Where do I start???
Pretty much as a child and a young teen I didn’t have weight problem. When I was a junior in high school a friend of mine was dieting and I knew that I wanted to be thinner than I was at the time. Jan was using “Ayds” remember those? Those little caramels that suppressed the appetite? They were my first down-fall. I am convinced that was when I totally missed-up my metabolism. I had gone from eating normal (or so I thought) to eating a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast without anything in it, a half of sandwich with cheese and miracle whip for lunch, nothing else till dinner when I would eat a Banquet Cooking Bag (Remember those? Ick!) over a piece of toasted thin diet bread. It became a race between Jan and I who could eat the least amount of food and calories. Boy, did I lose weight. I remember I was able to keep mine under 500 calories! Did I look great? You bet it did! I will not forget the day the scale hit 128 lbs!
I was able to maintain that weight loss till I entered college. I no longer had band practice so my activity level was next to nothing except walking the college campus. The pounds started a slight upward trend (we're talking 145 lbs). It was then that I had my first experience with Weight Watchers. This was back in 1974 when tuna was required 5 times a week and you made your own ketchup! ICK! I don’t have to tell you how long that lasted, maybe a couple of weeks max! At the end of my 2nd semester in college I had a misfortunate thing happened. I was raped. I know that I don’t have to tell you what happened to my weight after that. I blew up.
My boyfriend at the time had just graduated and was in the process for relocating to another town. Between the rape and the thought of losing him my life was hell. I ended up quitting school and relocating to the same city that he did. We ultimately got married. John could not deal with all the weight that I had gained so my marriage to him was hell as well. He physically and mentally abused me. In 1977, I had enough. I left him. I was about 275 lbs at this point. I had no self-esteem. I moved home to my parents and tried the ever so popular liquid protein diet. That was the nastiest ever! I couldn't stand that diet and it didn't last long.
Between 1977 and 1980 my weight pretty much remained the same as far as I can re-call. In 1980, I decided to give Weight Watchers another try. I put my heart and soul into it. It was my life. The program had changed and I thought then that it couldn’t get any better. I lost down to 200 lbs. I will never forget that day the scale hit that mark! This was the closest that I ever got back to my normal size. It was wonderful. Nevertheless I didn't stay there.
In 1982 I made the biggest job move of my career. I was elated over my job and I went from working in the suburbs to working Downtown. I thought that life couldn’t be sweeter and everything that I had learned and worked so hard weight wise went out the window. By 1983 I went up and over 300 lbs and the weight kept climbing.
In 1985 I met the love of my life Mark. He is a God-send. He is my strength, my rock, my support and the best cheerleader on the planet. He is my everything. I can’t live without him. Mark married me when I was over 350 lbs. He fell in love with me being obese and he has been with me through my darkest moments and some of my most elated moments. He is not your usual man. All my friends tell me that they are standing in line waiting for me to let them have their turn. They will be waiting for eternity! I am very spoiled by Mark. As you further read this story you will see what I mean.
Mark and I married in 1986. In 1988 I went back to Weight Watchers. I had a fantastic lecturer then as well. Chris also had lost a very significant amount of weight and she was with me through thick and thin and we could not get my weight below 350 lbs. I think that I was over 380 when I started this time around. We worked at it and tried so many things but nothing would get me past that point. Her husband was doing Optifast. Chris finally told me that she thought that I was going to need medical help in losing the weight. At this time Oprah had done Optifast and it was the biggest thing going. Our insurance approved me to go and I started Optifast in the fall of 1989.
I started Optifast at 387 lbs. I was so excited but it would soon turn to total misery. Within a week of drinking the supplement my mouth broke out into solid ulcers. The Dr.’s treated the symptoms and I kept plugging along. In October of 1989 I woke up with the world’s worst pain in my gut so Mark rushed me to the ER in the middle of the night. They hooked me up to an IV and started pain killers while they accused me of breaking the fast. I hadn’t. I started feeling so much better that I talked them into letting me go home. They told me that the medicine that they had me on was making me feel better and if I went home I would be back. Long story short, I went home that early morning and I was back in the ER before sun-up. They did an ultra-sound and diagnosed me as having gastritis. I was in the hospital for a few days. They decided then to put me on meds to protect the stomach and took me off the supplement because they felt that I was allergic to it. I ate off the emergency food list which was mainly eggs. To this day I hate plain boiled eggs. In December I developed an anal abscess. I had emergency surgery. The surgeon didn’t know how I had avoided toxic shock syndrome because it was so bad. I got over that and I made it a full 18 weeks of fasting and got my weight to 307 lbs. I was elated but I can tell you I was so sick. I wanted to do it again and the
I started my re-feeding phase of the Optifast program with the most awesome dietician on the face of the earth. Her name is Dr. Joanne Lichten. After I completed the re-feeding phase I loved Dr. Jo so much that I asked for her help as a private patient. I can tell you that Dr. Jo knows her stuff and taught me so much over the several years that I worked privately with her. If it weren’t for Dr. Jo referring me to a Dr. for testing for a thyroid disorder I’m not sure what would have happened. Dr. Jo had me on a 1500 calorie a day diet and I gained weight every week. I was working full time and exercise was not a word in my vocabulary. I also think that with all the yo-yo dieting that I had done I had destroyed my metabolism. Dr. Jo felt guilty taking my money for just reading my journal so we decided to part ways. We are still friends. She will always hold a very special place in my heart. She has become very successful. She has written a book called Dining Lean and it is the best ever! Everyone should have a copy. Visit her web-site at:
http://www.drjo.com/
By the time I left Dr. Jo, I had started therapy to deal with my ugly past. I spent the next 3 years doing a lot of work with my past and some family issues. It was the most painful time of my life. Psycho-therapy is tough but so worth the work that it takes. Today I am at peace with all of my past. Thank You Lord!
