Enough bellyaching already

Back in the saddle again!

So . . . I am beginning Day 2 of the 5 Day Pouch Test - a nifty little plan I found online for folks like me that have had bariatric surgery, lost the weight, and gained some back.

Turns out, my carb snacking is a common thing among the post-surgicals . . . something about the simple carbs being easy to digest, easy on the little stomach, but hell on the metabolism. NOW you tell me.

No matter, lesson learned. I have sworn off the evil little pretzels, and I am getting back to the original plan. If all goes well, I and my pouch will ride happily into the sunset, protein shakes in our saddlebags.

Happy trails, ya'll.

The 35 year war rages on

Yep. Read it and weep.

30 pounds. 30 fucking pounds heavier than I was this time last year.

This time last year, my body felt reborn. I was about 2 years post surgery, and my weight had stabilized. My clothes fit the same from month to month. The scary drops in weight had stopped, and the bouts with nausea, and the problems with digestion. Everything seemed to have stabilized.

This time last year, I was packing to take the kids to Myrtle Beach. Matty was recovering from a month in the hospital - he had been diagnosed with cancer just a few months before in February, and the pain that landed him in the hospital seemed to be under control, and the chemo seemed to be working, and we were feeling hopeful.

This time last year, I didn't see my parents much, but I knew my dad was getting weaker, and my mom was growing more forgetful.

Within 6 months, I would watch a great many things.

I watched my dad slowly fade away in ICU. I'd bury my dad, move my confused and addled mom into my house, and see the extent of her dementia first hand and the extent of the cancer in her bones, and in her liver, and in her kidneys on MRIs in her kind doctor's office. It would feel oddly familiar. The same doctor had broken the news to us about my mom's breast cancer recurrence 6 years ago, and had gently told Matty and me about HIS diagnosis just the year before.

I watched Matty endure torturous, inhumane, painful treatments that he bravely faced so that he could live through this goddamned thief called cancer and be here for me and the kids.

I also watched all of his friends gather in his honor in NYC to help us celebrate his being able to be there and our marriage which we managed to wedge in among the tragedy and loss and just before his stem cell transplant - yet another hellacious procedure he faced head on without blinking.

Not once.

I tried to be as brave as him when I saw tubes sticking out of his chest that carried the poisons through his body to kill the intruder, and I tried to keep a steady hand when I flushed the lines with saline solution so he could keep receiving the poison.

I watched my kids go though all this too, without complaint. I watched time tick past, and mourned the time lost with them while I worked, or sat in a hospital, or sat with my parents. I mourned time lost with my mom when I was sitting right with her, seeing the look of confusion on her face and realizing that she didn't quite know who I was.

I watched it all. I sat through it all, very still, with hardly any movement at all.

I worked. I remained calm in the face of this shitstorm. I kept plugging.

And slowly, slowly, I relied on what I've always relied on to keep my nerves in check. Food.

I snacked. I rationalized. I began to fall back on old bad habits.

The worst part is, it all feels like vanity. I didn't care that I wasn't exercising. I didn't care that the weight was hurting my heart, or my back. I cared that my clothes didn't fit anymore. It didn't even dawn on me to step on a scale until my summer shorts felt tight. I blocked everything else - the lethargy, the aches, the depression, the loss of strength. None of that clicked, not one damn thing.

Just the shorts.

Stepping on the scale felt like climbing on to the platform and putting the hangman's noose around my neck. Breath held . . . . watching the numbers flash . . . ..

199.6.

I thought my heart was going to stop right there.

I had fought so hard, gone through so much, endured years of waiting, gone to so many doctors, endured so many exams, endured so many years of illness just to qualify for the surgery, and I had lived through all the aftermath, all the throwing up so that I would never have to see numbers like this again.

It took 2 years to recover and stabilize. 2 years.

I fucked it up in 6 months' time.

I am thankful for small favors, I guess. For whatever reason, seeing that little "1" on the scale made me believe that I could fix it . . .something about still not weighing 200 made the panic immediately flood my brain with "it's ok, you can fix this . . . . it's not so bad . . ."

