WarEagle
Goodness, where to start? I've been overweight all my life, or at least as much of it as I can remember. I know I was obese by 5th grade. As I moved on to junior high and high school I tried unsuccessfully to lose weight. I became the funny guy with the great sense of humor to compensate for being the "fat kid" who was always made fun of. I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that.
This didn't change through high school or college and I became the guy that girls loved because I was "funny, smart, romantic, caring and would make Some Girl very lucky." I figured out that SomeGirl was her first name and her last name was OtherThanMe. So, self-esteem was somewhere in the gutter and what makes you fell better than food, right? I ate when I was depressed, when I was angry, when I was tired and when I was bored. Of course that made me gain MORE weight which just made me MORE depressed. Ugh.
At some point I decided I was tired of being overweight and started dieting and going to the gym religiously. After 3 years of regular exercise and watching my diet I was down to a BMI of 39 and it wasn't going to go any lower. No matter what I did no more weight was going to come off. I still thought WLS was something that other people did and that I could lose the weight without it. After two more years of trying to lose weight a good friend looked me in the eye and said "You're always going to be big. That's just the way it is."
I realized he was right, but I wasn't willing to accept it. That's when I started looking into WLS. I read everything I could about it and started doing all the pre-requisites for my insurance provider. I was told that WLS isn't a magic cure-all, that you still have to think about what you eat, exercie and be committed to a healthier lifestyle. Hey, no problem! I think about food all the time as is! I love to exercise and one of the incentives for the surgery is so I can do a lot of the activities I enjoy more easily.
So that's what brought me here and I guess we'll just have to see what happens.
