Kaley J.

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Sorry, you’re too fat to eat here
Miss. bill would ban restaurants from serving obese customers

February 4, 2008

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22997073/

JACKSON, Miss. - A state lawmaker wants to ban restaurants from serving food to obese customers — but please, don’t be offended.

He says he never even expected his plan to become law.

“I was trying to shed a little light on the number one problem in Mississippi,” said Republican Rep. John Read of Gautier, who acknowledges that at 5-foot-11 and 230 pounds, he’d probably have a tough time under his own bill.

More than 30 percent of adults in Mississippi are considered it obese, according to a 2007 study by the Trust for America’s Health, a research group that focuses on disease prevention.

The state House Public Health Committee chairman, Democrat Steve Holland of Plantersville, said he is going to “shred” the bill.

“It is too oppressive for government to require a restaurant owner to police another human being from their own indiscretions,” Holland said Monday.

The bill had no specifics about how obesity would be defined, or how restaurants were supposed to determine if a customer was obese.

Al Stamps, who owns a restaurant in Jackson, said it is “absurd” for the state to consider telling him which customers he can’t serve. He and his wife, Kim, do a bustling lunch business at Cool Al’s, which serves big burgers — beef or veggie — and specialty foods like “Sassy Momma Sweet Potato Fries.”

“There is a better way to deal with health issues than to impose those kind of regulations,” Al Stamps said. “I’m sorry — you can’t do it by treating adults like children and telling them what they can and cannot eat.”

Hello one and all, sorry it's been so long since I've posted anything. I have been trying to get my head straight as to what I want as well as dealing with some personal issues and just wasn't up to trying to post anything about it. So now that I can, let me get you up to date.

Physically:
1) my blood pressure medication has been upped from 5 to 10 mgs.
2) my latest A1C was 5.9 so my diabetes is under really good control.
3) the sleep apnea is still a problem. I'm doing better in terms of keeping my mask on most of the night but am still having problems with excessive sleepiness during the day. I'm on Provigil which usually helps but sometimes it doesn't and I have to caffeinate myself.
4) I joined the Y in January and for the last 3 weeks or so have been doing water aerobics about 4 times a week. Twice in a class and twice on my own. I am hoping it will help me have more strength and mobility as well as better circulation.
5) This Friday my doctor is sending me to a neurologist for some upper and lower extremities testing. I have been having trouble with losing sensation and strength in my legs (as well as tingling) if I stay in one position longer than 15 minutes. I have also been having problems with my hands (worst in the morning but lasting all day) where I can't grip anything and they are stiff and painful. The tests are to see if the diabetes has caused some nerve damage. My doctor said that if it isn't nerve damage then it could be that my weight fluctuations have caused my weight to redistribute so that it is pressing on my nerves (or in the case of my hands it might be carpal tunnel). I'm not too worried about it yet though it is annoying (for example, not being able to maintain a grip on the foam weights in water aerobics).

Emotionally:
1) I am trying to deal with some very painful stuff from my past and that is hard but other than that I'm okay.

As far as surgery goes I was really struggling with whether or not I should pursue it at this stage. Part of my brain kept saying that "Your life is not critically threatened by your weight right now so you should be focusing on the "natural" route." While I've been trying to decide how I felt about all of that I started a bible study weight loss program and joined the Y. Now I feel that I can in good conscience have the surgery because I have been giving the "traditional" route a good try and it is not doing a lick in terms of my weight. I know that statistically someone who has binge eating disorder and has been morbidly obese since childhood with no reprieve has very low chances of ever losing the weight the traditional way. Plus I also recognize it would be less risky to have the surgery right now as opposed to when I am critically ill from my weight related health problems. So I have decided that I am going to go ahead with getting the surgery. I know I can handle the after-surgery requirements (like exercise) because I've been doing it already (and in the case of the water aerobics, I really enjoy it). Since I agreed to go the conferences with my mom and one of them is towards the end of the summer I won't be able to have my surgery this summer because I can't miss the first few weeks of school. So I will be trying I think to have it beginning of Christmas break this year. Unless I can find a way to do the surgery this summer still.

So that's everything so far with me. Sorry this was so long.

Okay, let me try and update y'all on where things are and what has been going on since I last posted.

