December, a New Car, and a Crash We Did Not Plan For
It has been a strange few months. December started with something exciting – getting a new car – and ended in a way we definitely did not expect. On the 27th of December, only two weeks after getting it, the car was involved in an accident when another driver pulled out without paying attention. Thankfully nobody was seriously hurt. The car did not fare as well.
What followed was weeks of insurance calls, repair assessments, replacement vehicles, and the particular low-level stress that comes with a situation that is not catastrophic but is persistently inconvenient. Not the note on which you want to close out a year.
What the Accident Surfaced
The interesting thing about a stressful event after surgery is how differently your body responds to it now. Pre-op, stress and food were connected in ways that were largely unconscious. A bad week meant different eating. A shock like a car accident would have had a particular kind of emotional aftermath that involved comfort eating, or at least the pull towards it.
That pull is reduced after a gastric sleeve. Not absent – head hunger is real and we have written about it before – but the physical capacity to eat in response to stress is simply not there in the same way. The stomach does not cooperate with emotional eating the way it used to.
What replaced it, in the days after the accident, was something else. A clearer awareness of what the stress actually felt like without the buffer of food. James noticed it particularly. The discomfort was more present, not numbed. That is confronting at first. It is also, we think, healthier.
The Self-Discovery Part
We used the phrase “unexpected self-discovery” in the title of this post because that is genuinely what happened over those few months. Not the car crash specifically – that was just inconvenient. But the period it coincided with, which included James continuing his work with a personal trainer, Kirsten managing a more stable stretch with her Crohn’s, and both of us settling into what maintenance actually looks and feels like, brought its own kind of clarity.
You spend the first year of bariatric surgery focused on the loss. The weight is coming off. The health markers are improving. The milestones are frequent and measurable. By the time you reach the second year and the dramatic changes have slowed, you have to find a different relationship with the process. Maintenance is quieter. Less externally visible. More about who you are becoming than what the scales say.
James entered a bodybuilding competition during this period. That decision – to take a body that had weighed 30 stone and had gone through major surgery and put it on a stage in a competitive context – required a level of self-acceptance and deliberate redefinition of identity that we do not think would have been possible without everything that came before. The deficiency crisis. The insomnia. The hard months. The gym. All of it contributed to the person who decided to compete.
Where Things Stand
By the time we wrote this, we were two years on from the surgery at Weight Loss Riga. James is down 12 stone from his pre-op weight. Kirsten lost over 8 stone in the first year and has maintained that loss. Her Crohn’s management is better than it has been in years – the weight loss and dietary discipline that came with the sleeve have had positive knock-on effects on her inflammation markers.
The car is fixed. The insurance is settled. December’s stress is a memory.
What stays is the sense that the harder parts of this journey have not been detours from it. They hate been part of it. The surgery was never just about the weight. It was about rebuilding a relationship with a body that had been difficult to live in for a long time. That work does not finish at goal weight. It continues through car crashes and bad months and competitions and everything else.
Two years on, that is what the journey looks like.
Sources
NICE CG189 – Obesity: identification, assessment and management
BOMSS – Guidelines on the peri-operative nutritional management of bariatric patients
NHS – Weight loss surgery: what to expect afterwards
About this content
This blog is written by James and Kirsten, a couple from the UK who had gastric sleeve surgery together in March 2024.
We started this blog because we couldn't find any sources of content that details before surgery, the surgery and then life post surgery - so we decided to write one ourselves.
Everything on this site is based on our own experience and the research we have done along the way. It is not medical advice. Gastric sleeve surgery is a serious procedure and every patient's journey is different. Please always consult your own bariatric team or GP before making any decisions about your health or treatment.
Some posts on this site may contain featured or sponsored content, or affiliate links. Where this is the case, it will always be clearly stated at the top of the article. Our opinions are always our own.
Publish Date: 4 March 2026 | Last Reviewed: 7 June 2026 | Next Planned Review: 7 December 2027