Why does my surgeon care about my weight?

1. Your knee joint cartilage is rated to 100kg, and takes up to 15 times your body weight with every step.
2. Your risk of blood clot after surgery is increased if you are overweight, because the apron of belly fat crushes the vein in your thigh.
3. Your risk of death under anaesthesia is increased, because the anaesthetist has to force oxygen under higher pressure into your lungs, to push your belly fat down to make your lungs expand while you are lying on your back.
4. It is more difficult to find a vein because you have fat overlying and it obscures the doctors vision.
5. Your infection rate is increased, because fat heals more slowly.
​6. It is more technically challenging to manipulate the arthroscope due to the constraint of the fatty tissue.

What should we do about our weight?

1. Sugar labelling - if every product had a front of package label around the size of a 10 cent piece describing the percentage of sugar in the package, we would raise awareness of this issue.
2. If every time you ate out, you listed your dietary requirement as 'sugar (or fructose) free' we would change restaurant practices.
3. Being mindful of what you are eating and why can help - keeping a food diary can be very effective for some people. 
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These are very simple cultural changes which we can start working on today.