My Story

Well, here I am Day 3 of my blogging adventure, 8 days before surgery and 1 day before starting my 7 day pre-op diet. I believe I am ready to do this liquid diet.  Lots of wls people seem to have a real problem sticking to it completely.  I don't think I will because in my long life of dieting I have done liquid diets twice.  One was optifast and the other was part of a diabetes study I am part of.  Now to be fair, the study one was actually 2 meals that were shakes (you could do Slimfast or Glucerna) and then a healthy meal for dinner.  I seem to be able to do the liquid diets pretty easily but we shall see!

I have to say that I am struggling a little getting ready for tomorrow.  I have definitely overeaten the last few days.  Somehow I think I have been justifying it to myself because I have stuck with healthy foods but overeating is overeating and I have not felt nearly as good as when I don't eat so much.

I was actually a skinny kid.  I grew up in Denver, CO.  The area where we lived was unincorporated at the time and was annexed into Denver when I was 12 but we always say it was Denver anyway.  We were pretty poor.  My dad was an alcoholic and my mom worked as a bartender (go figure :)) I have 3 brothers, 2 older and one younger and we were on our own most of the time.  We played and played and played outdoors.  We had no real accountability and so we did whatever we wanted.  All that activity kept me thin.  I was a wild teenager in the 60's and had a fake ID and would go to the Airmen's Club at Lowry Air Force Base with my older friends.  We would drink beer and dance with all the airmen.  I had a new boyfriend every few weeks until one night I was 3 sheets to the wind and hit on this guy that was sitting at the bar with his buddies.  We started dating and within a couple of months we eloped.  I was 16, he was 19, we ended up in Ft. Walton Beach, FL.  This was about the time I started thinking I was fat.  When I look at pictures from back then I can only wish to be that "fat" now, lol!  Even after I had my daughter, Shannon, when I was 17 I really wasn't fat but somehow I had started down that road to thinking I was and the poor self-esteem that goes along with it.

After I had my son, Eric, when I was 22 I started packing on the pounds.  I have never really been that active, except when I was a kid, and it began to catch up with me. By this time, Steve was out of the military and we were living in a Chicago suburb near where he grew up.  I don't even know what I weighed when I got married because we never owned a scale growing up and I didn't own one yet.  I just knew I kept having to get bigger clothes.  We moved to Ft. Collins, Colorado when Eric was 2 and soon I decided to try the Atkins diet.  As I mentioned I am a bit OCD and when I do pretty much anything I feel I have to follow it to the letter and so I lost weight really well on Atkins.  I don't recall exactly what I weighed to start but I believe it was about 185 (I would even love that weight today!)

 I went down to 129, which is probably a bit too thin for me and as soon as I figure out how to post pictures here I will post a couple from "the good old days".  I kept pretty close to that weight for a couple of years and then I got pregnant with my 3rd child, Corey, and gained about 50 lbs with him.  We were living in Greeley, CO by this time and besides my own 3 kids, I was doing home daycare for 4-5 other kids.  I never really lost the weight from the pregnancy so I was back up to about 185 again.  Over the next couple of years I crept up a little more and a little more.  We moved back to the Denver area and I soon discovered on the scale one day that I was only a couple of pounds shy of that dreaded 200 mark.  In the next day or so I will tell you about that next diet and the good, the bad and the ugly that occurred through losing it.