My bariatric experience--part 5 Anniversary

I promise this is the last part of my series on weight loss.  My next post will be about something else, but I wanted to share with those of you who have been so kind to share that these notes have encouraged them one last post about how things have gone. I wrote it last week, on the first anniversary of surgery.  Along with the post, I'm including my "before and after" pictures,  taken exactly one year apart.

Today I am sitting at the bariatric surgeon’s office on the first anniversary of my surgery.

In the past year, I have lost one hundred and twenty pounds. I have gone from 48 waist pants to 36 inch waist, a size 54 coat to a size 42, and from XXL shirts to a medium.  One year ago I had sleep apnea, borderline diabetes, and high blood pressure; now it is all gone and I am running a mile, biking twenty miles, doing an hour of exercise a day—for which I give God  thanks.

I saw my nutritionist yesterday. I hoped she would put me on maintenance--the diet I will follow the rest of my life.  Not yet, though she did increase my calories and carbs. She actually told me I should eat more, since my body is fighting back against weight loss by going into starvation mode.  At my stage, she said, slower weight loss probably means either too few calories or too many carbs. She also told me to watch sleep and stress.

I still have a few pounds to lose, according the doctor and nutrition, that I should do it  verrry  slooooowly.  The slower it goes off, the less chance of putting it back on, and I have no intention of allowing that to happen.

I really don’t care about how much more weight I lose, but I do care about the establishment of good habits. The lasting value isn’t in a number on the scale, but in the process it takes to get there. I’m more concerned with changing the self-destructive behavior that first put those pounds on my body. I have spent most of my life looking for some easy, non-painful solution to weight gain when there is no such thing. Ease and comfort got me where I was today, which required major surgery to fix.

Gluttony is one of my most persistent besetting sin. Like all besetting sins it must be overcome with pain and effort. Sins are easily forgiven, but hard to overcome. God intentionally made it that way, so we would not return to it.

The way I see it, if I continued in my eating habits, I was in for a world of hurt—diabetes, joint problems, heart problems, sleep apnea, strokes, amputations, who knows?   Bariatric surgery and the subsequent lifestyle changes were not easy (I still look wistfully at every donut shop I pass), but it is still better than the potential difficulties which lay before me. It got better. Without accepting the changes, it would only have gotten worse.

It gets better and easier every day. I love the wonderful comments I get from people, though I still don’t fully believe them.  One of my foreign students saw me outside the school and said “I don’t understand.  When I started here, you were an old man.  Now you are a young man.  Everyone else is getting older. You are getting younger!”  Just call me Benjamin Button!

I don’t believe in telling others what do. I am not smart enough to run other people’s lives.  But for me, I would rather endure the trouble of changing bad habits with the promise of better days ahead, than to enjoy an easy life now, and dread the likelihood this is as good as it will get. It's good to know that God always gives ut the option to change, if we are willing to take it.