But it is bad. Bad for my heart. Bad for my back. Bad for my body. Bad for the long term prognosis of me remaining free of this disease, or addiction, or shitty set of genes, or collection of habits determined to kill me, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. Bad for my kids that are relying on me to take care of them and bad for Matty that has fought so hard just to be able to LIVE to have me sit here and toss my health in the garbage can.

I owe it to all of them to stay as healthy as I can for their sake. They deserve that.

I barely made it through the day yesterday. Today, the panic is gone, but the sadness is just washing over me in waves.

I must have stepped on that scale 4 times yesterday. I've already been on it twice today.

196 this morning. That little part in my head that always rationalizes was the first to say "See? It will be ok! You'll get back to where you are supposed to! Just need to keep your eye on the ball . . ."

Then that part of me that lived through 35 years of obesity reminds me of how many times I have tried and failed, how many times the weight has come back, how many times I have given up, how many times I have beaten myself up.

I want to do harsh things, of course I do. I want to do nothing but drink hot coffee and melt the weight off through starvation. I want to beat myself up and run until I drop, but I'm so weak, I feel like I can't get up from this chair.

People always say, "Treat yourself kind - take good care of yourself. Don't be so hard on yourself." No part of me wants to be kind or gentle. If kind means eating right, exercising, and abstaining from my crutches, that's about the last thing I have wanted to do lately.

The kind gentle part of ME is the part that lets me keep pretzels in my office drawer, and a bag of jelly beans to absentmindedly pop into my mouth during the long boring hours while I sit here on conference calls, hearing people bitch about our company, and our jobs, and about each other. The kind part of me gives me treats so I can distract myself from the losses, and the sadness and the fear and the shitty hand I'm holding while bluffing fate with an unbreakable poker face. The kind part doesn't make me exercise, and helps me ignore the obvious while I grow weaker and heavier.

That's the part of me that feels kind - the part that feeds the addiction. Making me stick to the plan doesn't feel kind - letting me have what my body craves and playing a nonstop reel of justification in my head feels kind. Like all addicts, I guess.

And that's the part that gets you in the end.

The sins of the fathers

My kid started playing football this season. He's 8.

He wanted to play last year, but I was concerned about him getting hurt, or getting yelled at by overzealous coaches. We have stuck with baseball for the past 3 years, so I was oblivious to the huge differences between little league baseball and pee wee football.

Namely, making weight.

Unfortunately, my kids were saddled with 2 fat parents. Now, there's lots of speculation in the medical community about whether obesity is genetic (i.e. thyroid problem) or environmental (i.e. one too many trips to Stevie B's with your fat parents). Most think it's a little from Column A, and a little from Column B (with three you get eggroll.)

All this to say . . . I had never encountered a weigh-in at the baseball field. Actually, his size was sort of celebrated, since he loves playing catcher and has NO fear of the baseball.

Come to think of it, his size has ALWAYS been celebrated. The day he was born, the nurses cooed and squealed over him at the hospital.

All 10 pounds of him.

From the moment he was big enough to sit upright in a shopping cart and peacefully eat Cheerios while I shopped, grown men have approached me in Target and Walmart on a nearly weekly basis to comment, "You're gonna let that boy play football, aren't you?" followed by a hair tussle and questions about his weight, his height, how tall he might end up ("how big's his daddy?"), whether or not I would consider aiming him toward the Univ. of GA (I've always had my heart set on Ga Tech) and admiring glances at the size of his feet and how much older he looks than he is.

When he was a toddler, we would frequent a chinese buffet (what a shock) where the waitresses would literally whisk him away from me and take him INTO the kitchen to "visit" the cooks and staff there, because they were so enamored of his size, and his blue eyes, and his fair skin and his white blonde hair. "He is VERY lucky! YOU are very lucky!" they would tell me in broken English. Apparently, large boys are just about the best thing you can ever have, where they come from.

No one ever said, "Wow. He's too big," or "Uh oh, that's going to be a problem." Until now.

It was quite the blow to have the football coach lead my littlest giant to a dusty equipment shed and have him step on a rusty old scale and announce, "He's 20 pounds over the weight limit for this team."

