Part 2

Okay, so I "left off" at Christmas 1980 and just over 200 pounds, or thereabout. Needless to say, I did not go back on my "diet" when January rolled around. I was still feeling good about losing 45 pounds.

I wonder how long it was before I got on the scale again? I couldn't say. But I just took a nice long boat trip down that famous Egyptian river "Denial". Graduated college in 1982, moved to Northern California to take a teaching job, and started my adult life.

Always, food ruled me. Ruled me with an iron fist. I have zero willpower, you see. So all through the 80's and well into the 90's I ate whatever I wanted to eat ... whenever I wanted to eat it.

There would, of course, be brief forays into this diet or that one. Weight Watchers, Doctors and Nurses Weight Loss Center, Phen-Fen, Metabolite, cabbage soup diet, grapefruit diet, TOPS, Overeaters Anonymous, and more. None of them were very effective. Truth be told, I never started any of those diets with very high hopes. I felt totally and completely defeated by food. Totally and completely powerless over food.

I have wondered why I never "did Atkins" again in that laundry list of diets I tried. I knew it worked, because I'd been so successful at losing in college. It was like my brain just wouldn't go there...I just never went back to it. Of course, the behavioral therapy I have had would lead me to say that I was very busy sabotaging myself in so many different ways ... but especially in the weight department.

At some point in the early 90's I started thinking about bariatric surgery. My weight just kept going up. I don't think I even owned a scale, so I conveniently didn't know how much I weighed. But the clothes in my closet kept getting bigger. And the pictures...you know, the pictures just don't lie, do they?

So anyway, in 1994 I jumped through all the hoops to get it approved by my insurance company, went through the psychological counseling and extensive medical testing, and in December of that year, I had a gastroplasty (stomach stapling) done. When I went in the morning of the surgery, I weighed 299 pounds. I absolutely believed I had no other options and no other recourse.

I lost a lot of weight quickly. Within the next year I lost right at 100 pounds. Again, at about 200 pounds, I felt great and felt like I looked good.

I always say that I weighed under 200 pounds for about 15 minutes. Then, the moment was over. I had some medical issues resulting from the surgery, and gained some of the weight back over the next year, had a gastric bypass conversion surgery in 1996, which helped resolve those issues, and lost back down to maybe around 220.

I'm going to look for a picture to show what I looked like pre-surgery, and if I find one, I'll post it.

And, I'll continue my saga later...