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I love it when I hear people comment that gastric bypass surgery is taking “the easy way out”.
Can you see the sarcasm dripping off your screen yet?
Quick, long-lasting results?
Yes.
Easy?
Um…no.
Actually, HELL no.
This is me:
Many of you have seen this photo in black and white on my “about” page.
There WAS really good photography involved, but it’s pretty much how I ended up.
I?
Did not always look like this. (And still don’t. Again, REALLY good photography.)
14 years ago, at the age of 20, I had gastric bypass surgery . This is my story. Well, a tiny fraction of it, anyway.
I get quite a few questions about bariatric surgery, so I figured it was time to write. Keep in mind that this is mainly about my life before surgery and what led to it. I do touch on long term recovery and my life since but the main focus is living with obesity and things I wish I had known about gastric bypass before undergoing it.
I was a pretty normal looking child but I was TALL and big boned. I wear a size 10 shoe if this gives you any indication of what I mean. My twin sister was always a little bigger than I was, but normal until about first grade and then she began to put on weight. A lot of weight.
Kindergarten:
First grade (I am on the right in both photos):
2nd grade:
My parents were understandably concerned about my sister’s weight. I think she was on every diet known to mankind and so were we all to an extent.
Home life could be very…volatile. It didn’t help.
I will be blunt that I am not a very active person, even post surgery (and I know it contributed and still does.) It was not always like that .
I loved to run as a kid. I won lots of races and was pretty fast. It came at a huge cost, though. I would cough and spit up ropes of mucous for hours and hours afterward. Childhood asthma was not as looked out for as it is now, but that is absolutely what I had. It went untreated. As the years passed, the pain of running won out over my love for it. I started to equate physical exertion with little oxygen and crushing chest pain. I still do.
This doesn’t help control weight gain.
My childhood was kind of tough and very lonely.
I got a lot of grief being attached to my twin sister. She was not only obese but very emotionally erratic and unpredictable. We didn’t know what was wrong with her. We know now that most of this was because she has brain damage and a serious seizure disorder that has worsened over the years.
It was a fairly miserable way to grow up, though. I really think it contributed to how I looked at food and coped in later years.
It wasn’t just her. I wasn’t “Fat” but I WAS BIG. I was 5′7 and 120 lbs in the 5th grade and far bigger than any boy in my grade. It made me very aware of my size and a lot of shame and ridicule was heaped on my head.
Middle school came and along with it? VENDING MACHINES. Finally, I had a way to get my hands on food that was bad for me that I could also use to mask what a lonely kid I was. I would use my lunch money to have 2 ice cream sandwiches and a cherry Coke every day. I was still Ok at the end of the 7th grade but started putting on weight.
My nickname was “LardassLee” and because the movie “Stand by Me” was huge, I had a devoted group of assholes people that would follow me down the halls at school saying, “Boom-bamba-boom-bamba-BOOM!” when I would walk.
I just got heavier through high school.
Being an obese teenager was much rarer then than it is now. And it
