Category Archives: head trips

Post-Op Week 66 Progress Report: Achievement Unlocked–Misses Size Pants

image This week saw me lose most of the gain I had last week.  How, I don’t know.   This was a good week for the most part, though.
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Achievement Unlocked: Sitting in an Airplane Seat

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Achievement unlocked:  fitting into an airplane seat and not needing a seatbelt extender. 

This is a big deal.

The last time I flew on a plane (American Airlines from SEA to DFW, BTW), I had to buy an extra seat, use a seatbelt extender, AND the seatbelt extender was just barely long enough to buckle me in.  It made for a very, very uncomfortable flight in more ways than one.  It was pretty much the worst travel experience of my whole life, which I’ll write about another time.

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Observations From -214

In all of the excitement of the day Tuesday, I’d forgotten to post up a side by side of me at my heaviest with me now.  So here it is.

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For reference, the photos at left are 2010.

A friend (who has also had WLS) asked me, “How does looking at this make you feel?”

Well, let’s see.  There are a lot of feels I feel when I look at this composite.

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Anniversary

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My husband and I went to the hospital where I had my surgery last year and tried to recreate the photograph we took before I went in for my surgery. I didn’t keep the outfit I wore to the hospital, so I chose something that was pretty darn close.

Today is a pretty important day in my life.  A year ago at this time, I was recovering from my sleeve surgery.

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Oh, You Know, It’s The “Two Legs in One Leg of the Pants” Photo. NBD.

So this happened.

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Ignore my Mexi-fro. It was really humid here today as it rained all morning, and my hair needs to be cut.

These are the shorts I wore at my heaviest weight.  And they were tight then.

I’d purposely kept them when I started this path because I wanted a stark reminder of where I started.  I never wanted to forget where I came from.

Tonight I got to thinking, I wonder if I can do that thing where you put both legs inside the one leg of a pair of pants?  So I dug up the shorts, and gave it a try.

I felt the catch in my throat when I was able to pull the single leg up over both my thighs.  I thought, no way…holy shit, I was this big?  What in the hell?  How?

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do this.

Yet here I am:  two legs in one pants leg.  With room.

54 pounds from my goal and chugging toward maintenance.

I got this.

 

You Know You’ve Lost a Lot of Weight When…

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  • People continually tell you that you are “wasting away to nothing.”
  • You are told pretty much every day that you look great.  Especially by people who didn’t pay you much attention before.
  • Your husband has a tough time picking you out of a crowd because now you look like everyone else.
  • You have to work even harder at the gym to achieve the same burn that you got when you were 50 pounds heavier.
  • Men who are not your husband check you out.
  • Men who are not your husband open doors for you.
  • You now wear a smaller bra than you wore when you first started wearing them as a kid.
  • You complain about your clothes not fitting properly now, not because they’re too small, but because they’re too big.
  • You find that getting dressed every day is a challenge only because you now own so many cute clothes that it’s hard to pick which outfit to wear.

And finally…you know you’ve lost a lot of weight when:

  • Your own doctors don’t recognize you.  Today on the way to my support group meeting, I ran into the doctor who did my last two followup appointments, and he flat out did not recognize me.  He gushed about how great I looked and couldn’t stop saying WOW.  Before we parted ways, he asked me how much I’d lost to date, and I told him and he pumped his fist in the air.  I told him I’d see him in July at my 1-year follow up.

Hopefully by then I’ll have at least another 10 pounds off and be inching my way down to my goal.  I’m already at 70% EWL and aiming for 90%.  To get to 90%, I need to lose 50 more pounds, which puts me squarely in my desired weight range.

Summer is coming, and this will be the summer of kicking ass.

Post-Op Week 45 Progress Report: Complacency is a Dangerous Thing

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Slightly up on the scale this week, but not surprised.  The week following my period, I am always up a pound or two.  This is the pattern of lose-gain that I’ve noticed that my body slips into each month.  I think I may cut calories back to 1000-1100 this week since my hunger isn’t as intense the weeks after my period ends.  It’s only during that week that I feel like a bottomless pit.  I did also have a few too many calories yesterday (I was at nearly 1400) and a lot of sodium, so I know those two things didn’t help me today.

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Post-Op Week 44 Progress Report

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Really pleased with this week’s progress!  This is proof that the road to losing weight, no matter how you do it, is not a straight line.  I plot my weight values on a spreadsheet in Excel every week, and because I am a science teacher, I generate a graph of the result.  Yeah, I know I’m a great big nerd.  It definitely has a negative slope but the line is far from straight.

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Image Distortion

Right now I look like this:

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So why do I still think that I look like this:

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Post-Op Week 37 Progress Report

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This week’s progress: great!  I added both calories and activity, and it gave me the result I was after so I will continue this behavior until it doesn’t give me the result I want.
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