Nothing can save my mug from being ugly, but I must say I feel much better! 🙂
I’m guessing that first photo was taking about a year ago. I would have been at or around my highest weight of 508. I was miserable, uncomfortable, and everything hurt all the time.
By the time I had my surgery on 10/23/23, I had lost 46 pounds. I lost about 20 in the month or so before surgery, then I lost another 26 within the 3 weeks before surgery. Even at that point, and for a long time after, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the possibility of being in the 2xx’s.
As I recovered from the surgery, stuck with the plan, and started exercising, I kept watching the pounds come off. Even now at 10 months later, I’m still losing an average of 1 to 2 pounds each week, most weeks.
It wasn’t an overnight change, but over time things got easier. I make it a point to remind myself often of how things used to be. How bad off I was. I try to remind myself how walking 20 feet from my desk at work, to the restroom, was something I had to think about. I remind myself how things like mowing my own yard, or fitting in booth, were far beyond my reach. I remind myself how I constantly thought about my weight in relation to the world around me. Is that chair going to hold me? How bad will I stick out? Am I going to be the biggest guy in the room?
Now I am at about 281 as of this writing. I still have 50+ pounds to lose but life is so much different. So much better.
Each day at work I take a break and go for a little walk around my building. It isn’t long…literally 5 minutes or so. But I remind myself of last year when for a few days I had to park elsewhere, and it was about 100 steps to my car and it was a big deal. I remember how I had a meeting a few buildings away a couple of years ago, and I had to stop 3 or 4 times on the 10-minute walk…then how earlier this year, even 50 or 60 pounds ago, how I made that walk with no problems. I remind myself that I go to the gym, I’ve been swimming laps this summer, and I actually like to go out and do things like a few weeks ago when my family visited a zoo and an aquarium.
It hasn’t been easy. Far From it.
I haven’t been perfect. FAR from it.
I still struggle with food issues. I still make wrong choices sometimes. But overall, I’m doing so much better. Feeling so much better. Worrying about my life in relation to my weight so much less. But I’m not going to let myself forget. I’m not going to forget what I was, what I don’t want to be again, and how far I’ve come!