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Weight this morning (technically second day of Slimtime)- is 276.8.  I have this awesome scale which you use bluetooth with and gives you FAR more information you could possible use!

So going to do monthly checkins so I can keep track.

Weight: 276.8
Muscle Rate (19.5% - Low)
Body Water (27.5% - Low)- this is weird as I drink TONS AND TONS of water
Bone mass: 6.6 (Excellent)
Metabolic Age: 75 (:(  - I'm only 62, soon to be 63, want to see this get closer to my real age)
Viseral Fat index - 28 (danger)
Subcutaneous fat (26.0% - High)
Fat Mass: 166.2 lb
Muscle Mass: 54.0 lb (low)
Protein Mass: 22.7lb (low)

Body Type: Recessive Obeisty.

So LOTS to improve - increase muscle mass, lower fat mass, bring down my metabolic age....

2 weeks today is surgery day - it is currently 11:04 so almost to the minute this time two weeks I'll be under and the surgery will be started...

Had my first Slimtime - mixed with cubes of decaf coffee and using the chocolate, blended with ice and water - it was actually fairly good!  Interested to see how the vanilla pans out as that seems to be universally disliked.

I meant to stand on the scales this morning and take my measurements but will do so in the morning as groggy, I had my shower and washed my hair so forgot all about it. Wet, my hair is past my hips and HEAVY so will wait until tomorrow.  I need to take pictures too - but therein lies the rub.  Without a word of a lie, I have literally avoided mirrors like the plague for more years than I care to count. I literally do NOT use them. I avert my eyes, close them, avoid them as if I were some hard-bitten vampire who was afraid to have the reality of a souless existence proven by NOT seeing their image. When I capture an inadvertent glimpse of self in a reflection in a store window or passing by a reflective surface, I cringe inside and feel mortified and appalled that that large person is ME.  It always perplexes me how I find my friends of a similar size (or larger)- simply beautiful and lovable and can see in them true beauty while I afford myself none of that honest and deeply felt belief.

There is a part of me that is incredulous that I'll ever be successful at this yet the core of me is determined and implcably set on making this WORK.  I do not for one second think that the surgery itself is the "magic wand" - rather, it is in my opinion, a sort of "jump start".  For someone who has been thin for parts of her life (sometimes extended time periods)- I am well aware the bad habits, the emotional triggers, the psychological implications are not dealt with by a laser rerouting parts of my body.   The whole "get healthy", "losing weight" thing begins and ENDS in my mind.

To that end, starting today, I began a diary to myself - with post-its to remind myself to return at regular intervals and read the warnings I intend to post to myself - the moments of inattention, the moments of "I've got this" - the moments when the scale begins to implacably inch up and up and up.... I have also looked at and come up wtih some realistic parameters - about timing, about giving myself forgiveness for slight backtracking, about  being realistic about goal weights, and most of all about keeping my mind on what is important.

Perhpas it is being 62 (soon to be 63) but vanity is the least of why I am undertaking this journey. Rather, I want to be flexible again, I want to be able to walk without pain, I want to get on a damn airplane and NOT have to ask for a seat extender (at this juncture, refuse to fly as I was so humiliated last time I was on a flight which was the FIRST time in many, many years I had flown and had to use them).  For me, at this point, I want to enjoy life moving forward and that means hiking with my dogs, going on walking tours, getting back up on my bike which is my Zen machine...

I'm glad it has taken this long to see the end of the journey (knock on wood).

First, there is a slight chance my surgery may be delayed - which would be devestating. Not only am I mentally, physically and emotionally ready to do this, but the realities of my situation mean that would really be problematic. I retired early (Summer 2017)- because it was that or my mother would have to go in a home and I wasn't having that. So I left my job and my husband I moved to Brockville after 36 years in Toronto.  She moved in with us- timely as it turned out as she had a very bad fall literally weeks after we moved in and was in rehab for 8 weeks in Montreal.  I took her straight from rehab to here and she has been here since, struggling at times but at 94 doing remarkably well.  

