The Decision

After going back and forth for 4 years and com­ing so close to hav­ing the surgery only to learn that my insur­ance stopped cov­er­ing the sur­geon, I have decided to move for­ward with weight loss surgery.  I will chron­i­cle my jour­ney here because as I talk a lit­tle more about it I real­ize that more and more peo­ple think that under­go­ing WLS is a cop out– it’s tak­ing the easy way out. And, like with most things in my life, I feel the need to edu­cate and inform peo­ple on the reality.

If you have read my pre­vi­ous posts you may have real­ized that I have been strug­gling with my weight for some time. The truth is that I have been strug­gling since I was 19 years old. I have actively tried los­ing weight– work­ing out, Weight Watch­ers, cut­ting calo­ries, lifestyle change,  med­ically super­vised diets, nutri­tion­ists, fad diets, and even hyp­no­sis. The thing is– I have never been able to lose more than 50 pounds.  Now I know that 50 pounds is a lot of weight to lose, but when you have to lose 232 lbs it’s vir­tu­ally noth­ing. Espe­cially since for every 50 that I lose I seem to gain 60.

But the weight alone is not the issue. Not really. My over­all health is suf­fer­ing. Not only have I screwed up my metab­o­lism, but I have thyroid/autoimmune issues, sleep apnea, res­pi­ra­tory ail­ments, join prob­lems, high cho­les­terol and more. And the life that I am liv­ing is not one that I am happy with. I have no energy. Between the extra weight that I am car­ry­ing and the other issues I am unable to muster up enough energy to func­tion at even a min­i­mal level. My daugh­ter is 3 and she deserves a mom who can play and function.

And so I made the deci­sion to get help. It was not one that I made lightly. It was not one that I rushed into. It is, how­ever, a tool that I admit that I need so that I can move for­ward in my life.

Today was my con­sul­ta­tion with the Bariatric Sur­geon (Dr. D). My BMI is cur­rently above 55 and I am con­sid­ered “super­obese”. Those words stung, but it wasn’t some­thing that I did not know already. Like I said, I have been research­ing this for years. And like many of the things in my life there will be some hur­dles that I have to get through– my insur­ance does not cover the surgery that Dr. D rec­om­mends and there are a few peo­ple in my life who are very unsup­port­ive in my deci­sion. Not my hubby though! He knows how impor­tant this is to me and, as always, con­tin­ues to be my rock.

So stay tuned. I will share more of my jour­ney here.

Tagged as: bariatric surgery, weight loss surgery, WLS