melitza03

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Had my DS surgery with Dr. Prachand at the University of Chicago in July of 2007.

Over the next two years, I lost, got down to just about 220 lbs for a minute... and then regained.  Hovered around 245 lbs for a year.  Now, 4 years after surgery, I stepped on the scale and was rather depressed to see it read 265 lbs.  Still about 80 lbs loss from where I started - but 40 lbs over where I was, and more than 100 lbs over the "ideal weight" for a 5'7" gal.

I'm more active than I was pre-surgery, with higher-intensity activities.  Since I am young, and have fairly active friends, that's been something I've been very thankful for.  But the mental depression and beating-up and general angst that comes hand-in-hand with being obese is now exponentially higher than it was pre-surgery.  I've already "pulled out all the stops", and I'm still fat.  I gave it all I had, and I still stalled at 220 lbs, then crept up to 245 lbs, then could not budge an inch in either direction for the life of me.

 Then budged an inch in the wrong direction.  The scale read 265 lbs last I stepped on – though admittedly, the last month or two I wasn’t showing nearly the same level of discretion with my sugar/carbs as I usually do.  265 lbs was a huge slap in the face though.  Being under 250 lbs was a comfort level for me – that’s the “safe rider weight” listed on most bicycles.  It’s the threshold a few airlines were putting up for “passenger weight allowance on one ticket”.  It was… well, it was an accomplishment at 245 lbs, if not of meeting my end goal, but at least of having kept off 100 lbs from where I started.  But at 265 lbs, it all suddenly comes apart.

I’ve gone back to being much more militant on low carb, high protein, though I haven’t gone cold-turkey on the carbs – yet.  I’ve been increasing water intake.  I’ve been kicking up the intensity in interval training.  I’ll watch the scale and see if I can’t get back to the “comfort level”, but I don’t have any grandeur illusions of being able to meet goal this way – I never was able to before, after all, and I have only those awful statistics looming over my head.

It might be time to look into getting resleeved.  I haven’t had a tight stomach from the beginning.  I had very few times where I remember eating so much that I felt “over-full” and might have stretched my stomach, and yet I still find myself able to eat comparable volumes to non-DS friends.  That doesn’t sit well with me.  I consciously try to limit my intake – am consciously improving the diet choices – am consciously exercising more and harder – but I still find it very difficult to have a positive outlook right now.  I’ve already had surgical intervention, after all - and I love my DS - and I am thankful for what I have lost... but need something more.

A fat kid…

I have always been overweight –, I was always in the upper 90^th percentiles in the height/weight categories, even as a baby.  I had the height to make up for it for awhile – but eventually I stopped growing vertically, and kept going horizontally.

I remember my family doctor making a snarky comment at a very young age – that yes, I had baby fat, and yes, I was still growing, but that I really needed to work at losing some weight, because the only was I would “grow out of it” was to get “freakishly” tall.  I think that was my first memory of going to the doctor; it made me feel embarrassed and ashamed, especially the way he’d talk to me as if I “just” had to eat better, I “just” had to exercise more.

What is “exercise” to a pre-pubescent child, pre-computers and gaming consoles?  I was tomboyish enough.  I grew up with two brothers and mostly male cousins around my own age.  I rode bike for miles and miles around down almost daily in the summer.  At school, I was always the first or second “girl” picked on the playground sports teams because I was the most athletic.  I did exercise – I was active.

I ran and played and did the same things as my brothers – ate the same things as my brothers – but they grew out of the “baby fat,” and I didn’t.  Soon, my parents started heeding the doctor’s warnings, and the difference in treatment stung.  My dad would frown and recommend we not have hot dogs and macaroni and cheese (my favorite foods as a child) anymore.  My mom would offer us cookies or some treat, and my brothers would take a handful each, and I would get my hand slapped away if I went to take more than one or two.  I’d be solemnly reminded that I didn’t “need” it, but I was still hungry, and I wanted the same treatment as my brothers – the same as I’d always had.  The difference in treatment between me and my siblings was palatable, and it hurt.

I don’t know whether it was the physical pangs of hunger, or the realization that I wasn’t going to be allowed to “over”-indulge, but soon, as an adolescent, I developed a more unhealthy relationship with food.  Whenever the opportunity to eat unsurprised arose, I would begin to gorge myself.  If my intake was always going to be limited to where I was still hungry, then I was going to eat as much as I could when I got the chance, to make up for it.  I remember getting up in the middle of the night and sneaking a row of cookies back into my bedroom, where I’d scarf them down as quickly as possible before I’d be caught, and they’d be confiscated; I remember arguments about where the leftovers went the next morning.  I remember being “caught in the act” and punished, but the punishment was never really more than the sense of deprivation if I didn’t do it.

