Matt x.
I have always been heavy. As a young child I would be one of the last kids picked in gym class for sports and was the source of many jokes form my peers. As I entered Junior High, I began to lose weight and by the time I was a sophomore, I had placed muscle in the place of where I had fat. I spent the next 4 years at a sensible weight and then started to slowly gain. Ten years later, I found myself feeling the same I did as a young child with jokes and comments of strangers and coworkers. I didn’t want to believe that I had become fat again even though I knew it. Things really sunk in when I was flying on a work trip and a man sitting next to me asked the attendant if there where any other open seats on the plane because he couldn’t sit next to someone as big as me. I was mortified and angered because I sat in a constant bear hug position and thought I was completely on my side of the seat. Anyhow, I could hear the other people’s mumblings behind me and I spent the rest of the flight ashamed.A few months later I was on a hunting trip with some old college buddies and they would stay up until after midnight telling stories and having a good time and then roll out of bed at 4:00am for a full days hunt. I had to go to bed by 8:00 just to keep up.One night on that trip I lay in bed listening to my friends having a good time and I started to imagine being able to bring my son and daughter hunting some day. My son is 2 and my daughter is 1 so I imagined myself in another ten years. The thought of my weight on my joints, my high blood pressure, and my inability to keep up with the other hunters made my wonder if I would be able to take my own children out in the woods. I no longer cared about being an object of ridicule on the plane; I had to do something so I could be a father to my children now and in the future. When I returned home from that trip in early December, I began researching weight loss surgery. Within in two months, I had the surgery and I am now on the way to the new me.
I think part of the reason I want this so bad is that I have known what it was like to be fat and thin. I spent years wishing to be back at the size I was in my late teens and early twenties and I didn’t want to spend another year of ducking out of holiday photos, deleting pictures on our camera that my wife would take of me, or staying up at night before a flight wondering if the person next to me was going to publicly humiliate me. And of course best of all, I will be a healthy and active participant in my children’s childhood!
