my struggle

Dec 03, 2008

My Struggle, My Choice
As an overweight American I can tell you with some authority that dieting does not always work. If diets worked would the industry make $40 billion a year? (U.S. News and World Report) According to the national center for disease control thirty four percent of all adults over the age of twenty are obese in this country. (centers of disease control). “The proportion of Americans who are severely obese -- at least 100 pounds overweight -- has quadrupled since 1986 “.(Fauber)
Every year more and more of these Americans are choosing to undergo gastric bypass. “Gastric bypass is a surgical procedure that creates a very small stomach; the rest of the stomach is removed. The small intestine is attached to the new stomach, allowing the lower part of the stomach to be bypassed”. (Surgery Encyclopedia)
My weight problems started long before I was old enough to understand what I was doing to my body. As a child my mother would not let any of us down from the supper table until our plates were clean. To this day I can still hear her telling me “there are starving children in Africa that don’t get dinner, so finish yours.” The rule that my mother had when I was 5 has never left me. To this day I will finish everything on my plate weather I am hungry or not, weather I even think that it taste good or not. I wonder all the time if I was allowed as a child to leave even a bite on my plate would it make a difference? I think that it could have.
I remember going on my first diet at the age of twelve. At twelve, an age where every girl wants to be popular and no one wants to be the butt of all the playground jokes, I was the outcast and a easy target for others. My brother, that is a year older, and I deiced on our own that we were going to go on a diet. So the diet began without any direction or knowledge as to what that meant or what we should be doing to make ourselves healthier. I thought that I was going to starve to death the entire time. We weighed ourselves everyday for that week! At the end of the first week I had gained three pounds and he gained two. We had failed and our first diet. Granted we had no clue what we were doing, nor did we have the tools to succeed, but in my twelve year old head none of that registered. I was just left feeling helpless and a prisoner in my own body.
By the time I reached high school I had learned to cope with my weight and lack of self esteem by becoming the class clown. If I made fun of myself first then no one could beat me to the punch. I had pretty much given up on dieting. I had convinced myself that I was happy fat, it became my identity. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year I found a new group of friends. Friends that accepted me and made me feel like a part of the group. These friends partied a lot. We drank every night and smoked pot when someone could find some. I started to thin out a little that year, I didn’t have time to eat, I was too busy with work and school and keeping up with this new group of friends. Now don’t get me wrong I was still far from thin. Weather it was the drugs and alcohol or me just becoming more comfortable with who I was, something changed. I didn’t think about myself as being “fat”. I carried out what I would consider a normal social life. Friends, boys, parties these were all things that took over my life.
I continued to party after high school, and while I was too busy having fun the weight began to creep on. Shortly after high school graduation I moved out of my parent’s house and into an apartment with my friends. I went from parting only at night and only on nights that I could get my mom to let me go out, to parting every night, and most days. The calories in beer alone are enough to pack the weight on but I did the double whammy. I was working at McDonalds. All of the food I was consuming in my life came from there. It was free and I could have as much of it as I wanted. The pounds just started packing on. For three years that was my life style, eat at work and drink beer at night. I gained fifty pound in those three years.
Then at the age of twenty I got pregnant with my son. I now had the right to eat whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and not even have to feel guilty! I was eating for two and I was going to take full advantage of it. That isn’t how it worked out though. I was sick and miserable for most of my pregnancy, everything that I ate came back up. When I was admitted to the hospital to have my son I weighed less than I had in six or seven years. While the doctors currently recommend a weight gain of 25-35 pounds for a singleton pregnancy. (Splete) When I left the hospital with my son all of my clothing was too big. What a great feeling that was. I weighed less that day then I did on my fourteenth birthday.
No one told me how much my body was going to change after giving birth, and I had no clue. I was so busy with the new baby that I did not even realize that I was gaining weight. I put on a pair of jeans one day and couldn’t get them buttoned up. I truly thought that they had shrunk in the dryer! I continued to pile the weight back on and before my son was a year old I was back to the weight that I had been before I got pregnant. That was not a wakeup call though. I did not stop there. I continued to eat my way past pant size after pant size. I was now numbing all of my emotions with food.
When my son was three I realized that my weight was out of control. That is when the dieting really began for me. At first I was unprepared and unknowledgeable. I didn’t know a thing about how to lose weight. To me it was as simple as if I eat less I will weigh less. Although this is true on some level it is much more complex. So I began to just eat less than I was before. I was still eating the same things, and I still had no clue what exercise was. For months I starved myself. I lost a few token pounds but nothing to write home about. Knowing what I know now, I was setting myself up for failure. How long did I really think that I was going to be able to live my life hungry? When you are starving and the scale is not moving, or at least as fast as you think it should, it is impossible to continue. In the end not only did I gain what little weight I had lost back, I packed on some extra pounds for good measure. Now I was the heaviest I had ever been.
When my son was thee and a half my sister told me about this diet. The only thing that I had to do was eat this soup every day. Cabbage soup every night for dinner, how hard could that be. I could still eat what I wanted during the rest of the day? But for dinner it was cabbage soup. Now even in my ignorance I thought how is this going to work if I can eat whatever I want the rest of the day, but my sister assured me that there was some chemical reaction that the cabbage soup had in your body that burned the fat while you slept, and when you are desperate you will believe anything. For the next three months I ate cabbage soup every day. Again I lost a few token pounds but again it was not anything great. Soon I grew really sick of the soup, the smell alone was enough to make me not want to eat, and soon I began to stop eating it. Again I gained the weight back and again I gained some extra while I was at it.
