When I got married at the age of 29, I was the heaviest that I had ever been and I continued to grow from there.  Finally, at the age of 35, and after a lot of deliberation, I decided to undergo gastric bypass surgery.

 

I remember the day of my surgery like it was yesterday. The room felt cold and so sterile with its fluorescent lights.  I was wearing not one but two of those hideous green hospital gowns because there wasn’t one that was large enough to go all the way around me.  Then it happened, the male nurse asked me to step on the scale.

 

And there it was, the number on the scale staring back at me. 279 lbs.

 

Silently, I thought to myself, “How could you let it get to this point?”  The words the doctor has used, “morbidly obese” kept repeating in my mind.  

 

To look at me, you wouldn’t have thought that I weighed as much as I did because I had learned how to wardrobe myself in a way that partially camouflaged my weight...but there’s only so much you can do to hide behind a body that size.

 

I was a complete wreck. I felt broken and like a complete failure because it was what seemed an endless cycle.  I felt like if only I could be more disciplined I wouldn’t have gotten myself into this mess. The self-loathing was relentless and it certainly didn’t help with the anxiety that I lived with on a daily basis.  

 

You see, I could lose weight but I couldn’t keep it off and with each weight gain, it came back like a vengeance and additional pounds added to the pile.  I worked out, had a trainer and tried every diet or plan under the sun. From Weight Watchers to Jenny Craig to Atkins and beyond. I just couldn’t keep the weight off and now it was taking a toll on me emotionally.  What happens when we get emotional? We eat our feelings.

 

It was my husband who made the suggestion for me to consider surgery, not because he didn’t want to be married to a fat woman, but because it hurt him to see me in such pain.  He loved me unconditionally, after all, he did marry me at the heaviest weight that I had been. I thought the surgery was a cop out...oh how wrong I was!

The decision to undergo this type of surgery should not be taken lightly because of the severity of the procedure.  My body was beginning to betray me. I was at the point where the swelling in my legs was so severe that I had to wear heavy compression hose and my blood pressure was off the charts.  It was time for a change.

 

Change can be difficult.  I have to be clear that my decision to undergo surgery was not one of vanity but for medical reasons.  The obvious result, however, was that I ended up losing weight...Losing weight at such a rapid pace that it was hard to keep up not only from a physical standpoint but also an emotional standpoint.

 

I was still working in the corporate world and had to learn how to dress through my size changes without breaking the bank and do to do so in the most flattering way possible.  From an emotional standpoint, I needed to stay true to my style but also handle the emotional fallout from having lived behind my size for so many years. I no longer had the physical barrier which now left me feeling, to some degree, vulnerable and exposed.  I was left with nothing but a blank canvas leaving behind who I had been to create who I was to become.