Describe your behavioral and emotional battle with weight control before learning about bariatric surgery.

My weight has been up and down since my teen years. Sometimes I sought food for comfort, i.e. various flavors of Ben & Jerry's late in the night, smothering my feelings with ice cream. Very often I socialized around food, all my family enjoying wine, pasta, cakes and cookies together. Nearly everyone in my family is overweight, most are actually morbidly obese. I've tried diets, weight loss support groups and extreme exercise. It seemed the more I tried to attain a healthy weight, the farther I went in the other direction.

What was (is) the worst thing about being overweight?

The worst thing about being overweight was not truly loving and accepting myself. Others can be cruel, but nothing was ever worse than looking in the mirror and hating what was looking back at me.

If you have had weight loss surgery already, what things do you most enjoy doing now that you weren't able to do before?

I can do so many things since surgery that I was unable, or more often unwilling, to do before. I go in public and smile at strangers, I put on my makeup and feel beautiful. I am the person I always was, buried before under layers of fat. I have a healthy relationship with food and I'm passing this on to my children now.