Welcome aboard, I also am a 31 year old married mother of 3, and I too was seriously thinking about the VSG! you are not alone, I know this is really hard, but it can be done! and it takes time, so many wonderful changes occur when we decide to change our lives, and a lot of those changes dont come easy, and at times they bring a lot of pain with them, they also bring a lot of joy, and when you are done walking through them, the great thing is that on the other side there is a whole lot more joy and peace to be had! I have been through a lot during my journey to health and weight loss, I have been overweight my whole life, at my highest I was 322 lb's I am 5'8" and I have lost almost 100 lb's so far.  I am willing to help you and show you some good resources if you would like, I understand the anxiety and depression part of this journey as well, I think something that would be a great place for you to start is with CBT (cognitive behavioral therepy) I have a great resource for this if you are interested. feel free to ask me any questions, I know there is hope for you, and I pray that you get to that place, where you can see that there is hope for you as well!
God Bless you!
Michelle     

Stacy, thanks so much for your post. As a matter of fact it did help!! I can tell by your post that you were blessed with a naturally optimistic personality and that is wonderful! I think that's a huge part of my problem. I am a very pessimistic worry wart for sure. I feel like since I've never been able to lose for the long term that at 31 I'll never be able to.

Another big thing for me is that my mom died a few years ago at only 46. I watched her struggle all of her life hating herself and her body and food. Many years of my childhood I ate fast food because my mom simply wasn't eating or eating very little. The years she was single I lived off mcdonald's which I loved lol! She worked harder than anyone I've ever known at a horrid factory job that I'm sure would've been shut down today! So back then it with her trying not to eat it was just easier for  her to feed me that way. Looking back I know she really didn' t think of the consequences. She never ever judged me for being a chubby kid and I know for sure she didn't want that for me. I don't think she ever truly realized how bad eating that way was for me even though nowadays it seems ridiculous not to. 

So as I get older the one thing I know for certain is that life is so very short. It breaks my heart to know my mom wasted so many years battling with body and food issues. I don't want to waste anymore of my years doing the same thing. So I tell myself some days that maybe this is just my thing in life. Maybe I was just meant to be fat and do the best I can with it. On days like that I think what a waste it is being so miserable about my weight when I might be this way forever.

Then there are the other types of days when I'm too fat and out of shape to go on a field trip with my daughter, or ride amusement park rides with them or take them swimming. These days hurt so deeply that I almost can't breath. These are the days that I tell myself that refuse to live another second like this.

More often than not though the pain I feel on those days is usually stuffed down by my old stand by which is drive through fast food or something chocolate. Then I feel even worse and there the cycle goes. I just don't know how to break it.

Anyhow thank you for your post. It is very important to me to not get to feeling so sorry for myself. So many people have it so much worse and at least this is a problem I can do something about whereas my mom's cancer was out of her hands.

I think weighing in each week here may be a good idea for me. Lately I have stopped weighing because when I see a gain it would freak me out and cause me to binge for days. I know that staying in the dark about my weight won't make it go away though. So posting my weigh in's here might just help keep me on top of it at leas a little more.

I want to start by saying hello to everyone here. I've been on OH for years on and off now and most recently was thinking about the VSG. However like others have mentioned even in my darkest hours when I feel like it's the only option I have, well it just never really sits right with me. As someone else here mentioned I felt like I could never be at peace with it. I believe that surgery does wonders for many people and who knows maybe someday I may be one of them. For right now though I just can't and don't want to do it for a variety of reasons.

I am a 31 year old married mother of three. I'm five foot one and a half (gotta have that half in there lol) and weight right around 285. I've gotten to the point that I can no longer go into the store and buy plus size clothes because even the largest size doesn't fit anymore. I'm the dreaded apple shape body which is terribly hard to find clothes for as well as terribly unhealthy. After three c-sections my lower stomach is...words cannot describe but you can imagine.

My children are all eight years old and under. I have NO energy to play with them or to clean the house or do anything at all. I see people twice my age out doing things with more energy than I have.

