What happens when your bariatric care provider has walked the exact same road as you? You get someone like Amiee Rothe.
On the latest episode of the BariNation Podcast, host April sits down with Aimee Rothe: a board-certified bariatric nurse, program director of a high-volume metabolic and bariatric surgery center in Birmingham, Alabama, and a bariatric patient herself. What unfolds is one of the most honest, validating, and important conversations we've had on the show. No filter. No fluff. Just real talk.
From Patient to Provider — And Why That Changes Everything
Aimee's journey started in 2010 with a lap band, followed by a conversion to a vertical sleeve gastrectomy in 2017. She was around 415 pounds at the time of her second surgery and is now maintaining at 175 to 180 pounds. But her path to becoming a bariatric care provider wasn't planned. It was personal.
Working as an ER nurse at nearly 400 pounds, Aimee had a moment that changed everything. While performing CPR on a young cardiac arrest patient, she physically couldn't sustain compressions and began experiencing chest pain herself. "My entire life I wanted to be a nurse," she shares. "My entire life I wanted to help people and my body won't allow me to do that." She made a surgical consult the very next day. No hesitation. No waiting. Done.
That experience, the weight of it, the grief, the resolve, is what drives her work today. "I truly don't think that unless you've walked it, you know what it's like to be on this side of obesity," she says. And that perspective is exactly what makes her the kind of provider patients need in their corner.
Obesity Is a Chronic Disease — And It's Time We Treated It Like One
One of the central themes of this conversation is something Aimee is passionate about: destigmatizing obesity and normalizing its treatment. "Obesity is not a failure of willpower. It's not a psychological condition. It is a chronic medical condition," she says. "It follows the same continuum as diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer. It's progressive. It's relapsing."
She even jokes that obesity "isn't a sexy disease" because there's no pink ribbon or celebrity spokesperson. And while that gets a laugh, the point underneath it is serious. Millions of Americans are fighting this condition every single day, and they deserve the same compassion, the same research funding, and the same treatment options as any other chronic illness. Nobody tells someone with high blood pressure that they just need to try harder. Nobody tells a cancer patient to walk more and eat less. So why does obesity get treated differently?
This reframing matters, not just for how the medical system treats patients, but for how we treat ourselves.
The Problem With Cookie Cutter Care
Aimee is equally passionate about what she sees as a critical gap in the bariatric care system: the lack of individualized, long-term follow-up. After the initial post op stages, many patients find themselves on their own. And when weight recurrence happens (as it can with any chronic condition), they feel too ashamed to return to their care team.
"A patient will regain, and they'll start to have these feelings of failure, which keep them from coming back to see us," she explains. "And that's heartbreaking."
Her message to patients? Don't ghost your providers. And if your provider makes you feel less than? Find a new one. She compares it to finding the perfect pair of jeans: exhausting, yes, but when you find the right fit, you know it immediately and you will never let them go.
She also runs a "Back on Track" program at her practice, specifically designed for patients who are more than two years post op and navigating the long game of life after bariatric surgery. Because success shouldn't only be measured in the first five years. Life keeps going, and so does your journey.
The Things Nobody Tells You
Aimee is refreshingly candid about the parts of bariatric life that don't make it into the pre op brochure. Consider this your unofficial heads up:
Transfer addiction is real, and more common than most programs acknowledge.
Body dysmorphia doesn't disappear when the weight does. Many patients still see their former body in the mirror long after the scale has moved.
Relationships shift. In her experience as a Southerner, food is love. When you can no longer eat the way your family shows affection, things get complicated fast. (Grandma's casserole hits different when you can only have three bites.)
The first three months are rough. She normalizes it openly and unapologetically: "God, the first three months suck, y'all." Sipping out of medicine cups is not the vibe, and she's not going to pretend otherwise.
Compliments stop feeling good. The attention that feels exciting early on can become exhausting and downright uncomfortable later.
The emotional reality is often harder than the physical one. She sees more patients struggle with the mental journey than the surgical recovery itself.
None of this is said to scare anyone. It's said because the more we normalize these experiences, the less alone every patient feels when they inevitably encounter them.
On GLP-1s, Tools, and Letting Go of Guilt
Aimee is a vocal advocate for GLP-1 medications in post op patients, and she's not afraid to say so in a field where not everyone agrees. "If you are a post op who is struggling, you have other options too, and it is perfectly fine to utilize a GLP-1 in your journey because it is another tool in the toolbox," she says. "You wouldn't feel guilty if your blood pressure medicine stopped working and you had to transfer to another one. Nobody thinks twice about that."
The message is clear: more tools, less guilt. Individualized care means using whatever combination of treatments helps you manage your chronic disease, and that looks different for everyone. There is no gold star for suffering through it with fewer resources.
"It's Worth It. A Thousand Times Worth It."
For all of its complexity and challenge, Amiee wouldn't trade her bariatric journey for anything. She cries with her patients. She laughs with them. She celebrates when they can tie their shoes, sit on the floor to wrap Christmas presents, or get approved for a kidney transplant. She doesn't fixate on goal weights or BMI. She fixates on quality of life.
"I'm just a post op," she says at the end of the episode. "I'm just a girl living her life, treating her medical condition and pulling others along with me on the way."
That's the kind of provider every bariatric patient deserves. And that's exactly the kind of conversation BariNation exists to create.
🎧 Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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