Getting Back on Track

It's nearly 3 years since my VSG and 2011 hasn't been such a great year up until three weeks ago. After last Christmas I guess things started going down hill. I could eat a little more and lost that feeling of restriction , although my meal sizes were still quite small. I started gaining weight and with the weight came depression. It was a vicious cycle. I gained 6kg (about 12lbs) in 6 months. The lightest I had been was 89kg (196lb) and then had gone up from there.

I went back to the surgeon and he ordered a barium swallow which showed there was some dilation. He talked about resleeving but the cost is so great I don't want to go there. I felt that the money I spent on the original op was completely wasted. I had a session with the surgeon's psychologist which I felt was a complete waste of time - I did vent a bit, but came away thinking that my responses were completely normal even though my feelings of frustration and despair were very on the surface. Thats pretty healthy IMHO.

I was enraged that I seemed to be eating so little and yet gaining weight!!! So in my anger and frustration I got hold of an app which would track my calories so I could demonstrate what I was eating. It was a motive of "I'll show them!" more than anything else. After trying a couple and finding them wanting I stumbled across myfitnesspal.com with a huge database of foods already analysed. So joined up - after all it was free. I was reading through the FAQs (I'm a good Netizen I always do that on joining a site that I intend to hang out at) and came across an article "I eat 700-800 calories a day why am I still gaining weight?" Well the light went on BIG TIME. I realised that I had a habitual starve/binge pattern that I had been unaware of simply because there weren't 1000's of calories involved in the binging bit. I had not realised that chronic undereating is completely defeating the body's natural metabolic rate. I also thought that my metabolism was broken beyond repair. I was wrong.

I started on the MFP guidelines and ate my necessary calories for the day every day - and gained a little to start with, but have been steadily losing ever since! I am so stoked. Anyway I feel as if I am back on track. The operation gave me a kick start and now it's basically up to me. Wish me luck.

Major NSV!

NSV = Non Scale Victory or Non Surgical Victory.

I am still stunned at my achievement. I have never walked 10k before in my life, but here I am at the goal of the Soda Springs, which is the first leg of the Tongariro Crossing. The Crossing is a famous hike in New Zealand which stretches between two mountains, Mt Ngaurahoe and Mt Tongariro in the Tongariro National Park. (Look it up on Google!)

I knew I wouldn't be fit enough to get up the Devils Staircase - a nearly vertical climb - but wanted to reach the goal I'd set myself of getting to Soda Springs, almost 5 K into the trek. I did expect to be able to rest up before the return trip, but the weather was pretty dismal and if we had sat around in the wet we would have become very chilled, so we made the return trip straight away.

I couldn't keep up the pace of the rest of our party, but took my time and completed it with aching legs and a soaring spirit at my achievement. I must say that without the encouragement of my Best Buddy in the World I don't think I could have made it.

Tears for Fears - and Weight For It!

I have a motto - Be Prepared! This means that any and every disaster that could befall me has been well thought out in advance. Comet coming down on the motorway? Yep I've thought that one through. Earthquakes, tsunamis, fire, flood and famine - all grist to the mill of my active imagination. I don't think I'm morbid as some people suggest, I'm just being practical. When an emergency does occur (as it does fairly rarely) I am the one with the plan of action. Mostly. When something happens that I haven't thought of I have been known to freeze up completely. Like the time a naked madmen went berserk, rampaging through our house and out to the woodpile which he then proceeded to throw through our windows (which were closed at the time). I didn't have a plan for that.

So in preparing for this surgery I was well aware of the things that could go wrong. Its a very risky procedure and can result in some pretty serious hospital time and even death. Until my stomach is completely healed I still run the risk of leaks, which is the serious hospitalisation scenario. What I haven't been prepared for is how smoothly things have gone, and I now have that nagging feeling that something is bound to go wrong because its all gone so right. That is all horse-feathers of course. I have to pull myself up and have a damn good laugh at myself.

I have added a weight converting widget on the sidebar because, being a New Zealander we are all metric. I weigh myself in Kilos. Due to the fact that I am quite oldish, Kilos mean less to me in weight that Stones and Pounds do so I convert the Kilos to Stones and Pounds. On the American websites that I frequent, however, the weight standard is just Pounds, so I also convert to Pounds also in order to communicate in American. I found a nifty website which I will put in my links which gives you ALL the weights at once. I love it. The gadget is a very cut down version of what they do. I hope someone else enjoys playing with it as much as I do.

Compulsion and Obsession

Now I know its not a good idea to weigh oneself daily, I know that weight doesn't come off evenly, I know that I will drive myself crazy if I keep doing it...so why do I do it? I am an obsessive person - anything can be done to death if its done by me. I have even had a knitting compulsion that was both bizarre and dangerous at one time. Dangerous? Have you ever tried knitting and cooking at the same time? It gets ugly real quick.

Mercifully my obsessions come and go, I'm completely over online poker now that I play Second Life. I always seem to have one or two on the trot at one time and never have I been without something. Maybe they are just hobbies? Normal people have hobbies right? Stamp collecting? Ugh! I contemplated stamp collecting once and worked out that there are so many stamps in the world over a long period of time I didn't stand a chance of getting all of them - so why bother. And when does a normal activity become an obsessive compulsion? I don't know the answer to this question as this is how I have always been.

