The Background

I have been thinking about this for a long time. By this, I mean the decision to share a personal part of my life with everyone. There are a few things to consider. First, I am putting it out there. There is no going back. Making details available on the Web is not something you can change your mind about later.

Second, I work in public relations. I am encouraged to be creative and improve my writing skills on a daily basis, but there is a lot of pressure to write well all the time. I don’t have the security of a team proofing and weighing in on the things I write here. It drives me absolutely crazy to misspell a word or make a grammatical error when I am posting on Facebook. I know there will be times I post something with a mistake, so I am going to try and not be so much of a perfectionist that I don’t tell a good story.

Let me warn you, I tend to over share sometimes. Some think this is charming, some can’t believe I say the things I say. It’s me, and it’s always been me. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. What can I say? I’m honest. You never have to guess where I stand on something. I tend to lay everything on the line. Point being, be prepared for moments of TMI.

Where to start….

I guess by now, you’re either bored or wish I would get to the point. Here goes. I’m about to have a life-changing surgery called Lap-Band. Basically, I am having a plastic band put around the upper part of my stomach to create a smaller stomach. It will restrict the amount of food I can eat and give me the feeling of being full after about a ½ a cup of food. I will be consuming between 500 and 1,000 calories a day. While this sounds drastic, so is my weight. I currently tip the scales at 287 pounds. I need to weigh about 140 pounds. You have no idea how hard it is to admit that. I only recently became comfortable enough to share this information. Until a couple of months ago, my own husband didn’t know how much I weighed. For so long my weight has been a well-kept secret full of shame and embarrassment. Now that I’m doing something about my weight I feel good about putting it all out on the table.

How did I get here?

Believe it or not, I used to be a skinny, athletic person. I played volleyball, was on the track team, very active in ROTC… you get the point. This photo is from my first day of college in 2002. AfterI started college, the weight gain started. At first it was passed off as the “freshman 15.” I was living on my own for the first time and not as active as I was in high school. The doctor thought I was letting myself go. To tell you the truth, I thought the same thing. Eventually they figured it out. I had Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome or PCOS. I developed this disease because my body had an excessive amount of insulin, which caused a lot of problems, including weight gain. Once diagnosed, it became hard to control my weight. To top it off, the medicine I needed to take to help with my excessive insulin made me sick. The weight just kept coming and I became more and more miserable.

I tried a few times to lose the weight, but it resulted in one failure after another. In a way, that was more stressful than just being overweight. After a while, I gave up. If I am going to weigh a million pounds and not be able to lose it, then I’m not going to diet and be miserable. Almost eight years later, here I am. All 287 pounds of me.

I’m not blaming my PCOS for everything. It started the problem and I made it worse. I gave up on myself. I slowly spiraled downward until I didn’t recognize myself anymore, literally. Part of it was because I was young and oblivious to the fact that I was killing myself. I eat what I want, when I want without regards to portion size or calories.

My family has a very complicated medical history that includes heart disease, obesity and cancer. My current weight makes me much more likely to develop these problems and more. Luckily, I’m young enough that I just might be able to avoid some of these problems if I can lose the weight. In fact, my doctors are confident I can reverse my PCOS after I lose the weight.

Trust me, this isn’t a decision I made lightly, no pun intended. I have been considering it, researching it and talking to my doctors about it for a couple of years. Not to mention, I’ve been saving for it. You see, in our messed up world of health insurance, my insurance plan doesn’t cover any weight loss procedure for any reason. In a way, I think they quite enjoy the fact that my obesity could cause major medical problems down the road. That just means much more money for the medical community. So, here I am shelling out $12,000 dollars to save my own life.

This is also not only my decision to make. My husband and I have talked endlessly about this. It’s a lot of money and it will change our lives in many ways. I will be eating very differently, which will affect him. This will be something I have to plan for and think about every single day. He is committed to make changes in his life, and even excited about it. He may be skinny, but he will be the first to tell you how out of shape he’s in. We are lazy. We encourage each other to be lazy. We eat larger than normal portions. It’s a vicious cycle we can’t blame on anyone, but ourselves. We take our bodies for granted and fill them with crap, more often than not. What kind of life is that?

Bottom line, something has to change and fast. We love each other and want to live a long time. Not to mention, we would like to have children one day. This is not something we want to teach our children. We want to show them how to be active and eat right.

So, there it is. You’re pretty much caught up. I hope to use this blog as a tool to help me deal with surgery. It’s not going to be easy or a magic cure, by any means. I have a rough road ahead of me, and I think sharing my story will help. I have gone from not wanting anyone to know about it at all, to telling a few people, to writing this blog. I tend to talk out problems, and this is pretty close to doing that. Don’t worry; it won’t all be about surgery and my recovery. Yes, I will post pictures of my progress. No, all my posts won't be this long.