I did finally get my BiPAP machine so I have been sleeping with that. The sleep study said it was the right pressure setting but I have still been falling asleep or into a stupor at work and so my doctor started me on a medication that I take when I get up to help me stay awake. I have only taken it for a couple days but it is amazing the difference it has made. I had forgotten how nice it is to be able to function during the day.

I have finally lost about 5 pounds off of the weight I gained back after coming off the liquid diet so now I weigh 338 pounds. I think this probably means that my body has finally realized that the starvation is over and my system is getting back into balance, which is good. I also found out that while my insurance will not pay for surgery related stuff, they will pay for me to see a nutritionist regularly to manage my diabetes so I have started taking advantage of that.

I also talked to my parents about helping me to pay for a membership at the Y so that I can take water aerobics. I am hoping that this will help me to gain some more strength, mobility, and endurance.

As far as having the surgery goes it is no longer in January. I put it off until at least the summer for two reasons:

1) my mom asked me if I would put it off so that I could attend two Christian seminars with her (one on eating disorders and faith and one on finding hope and healing in Christ). Since my parents are going to be helping me pay for the surgery I figured it was reasonable to agree.

2) I am now of a divided mind regarding having the surgery. I have been having a growing concern that my decision to have the surgery was a reaction to finding out I had some mild kidney damage from the weight and not because I consulted God and asked for His will and guidance. Part of me wonders if I have really given Him a fair shake when it comes to asking Him to help me to lose weight and so would I be overriding His will and power to go ahead with the surgery right now, having not consulted with Him about it. I know that if things continue to get worse with me I will need to have the surgery but I am having my doubts as to whether I should have it right now.

So I am waiting for a while and trying to give God a fair shake. Honestly, that is fine by me because I am also having to weigh the risks and benefits of having the surgery so more time before making a final decision is good.

All in all I guess I'm doing better than I thought now.

I have been having so much trouble with my food/eating/weight related issues since coming off of the liquid diet. I know I should have been expecting it since I knew my body would react strongly to the normal eating but I didn't expect my mind to react strongly too. I naively thought I would make a smooth transition and be okay. The last two weeks or so my eating patterns have been just crazy. I have been restricting a lot because I just haven't wanted to eat. Then on the few times I do eat I either overeat or stop eating after just a little bit because it makes me so nauseous. In my mind I know I need to eat regularly but I just don't want to because I'm not hungry and I know I'll just feel sick if I do eat. Plus I'm afraid that if I gain weight my surgery will be called off though I know that if I keep not eating and stuff then it will be called off on account of my eating disorder flaring up again stronger than ever. So I need to deal with this and I need to deal with it now because not eating is starting to really mess with my blood sugars (too low) because I'm on diabetes medication and that coupled with not sleeping right because of the sleep apnea is making me a nervous wreck almost. It will only get worse if I don't do something. So I have talked to my therapist about all of this and he helped me to set some 3 day at a time goals to help me get through this. They are as follows...

1) I will get in bed by 10:00 pm every night (I've been putting off going to bed because I know I'm not going to get rested anyway). If I'm not in bed by that time I have to call him.
2) I will eat at least 5 times a day skipping no more than one meal (i.e., if I skip 2 meals or snacks in a row I have to call him).
3) Every third day I will call him to either reset my goals to the same ones or to set new goals in these two areas.

I am also doing a food journal and a graph of my intake levels for the week.

The idea behind my calling him he says is so that if I am having trouble meeting my goals he can support me and hold me accountable. So far (the last 3 days) I'm doing okay. My therapist says that at this point he's not so much worried about the quantity or quality of what I'm eating, just as long as I start to deal with this and get back on track. The goal is to just get me eating something at regular intervals.

So good luck to me... Here's hoping I can turn this around sooner rather than later.

Yesterday I had my consult with Dr. Lane's office. It went very well. They are going to accept my work with Dr. Myer's dietician, my EKG and my psychological evaluation, and my psychiatrist's clearance letter even though it has a different surgeon's name on it. Yay! So basically with them I am ahead of the game towards having my surgery. They had me go next door to the hospital after my appointment to get a chest x-ray and I have an appointment on November 5 to get a pulmonary function test. Once the chest x-ray and pulmonary function tests are in I can make an all-day, 3 appointment with them (one with Dr. Lane, one with their dietician, and one with their internist to go over my test results, get a physical, and determine if I need any more tests done) and then I can schedule a date for my surgery!! They said it would be no problem for me to have my surgery around January 8, 2008. Yay! That would be a great way to start out a new year.

