Ten years ago today, I underwent the LapBand procedure to help get my weight under control. I’ve been either overweight or obese my entire life. As a teenager, I tried losing weight several times, one time losing forty pounds, getting close to 200 lbs., but regaining it soon after. By my third year of college, I’d hit 300 lbs. I remember reacting to the weigh-in at my school’s medical center with resignation because it felt inevitable. I spent a lot of my time at college being depressed and relying on food for comfort. It apparently took a lot of food to make me comfortable, so it wasn’t a surprise to me that my weight got so out of control. It almost seemed natural. I was also in a relationship with a person who didn’t mind enabling my food addiction, since I was accidentally-on-purpose enabling their drug addiction as well (my abandonment issues from childhood made me make decisions that were poor for both of us). We supported each other while in the midst of two very different addictions that were both crippling in their own, unique ways. Within a couple of years of graduating college, I‘d reached 375 lbs. and was desperate to interrupt the upward trend, so I opted for surgery.
Interestingly, we did both want what was best for each other, so when I opted for bariatric surgery a couple of years after college, my partner was very supportive. As I started the pre-approval process, I dove into the world of YouTubers who documented their journeys with the LapBand. From there, I signed up for a gym membership. I followed the pre-op diet to a t. From December 2010 to my surgery date, January 3, 2011, I’d gone from 375 lbs. to 323 lbs. I was already getting a boost from that initial loss. The post-op process was a bit rough... I had a lot of gas, which created a lot of chest pain, and even though I was eating less, I wasn’t losing as much as before. My new routines of meal prepping and two-hour daily gym sessions turned out to be unsustainable. And probably the biggest problem, my addiction to food, specifically takeout, reared its ugly head once again. Within a year of surgery, I was “PB’ing” (a weirdly cutesy term for sending so much food down your esophagus that the LapBand opening is too narrow to let it pass, leading to a “productive burp” where your esophagus kicks the food back up before it ever reaches the stomach) at least once a week, if not more often. Not only did my addiction lead me to eating my way around the LapBand, I was risking permanent damage to my esophagus because frequent PBs could lead to scarring or slippage of the band, which in turn could lead to terrible health consequences that might necessitate surgical intervention. So I asked my surgeon to empty my LapBand. I still believe it was the responsible thing to do at the time. I hadn’t done enough to address my food addiction and it didn’t do my body any good to pretend that I wasn’t going to go right back to eating all the things I wasn’t supposed to once I left my surgeon’s office.
All told, I was losing weight from December 2010 until around November 2011. The lowest weight I managed to hit was around 265 lbs. From a size 26 or so, I managed to squeeze into a pair of size 18 pants. Given my decision to abandon my journey, those gains didn’t last. By May 2013, I was back up to 375 lbs. My domestic partnership was strained by the difficulties of being in a relationship with an active drug user who spent less time in recovery and more time getting high. And I had started thinking about what I wanted my future to look like: I didn’t see myself as someone who could remain in the role of legal support staff, in a relationship with someone whose shameful secret reflected on me as well. (Ironically, I mentally deflected the fact that my own food addiction was my own shameful open “secret” since everyone I knew watched me go from 375 lbs. to 265 lbs, right back up to 375 lbs. over the course of two years.)
As I thought about who I intended to become, I really started leaning into the idea that my weight was going to be what it was for the foreseeable future and that there wasn’t much point in waiting to lose weight to do the things I wanted/needed to do. I wanted to become a lawyer, and if that meant I’d be a fat lawyer, so be it. I enrolled in law school and really threw myself into my work. I wanted to get out of that toxic relationship (didn’t really have a plan, tbh, more like I reached my breaking point), so I literally paid my partner to get out of our apartment.
