spartan488to300
My story is that around the 4th grade I started to really gain weight. My mother was a single mother and we grew up on social assistance. Money was always tight and she did the best she could with what we had but this meant a lot of low cost, low quality food. I lived on a steady diet of Hot dogs, chips, Kraft macaroni and cheese etc. I also was a total video game addict and would spend hours playing Atari (late 70's early 80's version of a x box lol).
These things combined with self esteem issues from a father who was seldom present and when he was around was very destructive and critical of everything I did culminated into the perfect storm of emotional eating, lack of exercise and finding comfort in my room and food.
My one saving grace was that I also loved sports and would play on every team in school, basketball, soccer, cross country, track and field etc. Although I was very heavy I was also fairly talented and could make up for my lack of conditioning. The real problems started when I left elementary school for high school and my talent was no longer enough to carry me through with the bigger pool of athletes.
I then learned to play guitar and spent all my time in my room playing video games or guitar.I still was an emotional wreck and even worse as the pressures of high school mounted. In elementary school I was in a class of 45 kids and we were all friends pretty much. In high school I was in a class of hundreds and was the fat kid who no one knew.
The more crap I took the more I isolated and ate. My attendance in school was poor but my grades were good so I could get away with not going to school any more then I absolutely had to. In my senior year I got hired at a local factory making great money in a union job. Coming from such a poor back ground I jumped at the chance. I worked in a foundry for the first year and a half and the heavy physical labor with the unbelievable heat and 12 hour days caused a drop in weight and an improvement in my health.
After a year and a half as I started to get some seniority I bid to an assembly line where the work was much less strenuous and my weight went from around 285lbs to 385lbs in about 6 years. At the point when I was knocking on the 400lb mark working on the line was becoming very physically difficult so I bid on a job driving a fork truck. In just a little over a year I found myself in the 450's and by Aug of 2006 I weighed in at my heaviest every at 488lbs.
When I weighed in at 488lbs I got scared and got serious I started learning about nutrition and exercise. By Christmas of 06 I had lost over 60lbs and was in the 420's doing good. i was lifting weights, eating like a body builder and walking at least 3 miles a day. Then my back went out over the Christmas holidays. Every since then I have been plagued with back and leg pain and injuries which have made it extremely difficult to exercise. These problems have also played havoc on my emotional eating as I am depressed with the place I have let myself get to and when my back goes out I am sitting with nothing to do but think and I eat to try and cope with the feelings of failure.
I have been approved by OHIP my heath care provider to have RYN weight loss surgery and will hopefully be seeing the people at Henry Ford Hospital soon to set up appointments and dates. I joined out here because I heard there was a lot of good info and people to help in such a journey. I am again watching what I eat and working out with a new vigor as the security of the surgery seems to take some of the pressure off. I have been hesitant to miss work ext from the back injuries and scared of the emotional eating but with the knowledge that surgery that will be a great tool to help me take control is there I feel more confident at exercising in preparation for the new life I need to work toward and build.
My diet goals are to slowly make my way to the very diet I will have post op so that after my surgery it will not be such a drastic change. Also to lose quite a bit of weight pre op to make the surgery easier for the surgeon and reduce the chance of complications.
John Bradley Boughner
