It must be time for the triennial blog post

Yah, I don't use this blog much these days.  I don't use my twitter or tumbler a lot either; I'm mostly on Facebook, which is where I'd put this post if it weren't probably going to be a longish one.

tl;dr: I had sleeve gastrectomy in early July of 2015, and I have lost over 80 pounds from my pre-surgery high weight, and as far as I can tell, I no longer have type II diabetes, nor high blood pressure, nor high cholesterol.  I have about 90 more pounds to go to hit my ideal goal, and about 50 to go before I'll be mostly happy if the weight loss stops.  So, if you've been wondering about the cryptic (or not so cryptic) Facebook posts of late, that's what the deal is.

Longer version, with some history, and probably some anger and disappointment I've kept mostly bottled up, but I'm ready to let it out.  This is really raw, straight out of my brain into this blog post:

I have come close to weighing 350 pounds several times in the last 10-15 years, and while I've never gone over that (that I know of), I've also not really been able to get down below about 310 pounds in that time, either.  I have been bombarded with the message that because I weigh so much that I'm somehow worth less than those folks with willpower and control who can manage not to weigh 350 pounds, and I have to admit, I mostly believed it myself (with occasional and short-lived backlash forays into "fat acceptance").  But, really, this is nothing new.

I imagine that this will be a familiar story; I'm certainly no special unique snowflake, but it's my story, and I'm going to tell it.  I remember being made aware by the adults around me that I was chubby.  Some were genuinely concerned (mostly with the surname "Dyson"), I'm sure, but I got the impression from others that their "concern" was borne more out of embarrassment than anything else (mostly with the surname "Martin").  I definitely internalized all this pretty quickly, and it wasn't long before middle school hit, and I was pretty certain I was fat, and that everybody at school thought I was disgustingly fat, and thus began my lifelong feeling of inferiority to most of the people in my life at the time, and by the time I hit high school, it was just an established fact that Greg Martin was that fat kid who was kind of funny and kind of smart, but mostly just fat.   That was my life.

Things didn't get better in college; there came a point where I stopped being constantly worried about being fat and trying to do things to be not fat and I just gave up and dove into my studies and my activities and tried hard not to think about it much.  Much to my surprise, I did end up getting married, and I got a career, had a daughter and found another love, too, and life seemed to go by and most things seemed to be pretty great.

Except, I was fat.

What's worse, there comes a point where carrying too much weight starts to have consequences beyond my self-esteem:  the blood pressure started to creep up, my fasting blood sugars were starting to be over 100, and the doctor started saying words like "pre-diabetic".  This was in my early 30s, and I weighed around 275 pounds.

So, I did lots of things.  I started taking a couple of medications "just to give me some runway to get the weight off".  I bought a bicycle and started riding it all over the place.  I rode the bus into downtown and walked a mile to and from the office every day.  I counted calories.  I did the Zone.

Even though I tried to do the right things, it never really got better.

Time marched on, I got older and heavier, and the medications seemed to have the worst of it under control, so I gave up.  Again.  It turns out that a wreck that I had back when I was riding my bike damaged something in my abdomen enough to weaken it so that I developed a hernia over a time period of a few years, and it got to the point that it hurt all the time.  So, I stopped riding the bike, and I stopped walking, and I worried about it.  This went on until 2008, when I finally was in a spot where I could afford to get it fixed, so I did.  It turns out that I had two, though, so I had to get the other one fixed in 2009.

At this point, Laura had started taking taekwondo at a local school, and since I was fixed, and had just taken my first trip to Europe, I was feeling extra ambitious and ready to try again.  So, I also started taking TKD, which I did for quite a while.

The whole time, though, I was still that fat guy at TKD.  I couldn't get a uniform that fit properly, so I had to wear a white t-shirt so my giant man-boobs didn't hang out of the uniform.  I did my best to have a good attitude, though, and I really did get into it.  There were periods where I would do 4-5 classes a week, plus this bonus workout class called WAR a couple of times, plus I'd practice forms and work out at home.  I was logging 8+ hours of hard workout per week.

