jayner
I think I started gaining weight when I was about seven. The pictures of me at that time show me getting pudgy. I was always shy and had very few friends. We moved to a new town when I was in forth grade and I had no friends until fifth grade when we went to a different school. It was about this time that I can first remember my first wrong experiences with food. My mother had me clean of the table every night. Instead of throwing the leftover food into the garbage, I remember eating all of it. I felt that my mother was aware of what I was doing, but she never intervened. In sixth grade I weighed 124. I was about 12 when my doctor first mentioned my weight and eating. I did not pay much attention to him since he was enormous.
I first lost weight when I was a junior in high school. I was in a class play. I was so nervous that I could not eat for three days. I lost over ten pounds. I was so pleased, that I went on a low calorie diet and went from about 175 to 140 and stayed there for several years. Over the years I have tried many diets, from diets supplemented by injections of hormones found in pregnant women’s urine, to the usual Weight Watcher’s, Atkins’s, Jenny Craig, fen/phen. Everything worked while I was on it. Nothing worked in the long run. I know how to be on a diet. I don’t know how not to be on a diet. I finally quit dieting, since they don’t work for me. Last year I weighed my highest, 285. My husband and I changed the way we ate – no more seconds and we started eating out of red bowls. One red bowl was one serving. We each lost ten pounds and it stayed off.
My health is not great. I have Type II diabetes, restless leg syndrome, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. They are all well controlled by medication. My hip started aching two years ago. I used to be very active in a sport called geocaching where you go on a scavenger hunt, mostly in the woods, using a handheld GPS unit, looking for a “treasure” (usually Tupperware holding trinkets) that someone else has hidden. I loved it. Sometimes you have to solve puzzles to find the locations, other times the locations are given to you. They are always in GPS coordinates. I have been on some great walks. My husband and dogs often accompanied me. Geocachers are a friendly sort. There are often meets where they gather, share food and stories and go caching. They are seniors, families, nerds – a very accepting bunch. I gave this up two years ago because of my hip pain and would love to take it up again.
After that my weight fluctuated. I spent three years in college. Then I joined the Navy. The Navy had weight standards that I was always having problems with. I left the Navy after nine years. It was hard being a single female in the service, it was lonely moving without a built-in family support system, and I was tired of fighting the weight battles.
My PCP mentioned WLS to me in September. I told her I had no interest. I always thought it was the easy way out. My attitude changed over Thanksgiving. A member of my extended family was dying from diabetes. It really scared me. I thought about retiring in five or six years. I want to have fun when I retire. It didn’t look like that was going to happen unless I made some serious changes. I started looking into WLS. Two facts changed my mind. The first was the statistic that five years down the road, the success rate of people my size who lose weight by diet alone is 0%. The other was how effective WLS is against making diabetes disappear. I was hooked.
