I Miss Being Fat

The title is accurate.  I miss being fat.  As you'll see in the picture at the end of this post, I was fat.  I topped out about 2.5 years ago at 350lbs.  When I say I miss being fat I don't mean I miss how I felt physically, I guess what I mean is that I miss knowing where I stood in society.  I was on the bottom rung on the ladder of life and I KNEW that, while maybe I wasn't happy there, at least I knew my place.  Now that I'm 170lbs lighter, my social status fluctuates according to where I am and who I'm around.

When I'm with my family and friends or when I'm at church, let me tell you, I am on top of that ladder, lol, but then, out in public, everything changes.  I will give you a few examples of this.  Last April I drove cross-country with a friend of mine and I was wearing pair of jeans.  It got warm in the car and I pulled the hem of the jeans up so they looked like long shorts.  We stop in Ohio at one of their "plaza" things (which are really cool, btw) and I'm in the bathroom and I finish up and after washing my hands next to these two women I start to walk out and hear this woman say to her friend "why do skinny B*tches always wear their pants like that?" I walked out of that bathroom with the biggest smile on my face!!  My friend was dumbfounded that something like that would make me smile. 

My next example is several examples of the fact that I get hit on.  Something that NEVER happened to me.  Just the other day as a matter of fact, I was IN TRAFFIC, and a guy noticed my blue and green tattoo and Seahawks flags on my car and this conversation happens

Jeep - "nice tattoo (wink, smile)"
Me - Thanks
Jeep -""where ya watchin the game? (wink, smile)"
Me - "with my husband! (BIG SMILE)"
Jeep - (returns smile) "Alright!"

Going into public places in cause for different anxieties.  I no longer worry that people are making fun of my 200 extra pounds, now I worry that my extra skin is bulging or sagging on my upper body or legs and arms.  Or that everything that society tells me I should care about looking like won't be represented any particular moment.  Sometimes it doesn't bother me but then, sometimes it does and there's no real way of telling when that might strike.  But then I think that's universal.

I think there is a myth or misconception, however that people who have this surgery are suddenly cured of every insecurity they've every had.  Let me tell you that is categorically untrue.  I am still 350lbs in my head.  I still don't recognize myself in mirrors sometimes.  I still spend a few extra minutes looking at myself in a mirror every now and then (however vain that sounds) because frankly I'm just so surprised that It's me looking back.

Looking back at my 350lbs life,  I couldn't move.  I was in my mid-thirties married over 10 years to a wonderful man, we had a young son and I could not participate in our life. 

Don't get me wrong, until that point, I had tried everything.  I had done everything under the sun, diets, exercise, The Biggest Loser!  Pretty much anything that said it would help me lose weight, I was gonna try!  None of those things worked.  I did not have the capacity (will power) to put down the food.  I was the girl who was shoveling in her third Big Mac (true story), I was the girl who would go to dinner with her family, eat a FULL MEAL then go home and have a bowl of cereal.  I was a bottomless pit. 

So, in 2011, after some inquiring, my husband and I discovered that his insurance would pay for gastric bypass surgery (if I jumped through several qualifying "hoops").  So, my first step was to go to a seminar by a local doctor.  From there I had to make my initial consultation appointment.  They let me know that according to my insurance I would need:

A) 6 months nutritional counseling
B) a psychological evaluation
C) complete medical evaluation and several tests

As you may realize this was not going to be the quick process I had been hoping for.  The insurance also was hoping that during my nutritional counseling I would be able to lose 10% of my body weight, which at the time was 35lbs.  I told my nutritionist, Gretchen, that if I was able to lose that much weight I probably wouldn't be sitting in her office in the first place! :)

She was wonderful.  She taught me about portion sizes and calories and how our food choices effect us.  Things I already knew, but it was nice to get a professionals opinion.

I had the psych eval (basically consisting of the Meyers/Briggs test) and the medical tests and surgery was scheduled for April 17, 2012.

I'll go into those details later. :)

Me and my beautiful niece at my son's first birthday party in 2008.  This was about 4 years from my heaviest weight.

This is just after Christmas of 2013 wearing my husbands Doug Baldwin jersey!  This is about 30lbs from my lightest weight :) It's a new experience to be able to wear my husbands clothes :)

This is the winter of 2013 I went to a local "big girl" clothing store and put on a pair of the pants I used to wear and posted it on Facebook with the caption "LITERALLY half my size".