--- - |2 Abstract This article traces the post‐surgical relationship between weight‐loss surgery (WLS) patients and their home bariatric clinics. Following surgery, there is substantive drop off in patient attendance at both follow‐up appointments and support groups. While barriers to follow‐up are often discussed with the bariatric literature, patients themselves are typically defined as the problem. Based upon a thematic analysis of 217 blog posts and comments in two top patient‐led online forums, I demonstrate that bariatric patients tell a more complex story about their post‐surgical lives. I argue that WLS patients constitute a population with highly specialised medical needs that is caught between the requirements for living with surgically altered digestive systems and a lack of sufficient post‐operative follow‐up care from their home bariatric clinics. Although online forums provide spaces for patients to examine these post‐operative social and clinical experiences in critical terms, seek information and get support, ultimately the conversations serve to underline the value of personal responsibility for post‐operative outcomes–a framing that echoes that of the bariatric profession. This framing should be understood within a larger climate of weight‐based stigma and discrimination as well as neoliberal healthism. - 'Sociology of Health &Illness, EarlyView. '