My Banana Journey delves into the rarely told story of male obesity. This book provides a brutally honest, painful and comedic narrative of one man’s lifelong battle with his weight and body image, which ultimately led to him making the decision to have bariatric surgery, leaving him with a banana shaped stomach.
The story begins with a reflection on growing up as a Barnsley lad in a tough mining village, with some powerful and poignant childhood memories of the realisation that he was fat and that society looked down upon that. Through relatively slim teenage years, Stuart suffered from body dysmorphia, never believing that the person he could see in the mirror wasn’t fat. In adulthood, Stuart gained weight over many years, with too many beers, too many pizzas and too sedentary a lifestyle all being contributing factors. This led to a stern warning from his GP in his forties, that if he didn’t lose weight, he would be facing a ‘major life event’ in the next ten years.
The book then moves forward to 2019 and the approach of a potentially life-saving sleeve gastrectomy operation at St. James’s hospital in Leeds, which would result in the loss of three quarters of Stuart’s stomach. Stuart tells the story of the build up to the operation in a year that Britain was battling with Brexit, and Jeremy Corbyn was battling with Boris Johnson. He reveals the hoops that he had to squeeze through, the people that he met, his time in hospital, and the impact on his body post-op, when an unexpected consequence left him in crippling agony.
The text is punctuated throughout with stories and observations about life, work, relationships, politics, travel, social media, phobias, mental health, anxieties, stress as well as eating and drinking to excess as a way of finding comfort and escape from some of life’s everyday realities. The book ends with a stark warning of the under-funding of the NHS, something which has become even more relevant since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
This is a very honest and heartfelt text, you will laugh, you will be shocked, you will hopefully think beyond appearance the next time you see somebody that is overweight, it’s true to say that My Banana Journey is a rollercoaster ride.