I have arranged with my sisters to take her for about 7 weeks.  One sister for four weeks (in Montreal) and one of my sisters from California has taken a leave of absence of three weeks to look after her (also in Montreal).   I need that time to prepare for the surgery (she would freak if she saw me on a liquid diet - the Slimtime regime beforehand)- the surgery and then the recovery period - when I will be adjusting and becoming accustomed to the "new normal".  So keep your fingers crossed that they allow it go forward.  The nurse practioner appointment I had in January was abruptly and with no notice to me or the Telehealth I was attending, cancelled. I followed up with numerous calls and eventually it was rebooked - for the DAY of my surgery.  More phone calls later and finally I had it two weeks ago - only to be told they may have to postpone. They are doing their best to make this work, so here's hoping.

The reality is that I am glad it has taken me the better part of two years to get here.  When my surgery came up last year (around March 2018) I had to say no as my mother was deathly ill (they predicated she would live only weeks - she fooled them!)- and I was scheduled for a lumpectomy and suspected cancer in my breast (benign thankfully!).  But truth is, I wasn't mentally or emotinoally prepared to go forward - had doubts and worries and reservations.  When I restarted things again in September, because of the time differential, i had to (almost) start from the beginning.  It has been a revelatory journey and I find now I am fully prepared to go forward with zero reservations or reluctance.  

The conclusion I have reached is that while physically I craved the surgery - mentally I wasn't ready for the kind of commitment the outcome demands.  Here's the thing - the physical part of it is really only the least of it -where we have to find the desire, the commitment, the passion to change is all inside our brains.  It is no secret that most obese people have a complicated, confusing and often unhealthy relationship with food.  I am no different.  Oddly, spending the 8 weeks (every day 7:30 a.m. to 7 pm) in the rehab with my mother opened my eyes to many things, not the least of which is WHY I have this unhealthy relationship with food. She is the opposite of obese, she is tiny, thin and eats sparingly, grazes more than anything albeit she eats what she wants. But what I did see is that she herself has a complicated and confusing relationship with food - and without planning it, passed that onto to her children.  She was born and bred in Ireland (I was born there but came to Canada when I was five) - and that culture itself has a preoccupation and passion about food that means walk into any Irish household and you open your mouth, and you WILL get food shoved into it!

This is one of the cultural implications of my food issues - and one I have diligently been dealing with over the past year - and i think successfully. While I still love cooking and feeding people (bred in the bone)- I am finding ever day, food itself is becoming simply something I fuel my body with.  When I was first weighed when I first entered the program at Toronto Western, I was a scant 3 lbs from 300 .... I am now 276 - without actively dieting or becoming obsessive, but as the program demands, being "mindful" - it is astonishing how constantly checking yourself, being aware of what your eating, slowing down and really looking at and deciding, do I want this? WORKS.  I have trying to train my mind into looking at food not as something I emotionally crave, but something I simply need to be healthy, energetic and positive - and when you look at what we are anticipated to eat after the operation - it truly shows how our society has lost sight of the reality of how much a healthy body needs to exist.

Surgery Date: June 11, 2019 - 11 a.m.

So ready to move on, to start this new journey.  This is the second time around going through the process (not following through the surgery during the first journey)- and for the second time, have the two hour nutrition course still to come (April 15).  But mentally, and emotionally, I'm there- ready to make the changes that need to be made, say goodbye to a lifestyle that has brought me to the brink of despair. The reality is I'm miserable the way I am now.  My life is one of existence and disappointment, not one of enjoyment and goals met.  

I'm not sure how others feel, whether they, like me, feel as if we live a half-life.  I think of things that once I dreamed of - travelling, hiking, exploring new vistas... to simple things, jumping on my bike, heading out to pick up a few groceries, cycling downtown to grab a coffee.. those are beyond me at the size I am now.

I am trapped in this body - I feel myself deep inside, yearning to escape the clinging folds which envelop and smother me and oddly, I feel excited about the radical journey which starts after the even more radical reorientation of the unseen under the skin changes.  It's time.  I'm ready to do it. To make the changes. To say goodbye to things that once gave me the fleeting simulation of pleasure, to choices that created the prison I now inhabit.

Onward.