A BIG SURPRISE!

So I am not heading home for Christmas since my surgery is on the 19^th.  My family is very large and getting together for Christmas is a definite must. We do the whole shebang! I love my family and this will be the first Christmas I will not be there or even celebrating it. I will be in Salt Lake City in a motel with my husband recovering. I am bummed and kind of glad, glad as in the next time they will see me I will be completely different. They know I am having surgery for my endocrine and metabolic disorders but not that I am having WLS. Only my immediate family knows I am having WLS.

So anyway I think I am going to kind of avoid them for about 6 months, which will be easy since I live about 400 + miles away. I want to totally surprise them with a completely different me! I want them not even to recognize me lol Kind of like on the TV show “What Not to Wear" with Stacy and Clinton and the big unveiling of their newly refashioned client. I want to just SHOW UP and AMAZE them! Speaking of surprise my ten year reunion is in summer of 2013, that’s another surprise for all my old school mates.

Did anyone else surprise someone with their weight loss like colleges, old school mates, family or friends? I want to hear your stories. I love hearing stories like this!

 IDK but has anyone ever told you that you are a dead ringer for Ally Sheedy??

Nope but she is pretty:) I think that picture kinda does but I just added more of my face shots so you can get more of idea of what i look like.

I had my surgery while my daughter was away for her first year of college on the opposite coast. I always loved her friends and my home was theirs whenever my daughter was around. While her best friend had seen me over Christmas, it went from Sept. to the end of May before I saw the entire gang. I was invited to a welcome home dinner for my daughter. When the "kids" opened the door, I was treated to screams and squeals and hugs. They were so amazed and excited for me that I was blown away. Two of the girls are full time students at the SF school of design, over 6 foot tall and part time models. I have known them since elementary school and know they went though periods of near childhood obesity. They have worked hard to be healthy and refuse to go to the lengths of unhealthy dieting required to really break into modeling. They could understand my struggles and were absolutely thrilled for me.
I usually don't like it when people I know, that I haven't seen in a while, make too big a deal over me. One woman told me I had changed in every way. It made me feel that she must have only seen my fat if she thought that because I don't feel that I have changed at all. She is the same woman that made me angry before surgery by telling me that I was really going to have to change my eating habits if this was going to work. She didn't know anything about my eating habits or my health problems! Oh well I have avoided her for two years.

Thanks for sharing Gail:)
I am sure when seeing someone for the first time in awhile they are going to be suprised. I agree with you though about the negative attention and with the consistant talking about it.

I guess when people say your completely different, they must have not truely known you before or they are specificly talking just about your body. I know I will change after surgery, I will be more confident and outgoing like I used to be. I have been basicly a hermit. I don't want people to see me and how my body is embarrassing. I basicly have cut out all my friends from my life, to only speaking to them on the phone or txt messaging. I don't want to be seen in public for chance someone my reconize me. But that is a whole other ball of wax.

But like you said you never really change deep down:) your the same person in a different body.

 No,  some of you changes deep down too.  And there are lots of stories about relationships with friends, famililes,  lovers,  etc etc changing after weight loss.  Some for the better, some not.

Until I had cancer in 2001, I had always struggled with my weight but was never obese. My fattest clothes were 16s and I didn't stay in them long before dieting my way back down. But, having my thyroid out and a year and a half of infrequent meds and constant steroids while undergoing radiation piled on over a hundred pounds in one year. I was a lifelong dieter and tried everything I knew to get the weight off. I'd lose 30 and regain 40. It just would not come off.

I wanted to be invisible. I was too ashamed for anyone to see me like that except for my immediate family and my closest friends. I was a veritable hermit, too. When I lost the weight after my DS, the comments from people I hadn't seen in awhile were all about how I hadn't changed.

I was at a funeral of an old friend a couple of years ago. A bunch of the attendees hadn't seen each other in 10 years or so. A couple of women commented on how they were getting fat. One of them said, "EVERYONE is getting fat! EXCEPT Kelly!" If only they knew....

 I am in that same boat and I can completely understand all those feelings, except the cancer. But being so ashamed of yourself messed up and a lot of us here have to jump those mental hurdles just as much as the physical ones. How long did it take you to feel normal? or at least close to :)

It took me about a year although I kept losing weight for another year. I had a nice long, slow window. I was a size 12 at one year, a 6 a year later and I am still a comfortable 6. I'm old as dirt and my friends are all coming into that middle-age spread. But, I'm not.

It's a miracle!

I felt normal as soon as my weight was normal. I was never happy at a 12, but that wasn't an embarrassing size for me either. That's when I started reconnecting socially.

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