Do Not Feed After Midnight

Some of you in Facebookland may know by now that I will be having bariatric surgery in the near future. 

After years and years of trying to fight the fat chick that's taken over my body since having kids, I'm finally scheduled to have a gastric sleeve op.

Now I am in no means blaming my five kids for my perpetually ballooning girth - I managed to bring myself to this morbid point all on my lonesome. I could point the finger at having kids (particularly for making me crave the most greasy, fatty, salty, sugary, deep fried, chocolate coated delicious food to keep morning sickness at bay), or for having depression and anxiety and all the various happy pills I've been on for the past 15 years, or for being time-poor unorganised and lazy at meal times and resorting to The Divine Mr Drive-Thru. It's hard to convince my kids that I haven't always been like this and that I was once healthy, active and sporty. I hope to show them this one day in the not so distant future. Or at least to not be outrun by a 2 year old in a playground. 

My perpetually ballooning girth has come about from not caring about what I was eating when I was pregnant, from become inactive and sedentary during and after pregnancy, from continually giving in to cravings for flavour and sugar and not hunger, and from habitually noshing on anything and everything because I was happy, sad, anxious, bored, tired or just awake. To get to this point, I have had to successfully fail at dieting. And I have succeeded to fail in almost every weight loss program out there. My passionate love and extreme hate relationship with food has found me here, now with chronic pain that makes that oh-so-simple eat-less-exercise-more formula not so simple. Exercise equals unbearable pain. No pain, no gain? Fuck that shit. For now anyway.

So. What's a gastric sleeve?

www.nationalbariatriclink.org

Take a normal stomach. Cut two thirds of the stomach and exorcise that demon along with the portion that produces the hunger hormone Ghrelin, via keyhole surgery. What's left behind is a teeny sleeve of stomach. See how darn cute it will be!!

Pinterest

I don't want to be the jolly fat chick. I don't want to see food as my enemy. Food has been the #1 love of my life (oh, yeah, after my husband & kids, of course) but I desperately need to stop embracing it with all I've got & give it a caring peck on the cheek instead.

I'm a mixture of excitement, fear and guilt.

I should not have got to this point.
I'm grateful to have a chance to get my life and health back in check.
I have been extremely lucky to have dodged the diabetes, heart disease, cholesterol, and high blood pressure bullets.
I should have had more will-power a long time ago.
I feel like I'm cheating.
What if I stuff this up, too? 

By sharing this publicly, I feel more accountable and fiercely determined to make this work. I can't let my family down. So, like hundreds of others who have blogged about their weight loss journey, I will do so too. 


Did you notice I never mentioned in this post how freakin' sexy I'll look in a year or so? Yeah baby...