Describe your behavioral and emotional battle with weight control before learning about bariatric surgery.

A part of me has held on to being fat, because I resented being taken less seriously as a big woman. I have always been overweight, since I started school at age five. My entire life experience has been filtered through that of a fat girl. I remember w/ great clarity the idiotic things people would say in front of me all through my life, like "If I ever got fat I would kill myself." When these kinds of messages are being force-fed to all of us from birth, is it any wonder the levels of suffering we end up experiencing, regardless of our weight or body shape, really. I've always wanted to prove that I could be successful and intelligent and awesome as a fat woman, and I have been, but often at great cost to myself. I have to work harder to achieve the same results. At different points when I was able to lose weight, I found that others did treat me differently--but I also "betrayed" myself and acted differently, felt differently, lived differently. I find that when I "lose" my battle w/ food and weight, I live w/ varying degrees of denial, and those layers of denial and repression are themselves heavy weights to lug around. I am TIRED--tired of the weight, both the literal weight and the emotional weight, that I drag around with me. I am SICK of beating myself up all the time. I am DONE w/ hating my body.

What was (is) the worst thing about being overweight?

The feeling of being out of control, of lying to myself and others, of "wearing" my sadness/failure/fear in the form of fat, visible to the whole world. I despise being judged based on my body, especially the judgments of ineptitude or a lack of intelligence or laziness. I hate feeling distant, or "removed", from my body so much of the time, and those times when I am called back to it are usually unpleasant, like feeling like a stuffed sausage in a plane seat or being unable to cross my legs. I feel "stuck" in my body, unable to be who I really am. That is the worst of all.

If you have had weight loss surgery already, what things do you most enjoy doing now that you weren't able to do before?

Well, I had the lap-band in Jan '05, and the initial weight loss was incredibly invigorating. I could wear clothes w/ some degree of true pleasure, I could crouch on my knees without acute suffering, I could cross my legs, I could be more adventurous w/ my husband (in many ways...), and I could act my age, be more myself. But I got pregnant about 9 months after my surgery, and things were never the same. Now, two children and 7 years later, I am back to what I was right around the time I got my lap-band, and my health has declined. I had to have a revisional surgery in 2009 b/c my band had slipped. Now I can't wait to take the next step and get the RNY. This time I will not turn back.