not alone

I must be getting better.
This is the pic from this batch where
I look the fattest.
And here it is for public view!

Here is a pic of other-Lisa,
author of the blog,
Gastric Bypass Truth:
The Skinny On Life After Weight Loss Surgery
(click here).

Lisa from Gastric Bypass Truth!

The other-Lisa blogged a really great list called,"What I Wish I Had Known" before gastric bypass surgery (click here for the full blog).

I picked a few of my favorites from her list.
I'll put them in italics and comment on them below.

• I wish I had realized that my life would still revolve around food - or at least, what I ingest. Instead of being able to forget all about eating, my day consists of counting fluid ounces, protein grams and supplements.

My lack of energy and wonky immune system will not magically get better just because I want them to. I'm going to have to intentionally, consciously nourish myself better.
I feel like crap.
I'm attributing my low-energy to my need for nutrients.
I do take supplements.
I know they're not enough. I need actual, living nutrition!

Until I get more income, I can't afford the fresh vegetables for my juicer. I can afford to EAT the vegetables. I have a nice big pot of brown rice, spinach, peppers and chicken on the stove right now. But, the amount of vegetables needed to make just one glass of good, fresh juice is more than I can afford.

Nourishing myself is something I am working on. I'm tired of being tired.

• I wish I had realized that gastric bypass surgery - and the ensuing weight loss - will not make all my problems go away. That I would still face issues even though I weighed less.

Tell me about it! I'm with ya, other-Lisa. Looking back, it seems like my compulsive overeating and preoccupation with complications to morbid obesity were distractions from the real life issues. As long as I had my face-stuffing habit and my sicknesses, I could postpone working on my life, my career, my karma, my relationships...you name it.
Now that I'm just plain fat,
as opposed to lethally morbidly obese,
I can get my life in order.
But getting my life in order has been hard.
No lie.

• I really wish I could have seen how the sagging skin and remaining fat would look, and how self-conscious it would make me continue to feel.

Yeah, instead of being self-conscious for being circus-fat, I'm now self conscious about my saggy front butt, my sloppy flesh and my need to yank this Halfway to Skinny body of mine into some kind of shape. I'm still suffering under the delusion that I need to do something about how I look before I can truly live.

• I wish I had known how easy it is to become obsessed with how I look, and how I would have to watch myself to make sure all my conversations didn’t revolve around me, my weight loss or my wrinkled skin.

That's why I blog. I get to purge my feelings about
my body image,
my relationship with food,
my appearance,
my wish for plastic surgery and whatever else I care to indulge in.
Luckily for us, we are not doing this alone! Other folks are working to get well too. We can help each other get free from our bad body thoughts so we can go out in the world and be ourselves! Or that's the hope anyway.

• I wish I had known that after 6-9 months the old demons of cravings and head hunger would rear their ugly heads and that eating right would not be easy or automatic.

Yeah, me too. Right after the surgery, eating made me sick. For about a year and a half after the surgery I did not experience actual hunger. It was nice to have to remember to eat rather than shovel food into my constantly angry furnace of a stomach. But my little furnace is getting angry again. There are a few ways I can deal with it. One of which is to have a surgical revision to the bypass to tighten up my pouch. That could buy me another year or so of no-hunger. What I'm more interested in doing is to nourish myself well so that I'm not in a constant state of hunger. I also wish to clean out my gut from the yeasts, parasites and toxins that cause cravings.

It ain't easy, but what is?
I don't expect my life to be easy.
No one's life is easy.
We all have our struggles.
We all have our karma to work out.

Other-Lisa, the other bloggers and I are working on ourselves.
Fortunately, the fabulous inter-web makes our blogs accessible to others who may be having similar struggles.

We find each other and hopefully we can help each other out.

It's always nice to know I'm not alone.

*Lisa's Video Pick of the Day*
She's right.
Maybe we should lose weight?
Why doesn't anyone suggest that we get busy preventing disease, curing hunger, working for justice??
Maybe we should take care of our health and then go out and make a difference in the world.
I love when teens make these great body-image videos!
Thanks, timelytelevision!
click here or click below