Bariatric Girl

Today I became Bariatric Girl and I’m gonna talk about…..

Weight loss surgery

The positive side.

First let’s talk about who’s fer it and who’s agin’ it?

Those of us that have had WLS are already aware of who’s agin’ it. Oprah has made it known that she’s against it. Dr. Phil was until lately. Apparently his nephew had the surgery. Kudos to Dr. Phil for being open minded and not sabotaging it.

If you do a search you’ll see scads of blogs exclaming the sheer evil of WLS. If you fail and you’re really mad you can join discussion groups and talk about it all day long. There are several people that have made it their life’s work….all they live for is to point out how horrible WLS is, reporting every positive report as a lie.

It’s pretty much frowned upon by society….I mean I was obese for 30 years and now I’m not. I’ve been told that I took the easy way out and I didn’t do it the old fashioned way. I’m not sure why it matters what method I used to get from 30 years of obesity to 6 years as a “normal” person. After trying everything else known to man, I could not get the extra hundred pounds I was carrying off. Well, I got them off but I couldn’t keep them off….until surgery.

So here I am (Christmas 2000).

My mom had died a few months before and I was devastated. A few days after this picture was taken I heard about weight loss surgery and made an appointment….the first one I could get.

There’s way more stuff in between then and now but let’s just say it all worked out.

And here I am today:

Enjoying a life I never thought possible.

And I’m in touch with several thousand members on a website that had the same experience….

A positive one.

I know people have died…I am fortunate that I haven’t known anyone…. except Alice.

She committed suicide because she couldn’t get the surgery.

On top of everything else, I volunteer hours at a time on a website so that I can help the ones that come in behind.

There are reasons for most of us regarding our past obesity. I’m going to step right up and admit that I was a food addict. Yeah…for a couple of years after the surgery I was thinking I didn’t eat that much. That’s why it’s a sign of addiction….that would be the denial part. I had major genetics working against me but that wasn’t all of it.

So after a couple of years I saw the parallels of addiction in our behavior including our need for coping mechanisms. When you do something to the point that you hate yourself, it’s addiction. A great description….

Uncontrolled use despite negative consequences.

You could have offered me a million dollars, you could have threatened my family’s lives and I couldn’t keep the weight off. For me, weight loss surgery was sort of like rehab. I got surgery that gave me a pretty much guaranteed chance to get on a level playing field with the “normal” people….if you follow the rules. If I could just have that…let me start over from scratch…I won’t screw it up. Easier said than done but I did it.

You can do it too if you know how.

I have spent an outragious amount of time trying to pay it forward and I will continue so but I’m branching out. I want to make a difference and I want people to know that there are a lot of people just like me instead of seeing all the people that are just plain mad for a long list of reasons.

I believe a good part of success is how you treat your surgery. If you respect it, nurture it…you get a good result. If you disrespect it, unappreciate it…you will probably mess up. It’s no free ride and it’s certainly not the easy way out.

My old WLS site was http://www.rydobesity.com/. RYD Obesity was made up of three people. RYD stood for Ramon, Yvonne and Debra….all three of us successful weight loss surgery patients. We met on obesityhelp.com. On May 2-4th of this year we put on an event that was incredible. This is the video we opened with. I had each person send their before and after pictures. It didn’t matter if they had just started or were old timers like me.

So here’s a start at the good side of weight loss surgery…