I have battled weight all my life but was never morbidly obese till about ten years ago. I had always been maybe 15 or 20 pounds overweight in my youth and teens. Then at 18 I took phen fen and got down to about 118 pounds I think it was. I felt wonderful and looked even better. Problem was I was also doing drugs and drinking so it was not a good time.

Fast forward a year or so later...I had gotten off the phen fen and held my weight down for a bit. Then I met a wonderful guy and stopped drinking and doing drugs. I started seeing a therapist and working on many of my issues. I also started on a merry go round of antidepressants which finally stopped when I found prozac. Prozac worked wonders for me and I feel gave me my life back. So here I was at a decent weight and with my emotions doing better as well.

Then in about the course of a year I gained over 100 pounds. To this day I don't know what it could have been other than the prozac. I expected that once I was off the phen fen I'd gain weight back. However I only took the drug for two months and lost forty pounds on it. So at about 21 years of age I found myself weighing about 235 pounds and I was devastated. I tried other antidepressants but none worked for me like Prozac.

So I figured I was happy for the first time in my life and just dealt with my weight. Over the course of the next ten years I was pregnant three times and had gestational diabetes each time. Durning these pregnancies I always lost my appetite and really didn't care about food. So because of this it was very easy for me to stick with the diabetic eating plan. I also lost a minimum of forty pounds with each of my pregnacies and sometimes more. Each time as soon as I had the baby it was like a switch flipped in my body and I was ready to eat again. Each time the weight piled back on and then some.

So here I am today at 31 and nearly 300 damn pounds. I'm scared and don't know what to do. I really would like to go to therapy again but simply cannot afford it. I've been trying to read about food addiction and to learn how to change my hateful attitude about food and my body. However none of it seems to be working. At the longest I can manage to do well for about a week and then I start binging again. I feel like I have so far to go that I could never do it. And my greatest fear is actually putting the work into to losing all this weight only to gain it back. I could not take the heartbreak of that again.

My oldest daughter who used to be very thin is starting to get heavy. We don't eat very healthy and I want to change that. There are so many changes to be made that I just don't know where to start. I swore to myself I wouldn't pass on my warped eating habits and body image issues to my children but I already have with my oldest. I feel like if I can get a grip on my family's eating and wellbeing now that I might save her from going through all i've had to. Don't get me wrong I'm not going to put my child on a diet, I just want all of us to be healthier.

I've done every type of diet there is and I don't want to do a diet anymore. Even though I think WW can be great and has worked for me in the past, I just don't want to deal with it. I don't want to count points. What I want for the first time in my life is to just learn to eat normally without counting and pressure and without guilt. I want to sit down the way my husand does and just eat my meal and move on. I don't want to be like my best friend who is a size 2 and still hurts just as much as I do when it comes to the pain of body image and eating. She still goes through hell with it just as much as me. I just don't want that. I want food to be food and that's it.

So how does one start? Hell I just don't know. I've tried babysteps and I've tried big major overhauls. For me nothing has worked. You hear over and over again how bad the statistics are for losing any weight and keeping it off much less over a hundred pounds. Yet I see people who have done it so I know it's possible. Is it possible for me though? Honesty I really don't know but I'm hoping and praying it is.

I look forward to talking with you all here and gaining as much insight as I can. If anyone actually managed to read this whole long babbling thing then I cannot thank you enough!!!

Wat to celebrate the positives! Keep it up, you are heading in the right direction. God bless you! Have a great week and take one day at a time.

Strive for consistency.

Being consistent every day is tough. You may want to think that because you made healthy choices yesterday it's ok to slack off a bit today.

Consistency may seem boring or frustrating at first, but it becomes a very satisfying way of life once you get used to it. You learn you can trust yourself, and you begin to feel more grounded.

Action for the day: If you were going to be more consistent with your new healthier lifestyle, what would your life look like, ideally? In your journal, describe this lifestyle. Then live it for a few days. See how it feels to nurture yourself by being predictable.

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