Horror story

A young woman I know reached the horrific weight of 500 pounds before she was diagnosed with a thyroid problem and had weight loss surgery to rid her of the excess pounds. It seemed like magic. She seemed to be one of those rare people for whom massive obesity was solely a physical issue. The surgery was a grand success and she quickly lost 300 pounds, found a new life, got married. She followed the post-surgery recommendations of eating small amounts of food more frequently and she developed a new pattern of eating.

Over the last nine months, the small amounts of food changed to small amounts of calorically dense foods. Her fat consumption skyrocketed. She regained at least 60 pounds and then became pregnant. The fact that she was eating for two encouraged her to eat more. The small amounts turned into regular portion sizes. She still eats as frequently as before; that habit has remained. The quantities have doubled and tripled and even more of the foods she eats are calorically dense and ultra high in fat. The vegetable of choice is avocado. The high protein is cheese. She has regained another 80 pounds in this three months of pregnancy.

I find this absolutely frightening. I am using this very sad story as a kind of aversion therapy/stimulus for my own efforts. I talk to my sister, with whom this young woman is temporarily living, in order to get regular updates on how she is eating, the decisions she is or is not making to fight the increasing weight. It seems incredible that a kind of fog has descended over this intelligent young woman: she does not weigh, she believes she is eating in line with the post-WLS plan, she is shocked that she is gaining weight. She has put on enough weight now that she is physically struggling to walk. This, of course, puts her on the fast track to wholly disabling obesity and, ultimately, death.

I say it seems incredible that she's in this fog but it isn't, not really. I've experienced that same fog in my own life. The last 100 pounds I gained when my husband was ill came on in a period of about two years and I did not see it happening, did not feel it. At one point in there, always dieting, of course, I had stuck for a month to a low carb plan which always resulted in weight loss when I used it. With the expectation I would be well under 300 pounds, I went to a doctor's office to weigh and found that I was 345 ~ higher than I'd ever been in my life to that point. I got on and off the scale four times. Always the same. It paralyzed me, but it did not stop me. I returned to that foggy state of denial and just stuffed it away for another couple of years.

Sometimes I think this thing that lives in me, this eating problem, disorder, living breathing godawful horrible whateverthefuckitis thing, is dead set on trying to kill me. We all used to say in OA "I have a disease that thinks it can kill me and live on its own." It's a strange sense of being two people in one. There's the one who wants to be healthy, takes the action to maintain weight loss and lose more, who loves living a life free of the insanity of the compulsion to overeat, who loves to work out and does so frequently, who is happy, content, joyful in this new freedom. There's another one who would, unchecked, simply eat herself to death, to founder on excess food. It is no different from an addiction to drugs or to alcohol. It is sobering to realize that I grew to 368 pounds while thinking about, planning, getting on or off of a diet every single day of my life beyond the age of 12.

There are those who say that diets don't work, and that's true. But the reality is that nothing really works except finding a way to, at some point, control what goes into my mouth. Whether that's done through WLS, retraining my eating patterns, gentle eating, mindful eating, liquid diet, diet pills, Jenny, WW, or the irritating old classic of pushing away from the table, it's going to be more tolerable if I expend more calories through some physical activity. Physiologically, nothing will work to lose weight but reducing calories one way or another. The task is to figure out how to do that successfully and consistently. That's a lifetime process, I think, but it starts by saying "enough, I am tired of fighting, enough."