What?! What do you mean? Aren't football players SUPPOSED to be big?

There he stood, red and breathless from 2 hours of sweaty practice, being told that he's too big to play. And there I stood, feeling like I had led my kid to this moment, one bite at a time.

Yeah, that turned out to be a pretty rough night all the way around. When you see your frailties and weaknesses visited upon your children, it's impossible not to feel guilty. I played the blame game most of that evening and into the wee hours of the night.

I was fat when I had him. I've raised him to be fat like me. It's my fault.

His dad is fat and wasn't active enough with him. It's his fault.

Our parents allowed us to get fat when we were kids. This is THEIR fault.

Which means if parents are to blame, it's back to being MY fault again.

But in the midst of all the self-abuse, I had such an overwhelming sense of pride for him. He had slogged through the hottest, sweatiest, hardest 2 hours of his life for 3 days before we were told the news, and when we WERE told the news, he said "I want to play."

Just like that. He didn't give up. He wanted to play.

I was adamant that there was NO WAY that my kid was going to drop 20 lbs in time to play football this year, and I was ready to turn in his football equipment until I learned it was possible for him to "play up" to the 9 year old team. Their weight limits were slightly higher.

But he was still 10 lbs. over.

Last week, he slogged through furnace-like temperatures, and walked laps when the others ran, holding his side but never quitting. He dragged himself through the drills, carrying the equivalent of a 20 lb bowling ball while the others sprinted past him, with seeming effortlessness while he struggled.

It's the hardest thing I've ever endured in my life. It was like he was paying penance out on that field for all of my sins.

"The sins of the father will be visited upon the children . . ."

It was all I could do not to break down and cry right there, in front of the parents and the other kids and my fiance and my ex who were all encouraging him to hang in there as he doggedly struggled to do the coach's bidding, over and over and over.

I felt like such a failure, despite the fact that I've now lost over 100 pounds. It's been a source of great pride for me AND my kids. They have been there the whole time for me, waiting at the hospital through my surgery, and worrying about me during my recovery, and watching me through mostly good days and a few really bad days as I struggled to keep food down or regain my strength. Now, it just seems self-indulgent to even celebrate that now, now that I see my kid trying to tread water with the same anvil tied around his neck that I managed to free myself of.

I felt helpless. And guilty. Really guilty. I didn't know what I could do to help him, but I couldn't just sit there and watch him struggle, so I got up, and left the stands and went down to the track to show some solidarity. I vowed to walk the track while he practiced. The first night, I was barely able to make two laps. By the end of last week, I finished 4 laps, and he had finished 5 days of grueling, humiliating, sweaty practice in 90 degree weather.

Not surprisingly, by the end of last week, he was also ready to quit. He was sore, and tired, and his resolve was giving way to the unrelenting temptation to stop moving, that same inertia that held me captive when I was at my heaviest.

Through the weekend, I tried my very best to encourage him to hang in there.

We all did.

I told him how proud I was of him. I told him that I would be right there with him, walking that track and enduring the heat and cheering him on. He managed to suck up his courage and get back out there yesterday to endure another 2 hours of heat and humiliation and hard work.

He's still determined, despite the soreness. He's also lost 4 pounds, which makes me so proud of him and so sad that he has to deal with this at such a young age.

I thought about an episode of "Deadliest Catch" I saw recently, where a greenhorn that had been the sole survivor of a sinking fishing ship was describing what it was like to watch everyone around him freeze to death in the icy water. How seductive the urge to just stop moving was for him, how hard he had to fight to keep moving until he could be saved, and how easy it would have been to just . . . . stop, and allow death to take him, like it had the others.

Not to be overly dramatic, but obesity is like that, too. The heavier you get, the stronger the urge is to just stop moving, to just sit very still and allow yourself to be taken. I kept thinking about that guy when I looked at my son. It was like watching him drowning in the water below me while I was safely on deck.

I have to keep encouraging him to move, to keep trying, to hang in there. I can't let him stop. I have to keep him moving, despite the fact that the sea around him is riddled with the bloated corpses of those in our family that allowed themselves to be taken way too soon by the seduction of the inertia.

