Life Before Gastric Bypass
How overweight were you before gastric bypass?
Before gastric bypass, I was extremely overweight. I was close to 500 lbs. I was 477 lbs. where depending on what school of thought you believe in how much I should weigh but I was significantly overweight, close to 250, 300 lbs. overweight before gastric bypass.
How did you become overweight?
To get so overweight and continue gaining weight, you have to not only consume what you're consuming, you have to eat more, and as you continually gain weight, it's like a domino effect, you keep consuming more and you're no longer cognizant of the amount of food you're eating, and it just keeps spiraling out of control especially when you're eating for the wrong reasons. You may not be eating cause you feel hungry anymore. Hunger was probably only a small percent of the time, because I was eating so much I probably never felt hunger anymore. I was eating because I was stressed, I was eating because, if I was in college it was finals time, I was eating because it was an addiction. I would find any excuse to eat, and like any other person who's addicted to anything, when you're addicted you'll continue doing it and then you'll keep adding more because it's harder and harder to get your high.
What was life like before gastric bypass?
Life before gastric bypass wasn't fun, especially the year or so before I made the decision, because close to five hundred pounds you are big and it wears and tears on your body and you try and make the best of it. You try and make excuses. You try and laugh it off. But at the end of the day, it's just not easy. It's really not easy were you have to consume so many calories to maintain that weight, and to gain. It's like, a drug, almost, food became a drug, it was addictive and it was so easy to get and so cheap.
How did being overweight make you feel?
There were times when looking in the mirror I would not recognize myself, and that was probably the most difficult part of being overweight. You look in the mirror and you wonder what is this shell outside of me. You almost see yourself as being so over weight that you're never going to lose it. There's no way out basically, so it can only get worse from here. Why change something if you don't think you can, basically. I thought there was absolutely no way I was going to lose the weight, because I had tried everything, and nothing worked for me. Why continue trying? Why not just keep living the life the way I was living, because it was comfortable. You get so comfortable being overweight.
What other forms of weight loss did you try?
I attempted many forms of weight loss. The traditional joining the gym, trying to cut your calories, Weight Watchers, Atkins, the South Beach Diet. I pretty much tried anything I read and at the end of the day, I may have lost a couple pounds but it would just spiral back and I'd gain a couple plus two. So it was more just again with the comfort of being so fat and when you are comfortable, why change? So it wasn't until I decided one hundred percent that I wasn't going to be able to lose it without this tool that I just gave up on regular dieting.
Why do you think other forms of weight loss failed for you?
I'd have to say that when you have a physical and a mental addiction, it's a little more difficult to stop it. So when you have the mental - when you fix just the mental component, it doesn't always work because you still have the physical addiction. And with being obese you have the physical addiction and the mental addiction. So if I was going to "Weight Watchers," though I was constricted to their food, I was still feeling pain. I was still feeling angst over being overweight. So I would still continue to use the crutch, the food, though it may have been a 300 calorie "Weight Watchers" meal, I'd still eat in large quantities because I still had that addiction.
When did you know it was time to change your lifestyle?
I would say I realized it was time to change my lifestyle habits when my lifestyle became so restrictive that I was embarrassed for myself, and that's probably when I realized something had to change, something big. If I can't walk across a parking lot without getting winded something has to change. If I'm eating 5000 calories a day something has to change. It all kind of came into fruition at once. If I'm eating because I'm sad something has to change because there's so much more to life that I'm missing right now, and that's when it happened, that's when the light bulb went on in my head.