All of my self-exploration and growth was going really well, except for the fact that, as I got involved at my law school, as I took on many different roles and got prestigious internships, I was still relying on food as my own crutch. By the middle of my second year of law school, around December 2015, I had reached a new high weight of 416 lbs. It’s kind of funny to think about 416 lbs. as being some sort of physical capacity threshold for me. I was really good at being a very productive, very fat person for virtually all of my life, and certainly all of my adult life. I could do everything I needed to do for myself and others when I was at 300 lbs., 350 lbs., 375 lbs. Naturally, I still had some limitations but those could be dealt with. Suddently, at 416 lbs., literally everything hurt all of the time. Walking, sitting, standing, laying down. I had to request special accommodations because I couldn’t fit in the chairs at certain classrooms in my law school (it was not humiliating if I didn’t think about it; so I didn’t think about it). If I needed work clothes, I couldn’t even go to Lane Bryant or Avenue. I ordered pants from a specialty store, sized 34, with a special “slimming” (haha, ok, buddy) lining that I ended up needing to cut out with a pair of scissors because they cut into my thighs when I moved around. When I wasn’t at an internship, all I wore was giant sweatpants and giant shirts. Sneakers wore out incredibly quickly. When I saw myself in pictures or as an outline in store windows as I walked by them, it was hard to recognize myself as a person. My features were indistinguishable from each other. I was a series of lumps with a head on top. In sum, shit got really dire for a bit. I talked to a friend about this predicament and we made an arrangement where he would do meal prep for me and I paid him some sum for the supplies and preparation. This dude did me a huge solid and I managed to get down to about 385 lbs. Ultimately, 2L year doesn’t lend itself to those kinds of arrangements, but the difference I felt was already pretty immense (no pun intended). I also ended up with some loose skin, which is weird to think about: just emptying this meat sack by 20-30 lbs. left me, a still-extremely-fat person, with loose skin... If I thought about it, I might be upset, so I didn’t think about it!
By the way, it turns out that, for me, one really important aspect of being able to live as an extremely fat person was to not think about my physical form. The reality of my body was one that I chose not to focus on for a very long time as I focused on attaining different goals. After I managed to come down from the threshold of “oh-wow-everything-hurts-all-the-time,” I had the ”privilege” of getting to choose to focus on literally anything other than what was going on with my body (or what was going into it). I continued to chase my professional goals, I continued to seek out personal growth. I learned to live by myself, I learned how to excel at my new job as an attorney. I joined bar associations, networked, continued to try to figure out what kind of name I was trying to make for myself. I was really starting to lean into my genderqueerness. It’s a disconnect I frankly still struggle with because connecting with my body and what’s going on inside of it remains very difficult. But anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming!
After a while at my day job, after I was financially stable enough to not only have my own place but also start seeing my therapist again, I started looking into surgery again. A lot of folks who had the LapBand ended up re-gaining and getting revision surgery; I figured since I’d tried, on and off, so many times with such lackluster results, I ought to see what my surgeon had to say. After an approximately seven-year break, she told me that if my LapBand was still properly placed and if there was no damage to my esophagus, I could actually just get it filled again and it would have the same effect. Not eager to go under the knife, I decided to take her advice. Things got off to a rocky start: my first fill ended up being more than I could handle. I went from 365 lbs. to 346 lbs. over the weekend because instead of making sure I could drink a cup of water (me and my body communicating as poorly as ever), I rushed out of her office on a Friday afternoon to spend the next three days not being able to keep even a sip of water down. When I returned to her office, I had to wait an hour to be seen. It was an hour of agony and by the time I got my band un-filled, my eyes were welling up with tears of frustration. I didn’t go back after that adjustment in February 2019.
But the band was doing its job. I had a moderate amount of restriction, I was working with my therapist, I had a job with work-life balance, and I was making enough money that I didn’t feel deprived in any way. So I just had to deal with... the elephant in the room, no pun intended. I had been working with a person coach through a health insurance wellness program and she suggested Freshly. Freshly meals turned out to be relatively satisfying and were a reasonable amount of calories, such that I could eat at 1,200-1,500 calories a day with minimal effort and much less expense than takeout. Although I didn’t continue with Freshly for a number of reasons, it was the kick-start I needed. On August 29, 2019, I pulled up MyFitnessPal and began the streak that continues today. I also started telling myself to make decisions. If I learned anything about myself over the past year, it’s that my food-addicted brain really likes to default to takeout and fantasize about the different options that are available. Sometimes my food-addicted brain wins, sometimes I win, sometimes we compromise. On some days, it’s a huge struggle. On other days, I am magically able to exercise moderation and I lean into that. Because I never stop trying, on a daily basis, I’ve managed to have more good days than bad. The LapBand helps, for sure. But I know for a fact that my addicted brain is very much willing to put the band through more than its fair share of hell for the sake of getting a fix. So while it’s very much a helpful tool, my daily battle is waged in my mind.