I'm not going to let that happen to him. I just won't. I'm still thankful every day that I managed to escape from that, but now it's time to save my kids.

The Surest Things Can Change

Appropriate, considering . . .

The Surest Things Can Change
(lyrics by Gino Vanelli)

I love you now and I never want to change my mind
But love is strange and the surest things can change
We carry love
More than we can stand to lose
But who can say . . .
The things we feel this day are the things we feel in time?

How can I be sure
The sun will rise in days to come
And now that I am yours, the world is still for you and I . . .

We carry dreams like children in the spring of life
But love is pain and the purest things can change

Oh how can I be sure the sun will rise in days to come?
And now that I am yours
The world is still in cloudless sky . . .
But sad as rain . . .

The surest things can change.

Happy 75th Anniversary!

Whee! 75 pounds gone! I've been having a little celebration around here.

I bought myself a neat ring and a pair of Baby Phat jeans (size 16, natch). They were even brand new - not from a thrift store or anything!

I didn't feel the need to commemorate or celebrate the 25 lb loss, or even the 50 lb loss. I thought it was a fluke.

Hell, it's only been this past week that I was able to force myself to clean out my closet of all of my favorite clothes. I felt sure I'd need/wear them all again, even though they were in the largest sizes that I wore before the surgery.

I'm still getting used to all this. Standing in the closet looking at all the empty hangers was just about as wierd as getting catcalled at the gas station the other day by a truckload of migrant workers.

Don't get too excited, though. They always like the big ones.

Hey Paw! What's fer supper?

Fried chicken, green beans with fatback, and hot cornbread with sweet tea! Sallll-ute!

Yeah, not quite.

More than any other question, the question of "What do/can you eat?" crops up when the subject of my gastric bypass surgery is on the table.

The answer is: not much.

I'm about to celebrate my 5 month surgery anniversary, and unlike other folks I have spoken with, my diet has not advanced very much past what I was eating just a few weeks post surgery.
I keep reading that re-establishing eating is hit or miss, and what you can't tolerate today you might be able to tolerate tomorrow. I am the poster child of that particular little nugget of wisdom.

These days, after many MANY experiments, I pretty much survive on Wendy's small cups of chili, cooked beans, hot tea, coffee, mini ricecakes, and diet fudgesicles.

I have a very VERY long list of foods that just don't work. For instance, I cannot tolerate meat of any sort (with the one exception of ground beef in well-cooked chili.) My old loves, rice and grits, cornbread and, well, ANY bread are a thing of the past.

Strangely, I CAN tolerate corn chips and cheese dip, which seems like the LAST thing that would agree with me. Ditto for mixed nuts, and I have been known to have a few peanut M&Ms with no complications.

The big takeaway from all of my post-surgical appointments is to eat enough protein to meet the daily requirements.

That seemed easy when I first heard it, and it's anything BUT easy.

New for 2009

Well, I know I'm a little late, but I finally feel like it's a new year.

This would probably explain why I still had Christmas lights on my bushes up until last week.

I think the inauguration had to occur for me to feel like it was a fresh new year with a chance for a fresh new start. I have to admit that that Aretha's hat completely invigorated me.

I hit two huge milestones just this past week. I charted a 75 pound loss on the scale and I dropped under 200 pounds, ceremoniously entering into the 100s on the scale. This phenomenon is affectionately known in weight loss surgery (WLS) circles as "entering OneDerland."

Along with the adjustments that I've been making to my new habits and changing body, I've also been adjusting to homeschooling and have picked up a few new hobbies. Sweet girl and I have jumped headfirst into scrapbooking. She's much better at it than I am. I've also joined the Yelp community, and received an Elite designation for '09.

One of the good things to come out of the last year is a more reliable energy level. I hope that means that I will be able to write more, and more often. I kind of lost my mojo this past year, but like a loyal pet, the ol' blog was still here waiting for me when I returned from my long absence. I've straightened up the place a bit and added some new "baby" blogs ot my repertoire: My Kid's Krazy Krap and Cheaper than Marriage Counseling. You're welcome to check those out if you'd like using the links on the right.

SO . . . onward and upward, and oh yeah, Happy New Year!