Still fat.  308 pounds.  That's the lowest I could get.

I now understand why, but at the time I couldn't figure it out.  I mean, figure calories in, calories out, 3500 calories a week deficit means 1 pound of weight lost, right?  Wrong.  While I can't describe the physics behind it, I can tell you that none of the basal metabolic rate calculators out there work for me.   I have years of data showing that even using a conservative calculation, and running a 7000 deficit weekly just between calories taken in via food and my BMR, never mind exercise, produces weight loss that stops at 308 pounds.

Anyway, I did all that, it stopped working, and then my hernia recurred, and the depression started in again, and I fled the taekwondo school, because it was all just too much to bear.

After a couple of years of feeling pretty awful, emotionally and physically, I found a new family doctor (the old one retired, so I had to), and we ended up with a pretty good rapport, and he said something to me that no doctor had ever said to me before.  He said "You know, this isn't really your fault".

Really?

I was pretty sure it was; all the fitness programs out there say if I just do this, and do that, the weight will come off, I just have to be patient.  I just need to have willpower, right?

He told me that I probably could lose weight the hard way by calorie restriction, but that without help, I would need concentration-camp-like conditions.  An 1800 or 1500 or even 1200 calorie diet wasn't going to do it because for whatever reason, my body was just super-efficient.  Silver lining: if the big famine ever does hit, I'll be one of the last ones to go because it'll take me a long time to starve to death.

Anyway, he wasn't the first to mention weight loss surgery to me, but he was the first one to mention it to me in a way that wasn't a judgement on my character.

So, after all this time, and all this anguish, I finally decided to stop flogging myself for failure to be a normal human and look into it, because the self-image aside, I needed to do something about all this other shit that was wrong with me.  My A1c was 7.9 (that's way too high), I was on two different blood pressure medications, and my joints hurt all the time, my feet hurt all the time, and nobody would fix my hernia until I lost weight.

So, I did it.  I did the six months of nutritionist appointments and supervised diet and exercise plans to prove to the insurance company that I actually needed this surgery (and I did lose some weight during that time; down to about 325 pounds before I stalled out for the last 2 or 3 months).  I did the two week pre-op diet, except I did it for 3 weeks just to make sure that I shrunk my liver enough to have the surgery.  I did the goddamn camera down my throat so they could check out my esophagus and stomach (retching the entire time; that was damn unpleasant).  And then I went and let them take most of my stomach out and give me a new teeny tiny one.  And the pain and the recovery and the pitiful laps around the living room all so I would be able to go and walk for real in a couple of weeks.  I did all of it, it was a giant pain in the ass, it sucked up all of my vacation for the year.

And now, I'm happier than I've been in years, because I'm in control again.  The pre-op stuff, the trauma and the recovery were enough for me to make a mental shift in the way I think about food, and the tiny stomach provides an actual full signal and immediate negative feedback if I screw up.  And, I've lost more than 80 pounds and I'm still going.

Almost the saddest thing about it all:  if I'd known that I just needed to eat around 600 calories a day, I might have tried that, and it might have worked, but nobody ever recommended that I do that, because conventional wisdom is that's crazy talk.  Even now, myfitnesspal bitches at me every day because I didn't eat 1200-1500 calories.  But now, I just ignore it, because it's working.

One of the reasons I waited so long to do this was the judgement I see out there every day about how the surgery is "the easy way out". I actually bought into the idea that I was fat because I was a bad person and deserved the consequences and if I wanted to be normal and good-looking and all that, all I needed to do was have some willpower and control, so I avoided thinking about the surgery because I wanted to "do it right".  Both Barbara and Cheryl can attest that it was pretty much an act of God to get me to even consider this.

And you know what?  It wasn't easy.  Nothing about this was easy.  And, anybody talking about this surgery being the easy way out in front of me will earn a punch in the nose.

And now the saddest thing about it all: I look in the mirror and I still see a disgusting fat guy.  I think once I hit my 3-month follow-up, I may ask for a referral to talk to somebody about that, because that's all wrong.