My compulsive eating is what got me into this shape in the first place, and to me it was normal. I have always been a little crazy around food, and a little nudge of emotional upset could lead to complete eating meltdown. When I was medicating myself with alcohol and other substances, food wasn't too much of an issue, my crazy eating was sporadic as alcohol mainly did the trick. But I do remember many years ago getting up in the middle of the night and grabbing the jar with the icing sugar in it and putting a whole tablespoon in my mouth as I heard someone coming. I jammed like the whole tablespoon in! And discovered it wasn't the icing sugar jar at all. It was the cornflour jar. Oh, btw, cornflour is not nice when you have a whole tablespoon in your mouth!

When I stopped drinking is when I started eating in earnest. Its not just about stuffing the pain down either. I wanted my body to be fat and hideous, to match the way I felt about myself on the inside, and also because I could not deal with being attractive to men. I had huge issues around that. I was deeply conflicted about men. I loved them and detested them. I wanted power over them and fell victim to them over and over again. I limped from one short term encounter to the next. My one long term relationship in my twenties was completely dysfunctional. My body in those days, when I was drinking, was the wide hipped big breasted variety that was lusted after by seemingly every man that came along. I always got sucked into thinking that someone might just care for me and want to be with me. Very sad really. And so my body image became distorted and I piled on the fat as a protection from the pain I felt inside. The longing and loneliness got buried. What I wanted and what I felt was of no value at all and I denied myself - everything. Everything but food it seems.

Can I leave the protection of the fat behind? Have I grown enough to not be pushed around by the actions of others? Its a scary thought.

Diet Drinks Make You Fat?

In the course of my research this week, as I try and ignore the food cravings that the VLCD has brought on, I found this little gem on the Science Daily website. Someone had posted the link the the ObesityHelp forum. Now I know that diet drinks weren't good for you (I didn't really care about that - I get 'bad for you' overload), but the research suggests that artificial sweeteners actually make you fat! Well it proved to be the case in rats anyway. And many people, like myself, who feel that drinking diet *brand name censored* is a safe option for the craving for sweet things are cruelly misled. What an irony. We do face an obesity epidemic today and there has to be links with food and drinks that are current in these decades as opposed to 50 or so years ago. Boy it made me feel mad, ripped off, and mad.

I am very emotional though, everything is 'right there' - but I feel good. This is the 2nd to last day of my VLCD and I'll certainly be glad when its over. On the positive side, never have I enjoyed steamed veges so much. I have had a wide variety and have learned to cook them to perfection. I put the carrots into the steamer first and a few minutes later a couple of pieces of cauliflower and 2 minutes before its ready I put in a few mung beans. Oh very exciting!

I've lost about 6 kilos (13lbs) so far, although the weight loss has stopped over the last couple of days. The body has some wierd and wonderful tricks to hang onto that precious fat. At the moment its trying to slow down my metabolism to conserve the depleting stores of fat. But if I go for a short sharp walk it can overcome this. Walking is hard when this happens because the tiredness messages come in thick and fast. Oh ho ho we are on to you now - fat cells in your millions! Prepare for war!

eViL CruD

Well its the close of day 4 on the VLCD (eViLCruD) diet which I am on for 14 long days before surgery. I was thinking today, I should be grateful that the days are stretching on forever, it will make my life seem longer...

Its not really that bad. If you can imagine drinking 3 glasses a day of flavoured wallpaper paste, supplemented with 1 cup (thats ONE cup) of steamed vegetables and having your mouth taste all crappy and not being able to even think about the pizza ads as they flash incessently on the TV, and being completely exhausted from such a low calorie intake, then you can see its not that bad. Thats what VLCD stands for by the way, Very Low Calorie Diet, and it is loooowwww. 512 calories by my rough count. Oh I forgot, the 8 glasses of water are a bonus.

All this process is necessary to shrink the liver which is probably (almost certainly) full of fat. As the surgery is laparoscopic the surgeon needs to get past the liver to find the stomach, so if its bloated and oozing with fat it will make the whole thing that much more tricky. For tricky read very dangerous.

The way I feel about it is that this is the beginning of the journey, not the op itself. I am taking part in preparing my body for what could be a risky procedure. I am losing weight rapidly at this point at around a kilo a day (2.2lbs) which will slow down over the next few days. Funny how I feel so positive. I had expected me to be curled up in a sobbing heap by now, chewing at my knuckles and whimpering over steaks past and/or future. I am mentally preparing myself for the journey ahead which will involve very close attention to getting the correct amount of proteins and fluids..basically for the rest of my life.

