kconnors
My grandma died when I was very young, from diabetes. She had only one boy and lots of girls, including my Mom. All of the girls faced overweight issues throughout their lives, about half of them being obese. Diets and sizes were a common topic for me to overhear. On my Dad's side I only knew his mom, who was always overweight. I am the oldest of three girls and all of us have been obese as adults. It seems to really take hold after the first pregnancy, as it also did with my Mom, so I think hormones play a big part in our cases. My two sisters need to take thyroid meds but my tests always come out normal. One of my sisters had made a big effort with diet and lots of exercise in the past 1.5 years, and is now only overweight, not obese. She has everyone scratching their heads because she does not lose any more weight even with lots of exercise and a calorie deficit. However, her endocrinologist is still unhappy with her thyroid levels - I am sure it is very frustrating for her. My other sister is quite a bit shorter than I and is bigger. My one child, a son, has eating issues and lost 100 pounds by diet and exercise. However he has gained some back over the past couple of years because he cannot devote as much time to the gym due to now being married and a daddy to two kids.
I wore chunky sizes as a kid, then at the start of puberty got tall really fast so I thinned out. Through most of high school I weighed 165 at 5'8" tall, so I could have stood to lose some weight but mostly I was muscular and played a lot of tennis and also hiked. I gained a lot of weight during my pregnancy and was over 200 when my son was born. Although I lost some I gained it back and then some over the next months of hanging around home with a baby and nothing much to do. When I left my husband a year later I thought I was sick because I kept losing weight, but it turned out that working as a nursing assistant and having to walk to work 4 miles each way was causing the weight to drop off. At the best point I weighed a little over 170 pounds. When my second marriage failed I just ate morning noon and night, gaining 50 pounds in only a couple of months. SInce that point I only reached 199 once when I stuck to an Overeater's Anonymous food plan for a few months. I started having bouts of depression and would gain 15-20 pounds each time, then level off until I had another episode. Hitting 300 happened in 1998 while I was living with an active alcoholic man. He would drink and I would eat. From that point I hovered around 300 until 2002 where I added another 25 pounds due to being very depressed and having had a radical hysterectomy. Since 2002 I once got down under 280 for a microsecond or two, but always regained.
My best friend was always obese through our school years and had a form of gastric bypass right before she turned 30. That was over 20 years ago. I was the thinner friend then, but her weight went down drastically and mine crept up. For the last 10 years she has been hoping I would chose to have WLS myself but I wasn't ready to give up the battle and also feared it wouldn't work for me.
In 2007 I was going to be turning 50 in October so in March I reviewed my weight and all the efforts I had made to lose the weight. My ankles were really starting to limit my mobility and I realized things were starting to break down due to weighing around 300 or so for the past 9 or so years. I finally decided to look into the Lap-Band surgery because I was hearing a lot about it, but when I went to an informational meeting about WLS I decided the bypass was better for me. Since that point I have been very goal-oriented toward getting all of the hoops jumped through to be approved and booked for surgery. It seems like a wish and dream I have had forever, although it has only been 9 or 10 months. My focus is on health but of course I would like to look good in smaller sizes. I have a professional job and am just about to get a graduate college degree and feel like my weight is the only thing dragging me down from completely reaching my goals.
So my surgery is on Tuesday and I was scared last week for a couple of days, but then I got this sense of calm. I keep looking at the before-and-after pictures and reading people's stories and I know this is the best thing I could do for myself. I am a bit nervous about hanging skin and hair loss issues, but definitely not enough to keep me from going ahead with my WLS. I know everyone is different and it will remain to be seen what my personal journey will look like.
I feel like I have a lot of life yet to live and would like to have a great quality of life by not being obese, and by being healthy. This is my dream.