I am really having to get adjusted to taking days off of work for appointments. I don't normally do that. Last year I only took one sick day (no personal days taken) and that was at the end of the year for my all-day appointment with Dr. Myer's office. So taking sick days is not my norm and it feels really weird. I know that it is important to do this for myself but I hate missing work because I love my job and working with my students. The added factor to all of this is that I only acrue so many sick days a year and so the more I have to take in preperation for the surgery, the more unpaid leave I have when I am recovering from my surgery. Yikes! So I am very glad that Dr. Lane's office is letting me make those next three appointments all in the same day because it takes me over an hour to get there.

I have an appointment in two days with my sleep doctor because my sleep apnea is being seriously unchecked by my CPAP machine. The last time I was in there (2 weeks ago) she increased my pressure to 18 (the highest my machine will go I think) because 16 wasn't working. Well, it has made it worse! I don't have a problem breathing normally at that pressure but I will wake up in the middle of the night with my face hurting like nobody's business because of how high the pressure is. I have tried adjusting my mask to no end, all that happens when I do that is I can't maintain a good seal with the mask and that wakes me up in addition to the pain in my face. So I end up taking the mask off in frustration and sleeping without it for the rest of the night. Bad idea I know, but I don't know what else to do while I wait for this doctor's appointment. I wasn't supposed to see her for another 5 weeks but I figure I can't live like this. I stopped all my caffeine intake at least 6 months ago and in the last two weeks I have had to start every morning with a Pepsi Max (the one with all the extra caffeine in it) because if I don't I fall asleep at work, literally! I have actually had one of my students startle me awake while she was reading to me because I had fallen asleep. I didn't even know my eyes had closed! This is so not good. I hate that I am having to medicate myself just to do my job but if my principal does one of her surprise visits like she frequently does and catches me like this I am in SO much trouble. Plus I know that my sleep apnea could be basically considered untreated right now and so all of the health issues that sleep apnea helps to cause are being built on every night. I am so frustrated! I know the last time I was in to see my sleep doctor she said that if the new pressure doesn't work then I will probably have to switch machines to a BiPAP because it can do two pressures, and I guess higher pressures too? Which means another sleep study (whoopee-doo) and messing with my insurance because I just got my CPAP machine less than a year ago. We have been steadily increasing the pressure ever since. My sleep doctor also said we might have to rule out that something else isn't going on too, like maybe narcolepsy or something I guess. *sigh* I just want to wake up in the morning, feel rested, and not fall asleep when I'm not supposed to. I know WLS will supposedly help with that at least somewhat but (and I know I'm whining) I want it now.

Anyways, thanks for listening.

The appointment at Barix Clinics was okay. I don't think I am going to go there for my surgery though. I am concerned because the doctor I saw didn't seem to have much experience and it is not a real hospital. On the other hand, he told me that it was not healthy to be on the 600 calorie liquid diet for as long as my previous surgeon was going to have me on it. When I added that to the fact that being on it was causing some of my eating disorder-related issues to increase (such as wanting to chew food and spit it out just to have the experience of eating without the calories and the rigidity in my thinking about food and hunger and weight loss) I decided that I needed to stop the liquid diet. Realistically whatever surgeon I choose should be willing to help me where I'm at rather than make me meet unrealistic weight goals prior to surgery. All that to say, I still have my consulation in 9 days with Dr. Brian Lane in Bowling Green, Ohio and I am almost sure that he is the one I will go with even though it would be an extra $5-10,000 extra to have him do the surgery over my previous surgeon. I don't mind paying for experience though and I think that is what the price difference amounts to.

