Love the part where you said that you were determined to achieve your dreams.

Me too. I *wished* for a lot of different things/activities back when MO. Now that I can do them, I DO them. I do not wait.

For me, the biggest things I learned is that one really CAN DIET and not lose weight. DIET and get worse blood tests ...workout and still remain MO.

Having learned that firsthand, and seeing how things were going wrong when I was doing everything right, I learned that it is OK and to "burn it all down" and do "something radical" to achieve that radical results I needed.

I learned NOT to listen to Negative Nelly's (different people...in different period of my life) who tried to dissuade me oout of surgery and tried to convince me that I could do it on my own.  I did the process three times before I went through surgery. I let myself be scared/dissuaded/logic'ed out of it TWO TIMES before I finally had faith and saw MY decision through.

I'm going to put a different spin on this, and talk about what WLS has taught me about all the years I spent SMO and struggling.

Getting my DS and FINALLY being able to lose weight AND keep it off has taught me that I was way too hard on myself for way too long. I wasn't weak-willed or a failure---I was simply different metabolically than those around me. It also taught me that, when I first started thinking of myself as fat, I really wasn't---I just wasn't skinny. It taught me that having a positive self-image can even make a difference in how you LOOK, not just how you feel. And it taught me that life is too short to not do what you want to do, RIGHT NOW.