost about 107 pounds (48.5 kg) since undergoing surgery in 2012.
If there’s anyone you can look up to for motivation or advice, she is probably it. Her first word of advice is to not consider surgery a solution in and of itself, but rather a first step towards a new life, a new and much better you.
Identifying triggers, solving emotional issues is key to weight loss
In 2012, Lisa and then-husband Jimmy Cannizarro went in for a gastric sleeve surgery, which would help reduce her stomach and thus prevent her from eating more than her body needed to refuel.
The problem, the comedienne tells Yahoo! in a new interview, was never the size of her stomach with her, but rather the fact that she turned to food as an addict would to his or her addictive substance, whether alcohol or drugs or tobacco.
She never had any weight problems until she was 18 and moved away for college, which she believes was the worst thing she could have done: she simply wasn’t ready for that life, so she started comfort eating.
This continued well through her adult life, up to a moment in 2012 when she understood her problem was very serious and could only lead to disaster in time. She had already tried everything in terms of fad diets, starvation and quick weight loss remedies, so she knew that none of that really worked.
She also knew that her problem was not with the actual food but with the fact that she used it to mask her emotional issues, whatever they happened to be at one point. She agreed to have the surgery, but also to work on those, so that her relationship with food (and eating) changed drastically.
Today, Lampanelli makes the distinction between physical hunger and emotional hunger: the former is the kind that requires something healthy and nutritious, while the latter is the kind that needs no food at all.
A word of advice
Were she asked to give a word of advice to those thinking of getting surgery to lose weight, Lampanelli would first say this: don’t consider the surgery the solution to all problems.
“If you have tried everything that you wanted to try for weight loss and have a clear conscience about every angle and every diet and every exercise program that you think is necessary for you to experiment with before - and you can really look at yourself in the mirror and go, ‘I can’t stop the self hate and the eating without getting the weight off first, and then I’ll tackle the emotional issues’ - then get it done. Don’t get it done if you think the surgery ends the problem,” she says.
As she learned on her own, the surgery is just the first step and the weight loss is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of working on yourself to become the best you possible.