There is a misapprehension among some people that WLS is "an easy option" or "cheating". Hmm, I don't think so. Its not a magic wand, and if the correct diet and exercise regime is not followed then results can be very disappointing - so I have been reading. But that does bring my thoughts around to how other people react to this. its not just WLS, its how other people are when you are obese. Its such a visible condition. In fact its almost as if thats all that people see, theres no hiding it if you are fat. And it is a fact that a fat person is much less likely to land a job if competing with a similarly qualified thin person. And lots of other stuff about fatism that I can't be bothered writing. Everyone has a helpful diet they want to share, and it seem that everyone watches to see what you are eating all the time too. What a paradox! Visible and yet invisible as a person. I saw a very cool picture on a fellow travellers blog.

Bariatricgirl. It was a photo of her face, slim, with the words "When I was obese, when I WAS obese, when I was OBESE, I was a photographer, musician and artist. No one saw the photographer, musician or artist. They saw obesity.
-Yvonne McCarthy

Very awesome statement.

Why Weight Loss Surgery

Yes indeed, why weight loss surgery? Doesn't that seem a little drastic? Surely if you just ate less and exercised a bit your weight would be under control. Have you tried this cool diet that my friend did and lost 10 kilos! Hey you look great the way you are, don't get hung up on your looks. Etc etc etc.

2008 was one of the more miserable years of my life - not the most by any means - but miserable in that I have so much to be grateful for now, but am not. A nice house a nice job, car, loved one, in fact everything I ever wanted, except to be a manageable weight. Misery that was deepening into solid depression as I knew in my heart of hearts that nothing had ever worked and probably nothig ever would. Every attempt to lose weight had failed, after briefly succeeding, and every failure brought more weight with it. My health has never been so bad and mornings waking up were like coming back from the dead. The diabetes made me feel like crap and all motivation to get up and move around was being sapped by the discomfort of my body. And I knew it was all downhill from here.

Obesity is a very misunderstood condition, and as a fat person I know that it is a two edged sword. One one hand you become invisible almost, as fat is not what people in general want to see so they look away. That in some ways is a good thing, as I don't like some types of attention. Fat protected me in my early years, a security blanket, and I didn't have to deal with the wolf whistles or bottom pinching brigade that a girl with a figure like mine put up with as a matter of course. I had an hourglass body, with large breasts and wide hips and a little waist and it drove the boys crazy. I still have an hourglass shape, but now it is 52",47",52" not 36",26",38". Anyway that was a long time ago. I still like to be invisible most of the time and observe people from a quiet corner. The other side of the sword is that fat kills you. Slowly and surely your life expectancy shrinks and you begin to realise that insurance companies would not insure a risk that most likely will be dead by next week - according to their charts and risk profiles.

I went to a psychic last year, more for a giggle really and to keep my sister company as she wanted to go. Some of the things he said were extremely uncanny in their accuracy but he said two things that I thought were frankly irresponsible. One was that my diabetes wasn't going to be a problem for me in the future (I didn't tell him I was diabetic but he could have guessed from my size) and secondly that I would live to 110. Well in my condition I would be very lucky to make another 15 years, but it did give me a sense of hope in a funny way, even though i didn't believe it.

So what happened? Around July or August i think it was I had watched a few programmes on obesity that had weight loss surgery as a theme, and found myself crying over one poor chaps experience. He was hugely overweight and had managed to lose the required weight to be eligible for the surgery, only to be told by the hospital that he'd done so well that they felt he could do it on his own without the surgery. I just wept for him as I knew that he, or we, cannot do this weight loss thing long term on our own. And even though I wasn't his size, I knew I could be. Then in October there was another programme, a New Zealand one, with a group of women being interviewed who had had WLS and a surgeon, I can't recall the details, but I gleaned this information. a) Obesity is a medical condition and that once your BMI (body mass index) is over 35 you are just not able to lose weight as the body has a self balancing function with regards to weight - in other words its not your fault, and b)WLS has a remarkable side effect in that type 2 diabetes often goes away completely as soon as the surgery is done. And c) that after surgery patients did not experience the same hunger pangs that had previously led them to overeat! There is a lot more information out there available and I won't go into that, as this is just a person journal of my impressions and not a comprehensive study on WLS.

When my dearly beloved came home I talked about it with him, what I thought, what I wanted and mostly, what it would cost. He was so supportive that I was deeply touched. I had expected some resistance, or skepticism, but no. He said - what's another 30 years life expectancy worth?

I made an appointment with my GP the next day and went and put my case to him. To tell him how I felt about my weight and how helpless I was in the face of my repeated failures to lose weight made me feel extremely vulnerable and I confess I sniffled a bit which made me feel even more embarrassed. But lo and behold! He was supportive too! He didn't say - You're not nearly fat enough - or anything like that. I am in fact morbidly obese, a whisker under a BMI of 40 but with diabetes type 2 it puts me in the morbid class. He simply gave me the number of a bariatric surgeon and said he'd write the referral!

I felt like I had been given hope again, without realising just how hopeless I had started feeling. I had been given another chance, yet again, to turn my life around in one more area. Another part of the healing jigsaw puzzle that has been my life for the past 20 years. (Maybe more on that later.)

Next question is Why Blog? Why put out what is so personal and private in such a public forum? I don't know the answer to that, maybe that will come later.

Tomorrow the journey starts.