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Of Fills and Hope

Published May 17, 2012 | By Chrissy

Holy Cats, you will not believe my luck!

Guess what happened.

NO!! GUESS!!

OK, I’ll tell you.

Oh my Gawd, it’s so freakin’ COOL!

Vanita Cyril, the Queen of Bloggers everywhere

You all know Vanita Cyril, right? She’s the woman over at After Bedtime Blog. Vanita’s so great, you gotta’ love her. Anyway, she ran this really cool contest last week. See V. has been a member of Retrofit for awhile now, and it’s been great to read her experiences as she has gone along. Through reading about her experience with the company, I have been dying to be part of it. Now I can be part, as I won the give away for a year with Retrofit. I’m screaming like a twelve-year-old girl seeing Justin Bieber in concert.

I’m as nervous and excited as if I was going on my first date ever.

If you’re a reader you know this hasn’t been the best walk. Retrofit is going to help me. There is access to coaches, a dietician and you can use Skype, e-mail or the phone to meet with them.

I have a really great feeling about this attempt.

So, I am prepared and ready. I saw my surgeon today and he gave me a small fill and I can feel the difference. I will be , hopefully, starting this new branch of my weight loss surgery journey ready and set to go with a nice green zone.

I will be writing about my experience so I will begin tomorrow with my first Skype meeting ! I have hope.

OK later ‘baters and you guys are awesome to me

Posted in Health, Obesity, Personal Growth, Weight Loss Surgery | Tagged Lap Band, Retrofit, Weight Loss Surgery | 3 Comments

Breaking Dynamics

Published April 28, 2012 | By Chrissy

Buffet - by Jorge Gobbi ( morrissey on Flickr) | CReative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

“And I’m not rewarding myself with food!” she said in my ear over the phone.

After telling her how proud I am of her, I hung up and marveled at how young she was and she was putting into practice something I wasn’t able to do for another fifteen or so years.

She broke a relationship dynamic with someone who had the same relationship dynamic with me my entire life. It’s wonderful to see her able to begin to change and grow.She didn’t break the relationship, she broke the dynamics of it.

The volatile, abusive and crazy making neurosis of someone else ruled me, and then her. This person told her things like, “You’re jealous because I’m thin and get more male attention and you’re fat.” Talk about destructive.

This person is the voice in my head telling me that I have little piggy eyes, that I am vain and think I am so beautiful, etc. It is the voice that tells me I’m cheap, worthless, dirty and stupid. I am so proud she is finding truth at such a young age.

But her statement that opened this post , “And I’m not rewarding myself with food!“, speaks volumes more than the mere words seem to say.

What Now - By Breahn Foster (breahn on Flickr) | Creative Commons License Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Things get inside us; abuse of all kinds, traumatic situations, bad choices, and they begin to grow things from the mold that it brings with it. Before you know it, there is a confusing jungle that is too thick to see through and requires the skill of a surgeon and the patience of Job to careful and tediously cut the vines away from our walls. Unchecked, it determines how we grow and we become so accustomed to it that we no longer see it and simply react out of habit. Some of us react with drugs, alcohol, self-injury, dangerous or screwed up relationships or…..food. Some of us use all the above.

It takes a lot of practice to be able to step away from things that are dangerous to our self-esteem, mental health or our physical safety. But one day, it happens after many days of trial runs, and it happens without rage. It just flows like water. The resentment is still there. One can’t have years of abuse from someone or from mental tapes screaming at us in the background of our head and have it just magically disappear. But we are no longer accepting of incorrect and abusive labels placed upon us. We can no longer be convinced they are true and we begin to be compassionate with ourselves. It makes it easier, in some small way, to be less angry and maybe even a little compassionate to the twisted one who hurt us.

She will never know just how proud she makes me, year after year; how watching her grow has been a joy and a privilege. She may as well have come from my body and been one of my children. I wish I had been half as smart at her age.

Today is a new day, time to keep implementing self compassion.

It’s never too late to love out of us whatever’s living in us, eating away at us.

Posted in Family, Personal Growth, Relationships, Weight Loss Surgery | Tagged Emotional Eating, Family, Growth, Interpersonal relationship, Mental Health | 6 Comments

Just checking

Published April 27, 2012 | By Chrissy

Just checking this WordPress app out so I can work on posts on the run!

Posted in Weight Loss Surgery | Leave a comment

I’m OK, You’re So So

Published April 10, 2012 | By Chrissy

Fair warning. I’m drinking coffee at nine at night…sip, sip, sip…

It was just gorgeous here at the Jersey shore today. Lizz, her best friend Mary and I went to the Wildwood boardwalk for the afternoon. As much as I can’t stand Wildwood and call it Little Newark by the Sea, it was a really nice time. The long beach was clean and yet to be full of trash from too many drunken, lazy tourists and the water was a straight band of blue across the horizon. I wish I had brought my Canon.

Two hours of walking (might have been two and a half, I didn’t really keep track) back and forth totaled about four miles though it was done in long spurts with time at arcades for the girls to sucker me out of money. My legs felt used but not sore or tired once we got home. Funny thing about my body, when I exercise, it swells starting with my fingers first. After a few hours it goes down but it’s really weird. After looking it up, it seems it’s weird but normal dilation of the blood vessels.

Good. I don’t need any more freaky shit with my body.

Sip, sip, sip…

Anyway, it wet my whistle for being active again. The feeling of broken glass in my knees and ankles isn’t around so I’m going to proverbially run with it. Can you imagine me actually running? I would need CPR. The EBV isn’t flaring so taking advantage of this time to get started again is perfect.

The trees have tried to kill me with my allergies being outrageous and almost comical. The amount of snot that has come out of my face has to be inhuman. Everyone out here is walking around sneezing, wheezing and with swollen eyes. The twenty-four hour urine test for Cushings has to wait until a personal issue is over and I haven’t been sucking down Prednisone for a few days. I imagine by Sunday of next week so I will pick the equipment up to have on hand when it’s all clear. I like to tell people who ask about the jug of pee “I just like to keep it.” and stare at them intently.

Sip, sip, sip…

Having spent forty odd days doing a Lenten Gratitude List over at Excitable Gurelle gave me a few things. Besides the obvious gratitude, it lifted some of my mood and gave me a renewed sense of purpose. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. Regardless of the outcome of the Cushings test, whether its Prednisone induced or otherwise, I have to live with this issue. Out lives and physical issues don’t stop because we decided to have weight loss surgery. Many will alleviated and that is kick ass. But some stick with us, like our eye color or the freckles across our nose. It doesn’t matter if others accept us, what matters is accepting ourselves.

Tomorrow a gentleman is returning my call to get my insurance straightened out. Once the outcome of the testing’s completed I can, once again, go back to seeing my surgeon and we will continue the discussion about a revision. Whether that happens or not is anyone’s guess but I have to live with the now, with my reality today.

Sip, sip, sip…

I’m a firm believer in health at any size and fat acceptance, not simply because I am fat but because I honestly believe in it. Even when thin I felt there was nothing right or OK about discrimination in any form. “I’m OK, you’re so so” doesn’t cut it in my book. I don’t have to like someone to make it OK for them to be who they are at this very moment.

OK so anyway, now that my pupils are pinned and I’m grinding my teeth like a tweaker on a run, it’s time to put the coffee away and try to get sleepy.

Just a few more sips won’t hurt…