This type of yo- yo dieting would be my life for the next few years. When I would yo –yo up it always seemed to go higher than it ever had before. I tried anything and everything that someone told me would work. You name it I am sure that I have tried it. Ok maybe not everything, I never got the shots of pregnant woman’s urine, yes some people did. During these years I the one thing I did get was an education. Every diet book I bought or read about in a magazine taught me something. I started to learn what it meant to eat healthy. I learned what a balanced diet was, and I started to understand what it was really going to take for me to get this weight off.
I joined my first gym as my birthday gift to myself the year I turned 26, I really started to get serious about losing the weight. I would spend two sometimes three hours a day at the gym. The people there were encouraging and I felt better in my body than I had in a really long time. I enjoyed the workouts and I was always amazed with myself when I could do something well. I was sure that I was headed in the right direction and that as long as I stuck to it that I could be thin and more importalny healthy. However without even realizing it I began to self destruct. I would miss a day at the gym one week. Then the next week it would be two days. I started eating a ton of fast food, and before I knew it I was gaining back all the weight I had worked so hard to get off.
Over the next few years I tried with vain to lose the weight. By this point I had all of the tools I needed. I understood what it was going to take to get the weight off but mentally I wasn’t ready. My head was not in it. After three different gym memberships, a personal trainer and a dietician I was heavier than I had ever been.
With in months of my thirtieth birthday my body began to give up on me. I started having pain in places I did not know I could have pain. My hands hurt so bad most days that I could not tie my own shoes. My feet started hurting; it was becoming more and more difficult to even get out of bed in the morning. Walking on the concrete floor at work was pure torture; I went to see my doctor for the pain. He ran some tests and then sent me to see a rheumatologist that same week. Within two months I went from healthy and functioning to barely moving. It did not take long before I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.” Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic disease, mainly characterized by inflammation of the lining, or synovium, of the joints. It can lead to long-term joint damage, resulting in chronic pain, loss of function and disability.” (Arthritis Foundation) Soon I was taking twenty three pills a day just so that I could get out of bed in the morning. I dreaed going to work everyday, something that I had always enjoyed, and keeping up with my son and the sports was proving more than I could handle most days. Now I was in a place that I did not think I could get myself out of. How was I ever going to get the extra weight off when I could barley move? Even through all of the failed attempts I had never considered that maybe I couldn’t get the weight off. I had always belived that it was just a matter of will power, that if I could muster up the will power I could lose the weight. Now the grim reality of it was that I could barely move, I resigned to the fact that I was going to live the rest of my life in this body that I did not like and did not work. I would live with the pain for the rest of my life and never be able to keep up with my son and do the things that I wanted to be able to do with him.
Then in the summer of 2008 a lady at work began to tell me about gastric bypass. Gastric bypass was something that I had always dismissed. I had always thought that there was just way to much risk involved in doing it. I also thought that by having gastric bypass I was giving up, that it would be like admitting that I was weak or lazy. I did not want the people in my life to think less of me because I had to have surgery to lose weight, that I couldn’t do it on my own. But now what did I have to lose? So I listened to her, every day she would talk about her experience, about what the surgery had done for her in her life. The more she told me the more I realized that the things that I had heard in the media may not be the whole picture. She convinced me to go to an informational seminar held at a local hospital by a well known surgeon. I was still skeptical about the procedure, but at this point in my life at least willing to entertain the idea.
I went to the seminar that night with an open mind. What I took away not only changed my life but changed the way that I look at others that have made the choice to have a bypass. I had this misconception, like a lot of Americans, that it is the easy way out, that having a bypass is for the people that are too lazy to get up and move or do not have enough self control to watch what they eat and exercise. These things could not be farther from the truth. Bypass is just a tool, if you have a bypass done and do not use it as a tool but instead think that it is going to do all of the work you will gain all of your weight back. The more that I learned about the procedure the more that I realized that not only was I wrong about it being an easy way out but that this procedure was my only hope. Without the surgery I would not be able to be a participant in my son’s life or my own life for that matter.
With the advancement of technology and the perfection of the procedure, the risk once associated with gastric bypass is no longer significant.” The long-term benefits of gastric bypass surgery in preventing death will likely outweigh those risks, according to new research.” (WebMD) So on January 12th, 2009 I will change my life forever. I have decided to have the surgery, to save my life, and regain control of my life. This means a lifetime commitment to eating healthy and exercise. There is a long list of things that I am going to give up for the rest of my life, but it also means a longer lifetime, one that has less pain and more joy. For me Gastric Bypass is the answer, not the easy way out and not a magic pill, but a much needed tool to help me regain control of my life.


Arthritis Foundation. Arthrits Disease Center. 2008. 29 november 2008 .
Splete, Heidi. "Guidelines for pregnancy weight gain focus on the new trends." Family Practice News. 15 Feb 2008.
Surgery Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of Surgery: A Guide for Patients and Caregivers . 2007. 1 december 2008 .
U.S. News and World Report. Money and Business. 8 June 2003. 30 November 2008 WebMD. Studies Weigh Risks. 7 october 2004. 2 December 2008

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