Well my weight during the time spent with Dr. Jo and my therapist crept up to 468 lbs. I went back to see my Optifast physician and he couldn’t believe his eyes. Knowing my medical history he asked if anyone had ever done any tests on my adrenal glands and of course the answer was “no” because I didn’t know that tests could even be done on those. He told me on rare occasions they can play a role in obesity. He got approval to run the tests as they are very expensive. The story of my life was that I was normal. He was so flabbergasted about my weight and the fact that my blood pressure was normal, blood sugar was normal, cholesterol was normal; everything was perfect except for the number on the scale. The Dr. told me that if he would erase my weight from my chart and send it across the country to a colleague they would not believe my records if he were to call and tell them that I weighed 468 lbs. He knew that I was miserable. He told me that I would never be thin. He told me my only option was weight loss surgery and that he would never recommend it except for my circumstances. He told me that only thing that I could hope for was about 100 lbs and even then I would have to work for it. I remember walking out of that office and looking at Mark and telling him that God would get this weight off of me. I wasn’t going to have surgery and I wasn’t going to quit fighting this battle.
A few weeks passed and I still struggled with just getting through each day. I will never know how I worked a full-time job at 468 lbs. Life was hell. I knew deep in my heart that I needed the surgery or I was going to die. I will never forget the night that I turned to Mark and told him that I wanted to have the gastric banding surgery. (By the way this is not Lap-Band surgery but Dr. Molina’s gastric band. The Lap-Band was not even developed at this time but I believe that the Lap Band was developed as a result from Dr. Molina’s method of gastric segmentation.) Mark turned and looked at me like I had fallen off the planet. His response was “You will die! You can’t do this!” I told him that I was willing to pray about it and if it was God’s will for my life the insurance company would approve it. God knew that we did not have the $10,000 that it would take for the surgery. The first go around with the insurance was they wanted more documentation. By the time I got it all together, the nurse called me from Dr. Molina’s office and said that I had been approved and not only was I approved but that I was the first one ever to have been approved by that Insurance Company. I knew then that I would be o.k. because God was in on it. I had the surgery in August of 1993. I did well and in the first year I lost nearly 100 lbs. I was so happy and life was sweet again.
Over the next 5 years I lost another 30 lbs. Gastric surgery never did make me thin like it did most people. Gastric surgery is not the answer. You can learn to eat around it and that is what I did for the most part. For Gastric surgery to work you must comply with the limitations of the procedure. I learned that soft mushy calorie laden foods went though my small pouch really easy. I found that candy and cookies went down with no problem. Mexican food (my favorite) went down very easily also. That is why I did not lose all my weight. That is why you see people who even had gastric by-pass surgery or stomach stapling start gaining weight back. You learn to beat the system. Even Dr. Molina said during the seminar that I was required to take before surgery that “This is a tool, you use it properly it will serve you well, you abuse it and you are likely to lose the tool because it can become entrapped”. You see the stomach is a muscle and if you abuse the little pouch long enough it will hang over the band and it will grow together where it touches. The stomach can take that band in and become a regular stomach with a band hanging in it!
By 1998 I had stretched out my little pouch and I learned all the tricks to get my favorite food down. Don’t get me wrong I did a lot of vomiting trying to do it too! There is no worse pain than something that will not pass through that tiny hole caused from the band. It feels like Dumbo is sitting on your chest! I wanted to get to my high school weight again. I wanted to be 128 lbs once again. I thought about having it re-done and the pouch made smaller when a friend told me about the Weigh Down Workshop a Christian based diet program.
