Claire Maddox

For most of my adult life I fought my weight. I lost count of the diets, some worked for a while, all of them came back, and each cycle left me heavier and more defeated than the last. By my early forties I had a BMI in the low forties, prediabetes, and a growing list of reasons my GP and I agreed it was time to consider surgery.

Choosing the sleeve was the easy part; understanding what I was signing up for was not. There were plenty of clinic brochures and dramatic before-and-after photos, and almost nothing honest about what the decision felt like, what the operation and its risks really involved, what it costs and why, and what the months afterwards, the diet stages, the early regret, the slow rebuild, are genuinely like. I had my surgery abroad, in Thailand, which raised its own questions nobody answered plainly.

The Gastric Sleeve Guide is where I set all of that down. A consultant bariatric surgeon keeps the clinical side accurate; the rest is my own story and other people’s. I’m not a doctor; I’ve just lived it, and I want you to know what the sleeve will and won’t fix.