After Year One

I feel like I should make a list of my current achievements since surgery. It is easy to get bogged down in what I don't like or can't do and to forget about what I can do. So, here are a few of my accomplishments in the last 15 months. I also feel like I need to be direct and honest, so some of these pare pretty personal. 1) I am able to drive our little manual transmission car. I was too big and my legs too short and I couldn't work the pedals before surgery. 2) I am able to easily hug my kids. When I was so heavy, it was very difficult to hug my kids. I just physically, could not do it. I am a touchy person, so it has been wonderful to be able to do this with my kids. On this same note, I can also cuddle up with my kids on the couch (particularly my baby. She loves to cuddle!) with plenty of room to spare. 3) I was able to out walk a person 20+ years my junior. I went for a walk with a coworker a while back and I was waiting on her! She is averaged siz...

One 'advantage' of surgery is that my body cannot tolerate certain foods. Since surgery, I have been eating low carb, less gluten, less milk, and less sugar. This is partly to lose/maintain weight, but it is also because I get nauseous and sick if I eat too much of these. Unfortunately, I can eat it some, before I get sick. Case in point: This past weekend, we had a lot of things going on. We had a Girl Scout event, a church picnic, and another event. Two of these events involved food. Good food. Comfort food that I love. Foods that I haven't had for a long time. I'm sure you can see where I am going with this. Now, the Girl Scout event had food, but since it was a huge event, the food was limited. So, I really didn't eat too poorly while there. They just didn't have a lot of options for me to get myself in trouble. Unfortunately for me, church picnics are of the devil! In my part of the world, a church picnic means potluck and everyone brings their favor...

Don't get me wrong, I am 100% sure that I would have still done the surgery, even if I had known the following things. However, this is a list of things that I think would have been helpful to know, before I had had surgery. In no particular order: 1) I would be nauseous ALL.THE.TIME Now, if you are like me, you HATE being nauseous. It is the most evil thing that your body can do to you as far as I am concerned. I spent a lot of time eating ANYTHING and then laying on the couch feeling nauseous. It didn't necessarily matter if I ate the "right" foods or if I ate the "right" amount, I was still sick. I still get this now, from time to time (I am almost 15 months post-surgery), but it has gotten better. But, it still happens, and I HATE IT! 2) I would throw up a LOT and that I would feel bulimic There are a lot of reasons to throw up after surgery. I throw up because I ate too much. I throw up because I ate too fast. I throw up because I ate so...

I have been overweight and obese my entire life. There was a short time, pre-puberty, when I was somewhat "normal" (I have a few pictures that seem to indicate that this was true), but I really don't remember not being overweight. It was part of my identity. It was just the way things were. Over the years, my weight has fluctuated drastically. When I graduated from high school, I was around 200 pounds. I remember being 315 pounds at one point in my career because it was "the highest I had ever been". I went back down to about 215 pounds when I got married in 2003, but the weight slowly started inching up. At one point, I weighed 365 pounds and this was "the highest I had ever been". I worked hard and lost about 100 pounds and all was better. Unfortunately, the weight started creeping up again and I hit 426 pounds, which truly is the "highest I have ever been".  Over the years, I have tried every weight loss program you can think of, a...