I refuse to give any recognition to Weigh Down because the founder Gwen Shamblin has started her own church from that program. My husband and I got involved in it and were leaders. Then we realized that we were in a very dangerous cult. Luckily in 2002 we got out. If you want to read our story or find out more about the happenings of Weigh Down Workshop, Remnant Fellowship (Gwen Shamblin’s church), let me warn you it is very evil in my opinion.
Go to http://www.spiritwatch.org/
Between 2002 and 2004 I really struggled with my weight. In late 2001 I noticed that I couldn’t hear anything out of my left ear. I didn’t let it bother me because I had my right ear which was fine. Boy was that a mistake! Now I’m permanently deaf in my left ear. It wasn’t till April 2002 that the right ear started to fail that I went running to the Dr. and long story short they were able to get my hearing back with prednisone and they diagnosed me with Sjoghren’s Syndrome which is an auto-immune disease. I already had Crohn’s so my Rheumatologist told me if you have one auto-immune disease you will have a secondary one. I’m glad that it is Sjoghren’s and not another one cause Sjoghren’s is easily treated. The signs of Sjoghren’s are dry eyes and dry mouth and unusual symptoms is hearing loss. I suffer with the dry eyes and at the time hearing loss.
I went through multiple rounds of prednisone between 2002 and 2005. In November of 2004, I ended up in the Emergency Room thinking I was having a heart attack. Come to find out it was my stomach. I knew then that I was playing Russian roulette with my life. By this time I had sworn off all diets because of the gastric surgery. I did not need to diet! So I thought. In desperation one Saturday morning, November 20 to be exact I visited the Weight Watchers web-site. I got the guts up to call them and talk to someone about my dieting history and how I was scared as to whether or not I could do their program because of the band. I couldn’t eat meat! My life was enchiladas, baked potatoes and junk! After talking to this sweet girl and getting a lot of encouragement from her and hearing about their joining special, I called Mark into our study and asked him if he would go with me. He looked at me as if I had 3 eyes and said “Weight Watchers?” “You want to go to Weight Watchers?” “Why?” I told him through tears that I wanted to go and that I had no other hope. I also told him that I was scared to death that I would fail one more time and I needed his support more than ever.
Let me say this… Mark was always with me, nearly every Dr.’s appt. He was there sitting in the waiting room during all of my therapy sessions. He was and is always pulling for me in whatever I seek out to do and his attitude has always been we would do whatever it took. Again, he is my God-send and my angel. I’m the luckiest girl alive!
Back to the story…
We literally threw on our clothes and got to that last meeting on Saturday. They had an awesome deal running. If you brought a friend, your friend could do the program for $6.00 a week. We joined. In fact the leader of that class was the same leader that had worked so hard with me back in the 80’s…Chris! My head just couldn’t handle being in Chris’ class. It had nothing to do with Chris but it had everything to do with the fact that Weight Watchers had never worked for me.
A friend that went to my church had lost over 100 lbs with Weight Watchers and had told me about Mike. She encouraged me to visit his meeting. I went the next week to hear him and to check things out because Mark had to work. I knew that I had found the place that we should be. I told Mark that he was going to love this guy. The following week Mark got to experience Mike and Mark loved him too. Mike was our man!
In fact in August of 2005 I started the journey to have my gastric segmentation reversed because I had so much faith in Weight Watchers and I was tired at guessing how many points I had eaten because I threw-up so much! I got the reversal approved and in September I had the band removed. Here is the remarkable thing. My hearing had gotten to that point that I was headed for a cochlear implant. The Dr.’s did not want to keep getting it back with the prednisone because the mega dosages I had to take were ruining my body. I have cataracts from taking so much prednisone. It also causes bone problems which they are watching closely for. I was wearing 2 very powerful hearing aids and I could only hear using a FM system. Mike wore it around his neck in meetings so that I could hear what he was saying. It was that bad. Even when they took me to surgery to do the gastric reversal I asked to wear my hearing aids. Within 2 weeks after having that band removed my hearing in my right ear came back. I do not have to wear the very powerful hearing aids anymore nor do I have to use the FM system. I wear a very small hearing aid and I only need it in noisy environments. It was a miracle. All my Dr.’s have no doubt that the band was causing rejection issues within my body.
Mike was another God-send. He helped me so much over that year and a half. By May of 2006 I had lost 98 lbs. It was also at that time that Mark and I decided to build a new home. Boy was that ever a huge mistake! Don’t get me wrong. I love my new home and so does Mark but the stress and emotion of building cost me a weight gain of 125 lbs. So, here I am, December 8, 2007, 427 lbs…
Do you want to share the journey with me? Let’s go!!!!!
