Fist Pump - Throat Lump

The fist pump! Yeah! I've done it, did it just the other week. Will probably do it again.

 

When I started out on this journey over a year ago, I wasn't sure it was going to end up on the surgeon's table. I went to an info meeting, but still wasn't convinced. This is a really big, irrevocable decision, and I had failed so many times before I no longer had faith in the weight loss process.

I have some issues with the way the bariatric surgery group I'm with handled things. I was made to jump through innumerable hoops to get here, including many medical procedures and exams. I've been sleep studied, x-rayed, EKGed, palpated, weighed, measured, and charted. I have listened, asked, been handed numerous handouts and a 3-ring binder to hold them all, and support grouped along. And I was forced to lose weight to continue the process. Without going into actual numbers (which are not for publication) from my first weigh-in until the pre-op two week liquid diet started, in seven months I'd lost a grand total of eight pounds. yippee 

Then I started the liquid diet and stayed on it. A few days in I got sick. Because of med changes I dealt with dizziness. But I stayed on the diet, and it's now less than a week away from the surgery. I weighed myself on my bathroom scale, which is probably at least several pounds off of the bariatric one, and to my shock found in the first week I'd lost another nine pounds. (BTW - I only weigh once a week at most. I learned that lesson the hard way during my first twenty diets...) That's a total of seventeen pounds, and there's already a change in the way my clothes fit. FIST PUMP!

But there's also this lump in my throat, a recognition of all the times in the past when I've successfully lost weight, and ALWAYS gained it back again. The fear is there, the ever present anxiety of failure. After all, I've successfully fought the battle many, many times, but never won the war of sustained weight loss.

Apparently I've dieted and then regained the weight so many times I've created a Pavlovian response in myself. Feelings of success are immediately damped by forebodings of failure. I'm my own psychological lab rat. My conditioned response is excitement tempered with sorrow. And the really bitter taste to it all is that it's become a very familiar response. How many times have I started diets, knowing that the results of all that pain and hard work would never last?

I'm trying to let myself feel successful, recognizing and paying respect to the times I've failed before, but this time won't be the same (already I hear the razzberry being given by my own psyche), because this time I'm changing the circumstances. This weight loss journey is different than any other I've taken. I'm changing the rules. After the hard work of losing weight has gotten me where I'm going, my stomach will have healed into a much smaller pouch, and the craving centers will have been excised. I hope that the desire for food will never again supplant my need for nourishment.

Here is my promise to my future self:  I will still enjoy food, in moderation the way it was meant to be. I will savor the flavor, and feel the heal. No longer will I waste the taste, or need the greed. I will be an informed, and intelligent consumer. And I will be healthier for it.

FIST PUMP!