The Beginning of the End

Welcome to my blog about my weight-loss journey. First, I would like to thank my fabulously talented daughter for designing my site layout, and making my banner. Her Photoshop skills far exceed mine!

I know that I am not breaking any new ground by keeping a blog about weight loss. People have blogged, vlogged, tweeted, Facebook-posted, and shared their personal experiences on the internet for years in every possible forum. You can read about diets (from fad to sensible) and exercise ad nauseum. And you can also find plenty of personal experience accounts about weight-loss surgery, which is what I am going to be talking about. I hope to add something new to the mix by keeping this personal, yet humorous and light.

I was born a heavy person. In every picture taken of me as a kid, I am a little chubbo. I was always the one picked last for games because I was too slow. I was the girl hiding in the back during gym class, hoping that the teacher would not spy me behind the equipment. Seriously, what kind of person thinks that the average middle school kid can pull off a routine on the uneven parallel bars without years of training, let alone an uncoordinated girl with 75 pounds extra on her? "Oh yeah, let me pull myself right on up there and do a couple of Pak saltos or castaway-to-a-hip circle moves" (thanks Google).

My weight just slowly increased as I grew older until I found myself this year, age 50, and over 300 pounds. I am not afraid to share the number with you. I am quite obviously morbidly obese, and have never tried to pretend that I am not. What is different now is the looming health issues that were made patently clear by my last round of blood tests. "Pre-diabetic, high cholesterol, high blood pressure" are not the words anyone is hoping to hear from their doc. I had been churning around the idea of gastric bypass in my head for the last year or so, and that was just the motivation I needed. I really do not want to have to inject myself with insulin for the rest of my life. Changes need to be made for real.

So, here I am, on the verge of having a Roux-en-Y procedure. Quite literally, on the verge. I have done all the hoop-jumping for the insurance company- psych tests, physicals, EKG, stress echo, fitness tests. I have given what seems like gallons of my blood to the lab, to be analyzed centrifuged, and whatever else they do with vials of blood behind those closed doors. I have had a sleep study, been fitted with a CPAP (that story alone is worth a post or two), and have been educated on what will be my new eating habits for the rest of my life.

I started the pre-op liquid diet 4 days ago, and I am starving, crabby, and it feels like some little sadist is inside my head pounding on the inside of my skull like it is a taiko drum. But I will get through this too. Whenever I feel like giving up and eating a filet-o-fish, I just think of that poor 12-year old version of me in gym class suffering the humiliation of not being able to do a backflip on the trampoline.

So I titled this post "The Beginning of the End." I hope this will be end of many things- refilling prescriptions for hypertension meds, achy knees, sore back, swollen ankles, struggling to fasten the seatbelt in the car, angry (or worse, crestfallen) looks from airplane seatmates who realize they are stuck sitting next to me for the next 3 hours. I hope that a new, more confident me will emerge- one that can let the past go and look ahead to a different future. I just have to make it through 6 more days of this liquid diet, then life as I have always known it completely changes.

All I gotta do is pretend this cup of chicken broth is a Chipotle burrito.