Over the past year and change, I’ve negotiated, adapted, and improvised my way to a 115-pound loss. (Counting from my all-time highest, it’s a 167-pound loss.) I sit at 248.8 lbs. Still very fat, but no longer extremely fat (medically speaking, I am out of the super morbidly obese range and have entered the morbidly obese range). On New Year‘s Eve, because I’m still extremely attached to the idea of food as a source of fun, I decided to celebrate with some soul food: ribs with a side of mac and cheese, french fríes (that I didn’t even like, tbh), cornbread, and sweet potato pie (MFP will tell you that my celebration began quite early in the day with breakfast of a latte and a chocolate croissant; lunch consisting of a reuben with a side of salt and vinegar pop chips (not worth it, btw) and a giant chocolate chip cookie; and a ”snack” in the form of a bag of *real* salt and vinegar chips (my Mulligan) and an entire bar of Ritter’s milk chocolate). Not gonna lie, it’s pretty embarrassing to type that all out. But I’m #livingmytruth! Literally every day I have to start over, because literally every day I have to fight some part of me that feels like it “is” this way. Like it “is” destined to ”be” this way for the rest of my life. Like I’m going to want to eat junk food and takeout every single day for the rest of my life (even though that’s actually not true but that’s what it feels like sometimes.)
One could argue, then, that it was lucky that this little celebration meal gave me a wicked case of food poisoning that woke me up at 3am, had me spouting stuff out of both ends (forgive the visual) for three hours, and left me with a sharp pain in my chest from inflammation around my band. Ten years in, I was afraid I’d finally broken the damn thing and I headed to the ER on New Year’s Day to get an esophagram performed (and of course, to put a stop to the constant trips to the bathroom that didn’t even let me lay down and the inflammation that stopped me from being able to keep even just a sip of water down). I say that it was lucky because it interrupted a little cycle that has slowed my weight loss to a crawl in recent months. I had to have my band un-filled and am on liquids for two days and puréed foods for two days and will have to see my surgeon this week (ugh, not looking forward to that). I’ve been getting less adept at making those decisions I was able to make months before and this took me out of that cycle, for a time. I have been getting discouraged by the slower weight loss. I have been discontent about the fact that I have been able to start a (very modest) running regimen that has not yielded the accelerated results I have seen for others on this and other subreddits.
To sum up, I’ve made a lot of progress in how I negotiate my relationship with food but sometimes I feel like I am still just white-knuckling it. Now that I’m trying to explore different sides of myself, including the side that wants to interact romantically with other people, as well as the side that wants to teach evening classes, something I’ve never done before but feels right for me right now, I don’t think my journey is going to become any smoother any time soon. I have had a lot of experience to draw from so I’m hoping that, at the very least, I can bring that experience to bear, but I also feel like I’m treading unfamiliar water as I figure out how to live in a body whose daily calorie allowance isn’t 2,300 a day anymore. I’m also finding that my prior romantic relationship was a really poor template for what I want to seek out in my current prospective relationship and that I have to be better at not letting these experiences throw me for a loop. I’ve also yet to learn what it looks like when I‘m holding down two jobs and also trying to maintain a (very modest) running regime and maintaining a calorie deficit in a sustainable way.
If there was any coherent point to this long and drawn-out reflection post, I guess it would be that you don’t need to wait until you’re at a lower weight to pursue the life you deserve; that progress is much more important than perfection; that just because you don’t have everything figured out doesn’t mean you can’t make those less-consequential decisions today; that surgery is not the easy way out; that food addiction is its own little beast that needs to be reckoned with if that is your issue (that is to say, if you are like me, you might also find the “just eat at a deficit“ advice frustrating because although of course that’s an excellent tool for many people, the route for folks with food addiction is not as straight a line); and that reading these posts is your way of telling yourself that you’re worth it and that you’re trying to improve, so carry that sentiment into other aspects of your life and you’ll be a little closer than you were before.
Oh, I should also say thanks very much to the folks who post and moderate. This subreddit, r/SuperMorbidlyObese and r/progresspics have been really amazing resources during my journey and I’m immensely grateful for these spaces and the kind internet strangers that inhabit/curate them.
