What was your "light bulb moment"?
My moment came at age 41. My father and my sister both had heart attacks at 43. I didn't want to follow in their footsteps.
I was relatively healthy for a 35-40 yr old woman weighing 280 lbs at 5'2". By 41, though, I was getting tired more easily, my blood pressure was creeping up, and my right knee hated me. I had seemed to inherit my mother's genes as far as heart problems went, but I was diagnosed as being pre-diabetes-my father had type 2. I didn't want to chance it, so made the decision to try to have surgery after my very awesome PCP made the suggestion.
From 2005-2008, I really wanted the band, but had no insurance, didn't qualify for Medicaid, so I wasn't able to have it, so I gave up. Looking back, it would have been a disaster in more ways than one. I wouldn't haven't been successful because my mind wasn't in the right place...and most bands have ended up being super bad news.
I wish my mother had lived to see me how I am now. She passed away in 2005 when I was 33 and still M.O.
I woke up in between a memory and a dream...
Tom Petty
Living life healthy is something many people take for granted. You had to work harder and be more proactive. Good for you.
Me and my mother had a lifetime of weight adventures. I learned as an adult that when she was 37 she lost her first big loss..100 pounds on weigh****chers. Then my parents went to Hawaii for 3 weeks. A trip my mother planned for a year. My favorite photo of my parents is them smiling in Hawaii on their last night.
My parents got off the plane. I had been hit by a car and had 2 operations on my arm. My 16 y.o. brilliant sister was pregnant.She would go on to be a horrible mother to a sickly kid. My mother gained that weight back over the next year.
Oops I got a little deeper than I wanted but I have the lows and highs she has but I don't always have to follow the paths she showed me. She was very happy about my RnY and she lived to see me get a transplant. Some of the last words were..don't gain that weight back! Her real last words was "malt?"
My mom never really had a weight problem until she quit smoking, but even then her heaviest was 160 at 5'7". Her solution? Start smoking again. It's not really funny, but the thought makes me giggle for some reason. Oh, Mom.
Even with her being thin most of her life and me being heavy all my life up to her death...she never, ever told me that I needed to lose weight, even though she was probably thinking it. ( not saying your mom did that, but I know women whose mothers are/were like that. ) My dad, on the other hand, rarely shut up about my weight. (He wrote the book on ****ty parenting. )
I woke up in between a memory and a dream...
Tom Petty
I had a few . One was when I discovered this site and simultaneously learned that bariatric surgery existed and could offer a permanent solution to my lifelong "runaway body" problem.
Another real eye opener was on the bariatric ward when I found out none of my fellow ( thirty or so ) patients had been here and most knew nothing about post op eating vitamins health risks NOTHING! At follow up doctors visits I heard horror stories about not being able to eat at all and about obstructed bowels from forcibly eating the wrong things directly post op .
Most of my ward mates did not change their eating or non-exercising ways and so lost very little if anything - a few got super sick .
This is how I learned why docs happily do less of a surgery than patients need to keep off all their excess weight. Because most bariatric patients don't comply at all ! ( shocking but true)
another eye opener for me is the link I discovered in overeaters anonymous meetings between childhood sexual abuse and morbid obesity ( self protection) . Now I also see a link between my own faulty boundaries and over consuming whether it's food drink or something else.