Since coming off the liquid diet 6 days ago I have regained 6 pounds. I am not happy about that even though I expected it. Biologically it makes sense that if my body starts seeing real food and extra calories (even if the calories are not in bizaare ranges) it will want to retain it. But it is hard not to be discouraged about this and think that I am fulfilling everyone's expectations of my inability to lose weight and eat healthy. I am restarting my food logs and my pre-liquid diet, low-carb, low-sugar meal plan and am hoping that since I was losing weight on it before the liquid diet that I will begin losing weight on it again (or at least not gain weight). Part of me is concerned that I made the worng choice in going on the liquid diet in the first place and that I have totally screwed up my body in how it handles food and weight. So I don't know, basically I am trying not to cry, not to be overwhelmed, and not to give up.

I have an appointment tomorrow with a surgeon at Barix Clinics for a consult. I don't know that I'll change over to him but I figured it couldn't hurt to get a second opinion and look at all my options for the surgery. We'll see how it goes.

I also have an appointment with my psychiatrist tomorrow because my surgeon is wanting me to switch from Effexor XR to Cymbalta so that I'm not so god-awful hungry while I'm on this liquid diet. I don't know whether I'll actually switch or not. I mainly want to find out what my psychiatrist thinks. Apparently Cymbalta has a side effect of making you less hungry.

My mom asked me today why I can't just stay on the liquid diet until I'm completely down to goal and just not have the surgery. I can't do that. First, this is getting harder as the weeks go by. Second, it's not real. Even if I did that I would get to goal weight and then balloon back up as I transition to real food. Third, I don't think liquid diets were meant to take you all the way down several hundred pounds. I know she is hoping that once I get down to a BMI of 55 I will realize I can do it myself and not want the surgery. I just don't see that happening.

Well, I talked to my surgeon and I can't have the Duodenal Switch because it leads to very high risk of osteoporosis at an early age. My family already has a tendency towards this so I don't think I should take a chance of going down that road. So I'm back to the Roux-en-Y. It's a good surgery too so I'm not too concerned about that. I'm also not sure that I'll change surgeons anymore either. My current one has a lot of experience with Roux-en-Y and is not as far away as Dr. Lane is. Ah well, I hate to look like someone who can't stick to things but what can I do? At any rate I can stick to things (ex., the liquid diet). It's just very hard to make the decision of which surgery is best for me. It's kind of been answered for me now and that's a relief.

An exciting development is that Dr. Myers figures based on the way my body has been responding to the liquid diet that I'll be able to have the surgery over the Christmas holidays or in early January. I had wanted to wait until June (and a small part of me still does) but most of me thinks that the best plan for me health-wise would be to stay on the liquid diet through to the holidays and go straight from the liquid diet to surgery without a break in between. That way I won't risk gaining the weight back from going back to "normal" eating and my health issues will be addressed all the sooner. If I really need to I can make it work to take the time off work for recovery. None of my IEP's are due during that time period and I would still have before and after surgery to work on my kids' alternate assessments so my job performance wouldn't suffer. I know that if I'm out that long during the school year it will affect my pay but I think my parents will probably agree to count helping me with living expenses as part of the cost of surgery (which they are loaning me the money for because of insurance being a butthead). So if I really can lose the weight I need to by then I will be able to have my surgery 5 months earlier than I expected! Yay! That has to be good for my body!

I had quite a scare tonight after I last posted. I had called my mom on her cell phone and one of my sisters answered. They were in the waiting room of the emergency room because my mom had suddenly lost vision in her right eye and had intense pain and pressure on the left side of her head. That was all I found out at that time because they were called and my sister had to hang up. Needless to say I was left a wreck. I called all my friends and my pastor and some people in my church to get everyone praying and guess what? God answered our prayers!! I just got a call from my mom. They did a CAT scan and it came back clear - no tumor or stroke. Her vision came back from wherever it had gone and she is currently only having a mild headache, which is probably from not having eaten. They said to follow up with a neurologist to make sure it wasn't anything else but this is so much better than all the scenerios I was picturing. Praise God, He answered our prayer! Also, He sent me many good friends to support me and pray with me. A couple that I'm friends with from church invited me to spend the evening at their house so I wouldn't have to be alone for a couple hours. After talking and praying we played Phase 10 and it really helped get my mind off of all my worries. Also, another friend of mine called and reminded me to make sure I drank all my supplements for today (which I hadn't, it completely left my mind). I thank God so much that He has surrounded me with such a good support system!