Keeping op appearances

I dedicate this post to Stephbospoon!

For someone who works with words everyday, I think I have somehow botched explaining about this op.  I do want it.  I mean, in as far as anyone is looking forward to having five holes put in them, their liver taken to one side and a silicone ring being put around the top of their stomach.  Sure, that process is not likely to be fun – I am quite sure there will be times when I curse myself.  But what I’m focussing on is the results.  It’s not a miracle ‘cure for fatness’, I get that.  And I would absolutely fight for anyone to feel they are entitled to live the life they want, at the weight they are.  It’s just… I can’t.  My husband says it’s a “vanity op” and I know what he means.  But I hate looking like this and I hate how it makes me I feel.  I think if I didn’t have to leave home to go to work, I just wouldn’t leave home much at all.  It makes me feel ashamed, and less than, and apologetic and hyper, super-sensitive.  So actually, I would argue that it isn’t vanity alone – it’s that my self-esteem and my mental health are so closely tied to my appearance (as shallow as I know that is) that it will make me feel so much better.  I am constantly hunched against the words I feel will be chucked my way, or at least the looks of disgust and/or pity.

I know that people say that your size isn’t everything – that you can lose weight and still have the same problems.  I see that.  But in my case, it’s not simply a theory – I know, I absolutely know, that my self-esteem and self-confidence perk up no end at a certain point.  I know this because for a short period of time after Lighterlife when I was still shrinking, I felt better about myself.  Lighter – yes in weight, but also in spirit.  Even with the band, that weight point is a long way away.  But, I get a little hyperburst of swifter weight loss for around 3 months and it seems common to lose a stone a month – and for it then to settle to 1lb-2lbs a month.  That’s what ‘normal’ people have, right?  That 1-2lbs a week.  I am afraid of doing the maths thing (of by X time I could be Y) because it’s never caused me anything but bitter disappointment, but maybe, I can now.  Maybe by the time we go off to Canada and USA in late September I’ll be several stone lighter. Maybe by Christmas I could be within striking distance of that weight bracket where I feel better about myself.  Maybe by this time next year, I’ll be able to see the ‘healthy weight’ BMI from afar.

Currently I’m losing around 1lb a month.  I’m not exaggerating: on my weight app it tells me that I have lost 1lb in the last 30 days, 4lbs in 90 days.  It’s so energy sapping, so utterly emotionally draining to carry on doing what I know to be right, even if every day I get on the Scales of Doom, only for it to laugh at me.  I just want some help.  I don’t want it to be something that happens to me, I want to be actively involved in losing the weight, I want to be able to feel proud of what I’ve achieved.  I am going into this with my eyes (and, okay, my purse) wide open.

I have a consultation this time next week with the surgeon.  It’s less expensive a procedure than I’d feared.  I spoke to P to ask about borrowing the money from savings (they’re joint savings) and paying it back rather than paying interest to a bank.  I hate talking about money, I was shaking.  But I did it.  He listened – and challenged me about some things, useful things – and ultimately agreed.  Then the next day, he said I only had to pay back a third – that the other two thirds I can just have.  After all, he said, he would benefit from it too.  And I know that he means I would be more confident and happier – I know he doesn’t mean aesthetically.  He talked me out of the more radical forms of surgery that I was considering on the basis that you lost more weight, more quickly.  He was right.  The band is harder, longer work – but enables me to live a more ‘normal’ life, now and in the future.  I won’t have to have injections and a cocktail of pills to ensure I have sufficient vitamins and minerals, for example.

So, for me, the end justifies the means.  It’s not for everyone.  I’m a bit ashamed that it is for me, tbh.  Why can’t I just do what everyone else seems to be able to do?  (And okay, I know there are more people like me out there but sometimes it feels so lonely and isolating – when you pick up a magazine to see an article on someone’s “transformation” and they show their typical day’s food before and after the diet and I want to scream and howl and throw things because OF COURSE they’d lose weight, given what they were eating before).  But I can’t and I have to face up to it – I’ve been slogging at a variety of diets for so long.  I knew that when I got engaged, if I couldn’t get slim for a wedding dress, that I couldn’t do it.  Hand on heart, I did everything.  The spectre of that dress haunted me.  I was terrified of looking awful.  Reader, I didn’t look awful – I looked as okay as a fat girl in a dress could look – but I look at the photos to this day and feel sad.  The only thing that stops me having a meltdown about it on a daily basis, is knowing I did everything I could do – that I have nothing to reproach myself about.

Anyway, this has turned into a torrent of getting things off my chest in the form of a gargantuan post.  It probably should have been serialised.  Sorry for trying your patience dear Reader (including Stephbospoon – and SBS, yes the low carb, high fat route suits me best too.  It’s not easy to do but it’s easier to eat less and not feel furiously hungry all the time). 

I’m off for my stepson’s birthday dinner so for tonight at any rate, there will be cocktails and possibly a pudding (as well as a starter and main) – but the place we’re going to does very beautiful but very small portions of a healthy nature.  Have good weekends, one and all.