I went from chubby to fat to obese, all before I left grammar school.

Adolescence…

I hated going to the doctor because even if I was going in for a cold, or the flu, he would always take the opportunity to harangue me about my weight.  I was popular in grade school though, and so during the day at school, I pretty much forgot that I was different from anyone else – until I got home and the food-discrimination would remind me again.

The first time I remember being judged by a peer was on the bus, where a kid from another school tapped my shoulder and held a flip notebook in front of me.  “You have a very very very very very very very very….”  He flipped the page.  “FAT ASS!”  I calmly left the bus at my stop, then ran all the way to my room and sobbed for hours.

I started dieting by 5^th grade.  I would try not eating; I would stop doing normal “playing” and begin “exercising”.  I wasn’t riding my bike for fun down the road anymore – now I was going out with the deliberate goal to meet a certain amount of time, or a certain number of miles – a certain amount of sweat, a certain amount of muscle pain.  It stopped being fun.

I kept gaining weight.

My mom took me to a behavioralist-psychologist-quack.  He put me on prozac, even against my mom’s insistence that it wasn’t a mental problem – not like that.  No results, I stopped going.  I went and saw a dietician for awhile; again, nothing.  I was eating quite reservedly at the time (pop tart for breakfast; pop tart for lunch; maybe a granola bar sometime in the afternoon, family dinner).  Even the dietician admitted the caloric intake wasn’t so bad – but it was “all the wrong stuff” of course.

By junior high or high school, I was sick of it.  I was sick of constantly obsessing over food, of being deprived what everyone around me was having and still being so goddamn fat.  If I was going to be fat, then I was going to eat whatever the hell I wanted.  My friends yo-yo dieted around me, losing and gaining and having crazy mood swings and otherwise going to extreme measures to lose the 30 or 40 pounds they were overweight.  30 or 40?  I wish.  I was over 100 pounds overweight, and gaining.

I was 280 pounds by sixth grade or so – after that, I’m not really sure.  Our scale at home only weighed to 240 pounds, and I had since learned a very strong avoidance to going to the doctor because he was only going to make it seem like every ailment I had could be traced directly back to my obesity.  (You have the flu?  If you weren’t so fat, you wouldn’t get sick so often.  Your eczema is flaring up and making it so you can’t even sleep at night?  If you would lose some weight that would be manageable.)

I was probably around 330 pounds by the end of high school – hard to know for sure, since our home scale cut off at 300 pounds and I was now avoiding the doctor unless death seemed imminent.  I continued to exercise like crazy, I tried to limit my portions, but none of it matter anyway, so I came to terms with what I was, and what I had always been: fat.

Young adulthood…

I finally reached a snapping point when I became extremely sick in the middle of my freshman year with something that was like terrible strep throat with nausea and tremors.  I came home mid-week to see the primary care physician I had had most of my life, and he didn’t even do a strep test.  Instead, he sat there and “caringly” told me how if only I would eat several small meals a day and exercise, I would be so much healthier.

I was only able to fit in like 2 meals a day in the dorm due to a very hectic, intense schedule, and since I didn’t have a car at school, I was walking more than I had in my entire life.

I cried the entire way home, showed up at my mom’s office and wept there too.  I don’t get sick often; unless I felt like I was dying, I had learned to buck-up and avoid the doctor’s office since I was child and had that same down-talking from that same man.  I didn’t go to be told how “if only I’d try” – I had been trying my entire goddamn life.  What the hell did he know about it?  I came because I was too sick to even attend classes, with strep throat.

I called back to the same office, scheduled an appointment with a different doctor, and went to him.  He listened to my problem, did the tests needed, prescribed me the meds I needed, and I was on my merry way, with nary a word about how my laziness made me fat.  I wonder how much mental anguish I could have saved myself if I had just switched doctors at a younger age, instead of waiting until I got home to let the sense of failure wash over me and lead to hours of weeping.

I started reading up online about weight loss.  It’s sad when studies show that fewer than 10% of people can maintain weight loss using diet and exercise alone – but it’s heartening to realize I wasn’t the indolent, lazy person my doctor had always insinuated.  “If only you would ACB, if only you would XYZ, then you wouldn’t be fat” my eye.  Someone who was forever-skinny wouldn’t understand.

I made up my mind to have weight loss surgery.