Comparing Caselli's Weight And Life

Caselli and Worley both changed their weight and life in very different ways, however the steps they both took were similar. In Caselli’s past, he tried to lose his weight by doing various diets and weight loss programs to no avail; “He would diet and lose seventy-five pounds, then put a hundred back on . . . On one diet, he got down to a hundred and ninety, but he gained it all back” (Gawande para. 10); Caselli tried to diet and found dieting never truly helped with his weight. Worley tried the same approach to her weight which resulted in no benefit to her either; “After years and years of dieting it slowly dawned on me that my body rebelled when I tried to restrict my food intake” (Worley para. 11). Worley and Caselli both found out that dieting was a waste of time and money to a problem that was more than just controlling urges; “Have this happen to you enough times and you will be apprehensive at the prospect of losing weight for fear of gaining bad more than you lose . . . All those years I figured that it was me who was failing, and then I began to realize that it was the method that was failing” (Worley para. 10-11); Worley realized that her method was failing and to help herself, she would need to take a different approach.

Caselli realized the same principle during one of his diets; “He, too, wanted desperately to lose weight, but the task of controlling himself, day to day, meal to meal, seemed beyond him” (Gawande para. 13); Caselli found that these diets were not helping him in any amount, so he stopped them, however Caselli never tried to find a different approach to help himself. Caselli and Worley knew that their weight was effecting their lives which aided them take extra measures to help change their lives. Caselli took drastic measures to change his life, he went to the doctors to have a gastric bypass; “And so although he was afraid of surgery, he had come for a Roux-en-Y gastric-bypass operation” (Gawande para. 1); although not stated in the text, Caselli felt that an operation is the only way to change he life around. Worley took a less serious path to change her weight and feel better; “So I stopped dieting and began to make peace with food and with my body . . . Over the last fifteen years or so I’ve made many attempts to become more active on a regular basis with varying degrees of success” (Worley para. 12-13)