525, 600 minutes (one year surgiversary-with pics)

mljohns
on 1/29/16 7:26 am

DS on 01/27/15

To borrow the lyrics from the song Seasons of Love from the play Rent...."525,600 minutes...how do you measure. measure a year".

Indeed, how do you measure a year since I started my WLS journey? Here's the hard cold numbers:

January 27, 2015 weight 235 lbs (I've been as high as 248). Five feet tall, BMI 49.5, type 2 diabetic with an A1c of 12.5, dress size 24/26, jeans size.....didn't wear jeans, only had stretchy pants, blouse 3X.

January 27, 2016 weight 130, still five feet tall, BMI 25.4, in diabetic remission with an A1c of 4.8, total weight loss 105 lbs, dress size 8/10, jeans size 8--all I wear is jeans now, no stretchy pants at all (except my work out clothes and bike shorts), blouse s/m.

How do you measure what it FEELS like?....there is no scale or measuring tape for THE feeling of losing 105 lbs.

I, like many on this forum, have been fat my entire life. Chubby kid, fat teenager, even fatter adult. So I never knew what it would be like to be "skinny". I had no reference point. Unlike some, I was not a wallflower due to my weight and rarely allowed my weight to keep me from doing anything I wanted to do. One exception....zip-lining in Hawaii (I knew they wouldn't have a harness big enough). Of course there were difficult times being fat, when my father yelled out "Hey KoolAid" at my junior high graduation (remember the large pitcher of KoolAid in the commercials)....or the time my boyfriend proposed marriage....if I would lose 50 lbs (I lost 185 lbs-his weight-I kicked him to the curb). So now that I'm "skinny" and everyone tells me,"don't lose any more you'll just disappear" how does it feel??? In a word....strange.

Strange that I can shop in any store I want to....strange that friends of many years don't recognize me...strange that I don't recognize myself sometimes...strange that a regular sized bath towel fits around me completely-with room left over...strange that I can see and feel bones that I didn't know existed...strange that I now own more sweaters than I have in my entire life put together. Yes strange.

Here's another word....happy. Happy I am now in diabetic remission and am no longer on insulin or any other kind of med....happy that this surgery has been successful, that I was able to get this far and not fail...happy that for the first time in many years I'm not afraid I'll die of some diabetic complication. Yes happy.

One last word....thankful. Thankful to my two co-workers who had WLS a year before I did and were successful. Watching them go through their process really opened my eyes-this isn't the easy way out...Thankful to my surgeon who was strict and extremely skilled....Thankful to this forum for reading the stories of others who were successful and thankful to those who shared their failures as a warning....and of course thankful to my loving husband who married me at 195 lbs and thought I was gorgeous...who still thinks I'm gorgeous at 130 lbs and has been with me every step of the way. He prepared his own meals when I was on liquids and soft foods, took off work to be with me after surgery and continues to put up with my incessant talking about myself and my journey. Yes extremely thankful.

I'm a very outgoing person in real life, but rather private online. I rarely post pictures. But as a thank you to all of you who post your pictures and with hopes some one who is just starting out on their WLS journey may be encouraged by one more person who made it-so far.... here's my before and after pics.

So what does the next 525,600 minutes have in store for me....only time will tell.