cardinalgirl75

I have a list of books I need to that is taller than me.  Despite this, the book I decided to start reading the other day was Such a Pretty Face by Cathy Lamb, which I've read before.  (There aren't a lot of authors on my auto-buy list anymore, but she's one of them.)  The book features a heroine, Stevie, who was morbidly obese.  After a heart attack at thirty-two, she opted to have gastric bypass in order to lose weight, and she was successful in losing the weight.

At the time I read the book two years ago, I weighed 250 pounds.  I'd already lost 150 pounds since January 2009, which is when I finally decided that I'd spent enough of my life as a fat girl with no willpower and began dieting.  I went on to lose 75 more pounds and today stand at 175.  I am a mostly-happy size 12 although I'd love to be a size 10.   *sigh*  Maybe someday.

When I tell people how much weight I've lost, they are astounded.  I get asked how I did it, most people assuming that, like Stevie, I opted to have surgery.  I didn't, and when I tell them this, the comment I receive in response is usually, "You did it the right way, taking it off naturally."  I don't like hearing that because I feel it belittles those who feel they have no other option but to have gastric bypass.  I have a friend who dieted for years, and had had some success, but eventually the weight would come back.  Ten years ago, she opted to have the surgery.  The weight came off and has mostly stayed off.  I considered having the surgery when she did, but in the end, I didn't.  Why?  Well, partially because my mother talked me out of it, but mostly because I wasn't in the right frame of mind to do it.  I would've been one of those people who had the surgery and five years later was back to my old weight.

In January 2009, I was in a much different place than I'd been back in 2002.  I'd seen my future and it scared me, so I went on a diet.  Only I told myself that I wouldn't call what I was doing a diet.  I would just cut back on what I ate.  I gave up sodas first.  I had a crazy plan to give up sweets and chips, but that never quite happened.  What I did instead was I switched from regular chips and sweets to lower-fat, lower-calorie versions.  I ate only one sandwich instead of two at meals.  I finally learned to like yogurt.  (Now I'm addicted to the stuff.)  Within a couple of months, I thought I noticed a difference, but I told myself I was being silly.  It took my mother buying a scale that went up to 400 pounds for me to discover that I wasn't.  Just by cutting back a little on what I ate, I'd lost nearly twenty pounds in three months.

Knowing that I could do it made all the difference.  See, before when I dieted, I had no idea how much I weighed and they didn't make scales that went up to what my weight had been.  So I'd think I was making progress, but without tangible proof, I eventually gave up.  That scale was finally able to show me that it was possible.  The first year of my diet, all I did was eat healthier following the poor girl's version of the Subway diet--yes, it works!!  I lost 96 pounds.  The second year of my diet, I started exercising as well as eating better and eventually joined a gym.  I lost another 96 pounds.  And in the year and a half since, I've lost what I figure is all I'm going to lose.

But major weight loss brings with it problems of its own--the skin thing being one of them.  Yes, I lost all that weight and had people telling me I looked amazing, but all I saw when I looked in the mirror was the excess skin.  So last November, I had a lower body lift and spent two months sleeping in a recliner--at first because I had to stay in a certain position or risk pulling stitches, and then I couldn't lay flat because of the drains.  (Honestly, the pain of those damned drains when the stitches holding them in place would pull hurt worse than the surgery incision.)  Minor hiccups aside--and trying not to look at my arms and legs, which are still pretty bad--the person I see in the full-length mirror looks pretty damned good.

There's just one thing.  I don't recognize her at all.

You know those ads for weight-loss pills that show you pictures of how someone looked before they took the BS miracle pills and how they look after?  I used to see those ads and see the radically different pictures of people and think, "That's fake.  That's not the same person."  And then it happened to me.

I hate to sound vain, because I'm not.  God, I'm the last person in the world who could be considered vain.  (Little Sister remains horrified by what she considers my occasional lack of good sense when it comes to going out in public without my hair and makeup done.)  But whenever I go past a mirror, I stare at myself for a few seconds (or sometimes longer, depending on whether or not I'm in public) because I still can't believe the person in the mirror is me.  I was morbidly obese for a good chunk of my first thirty-three years of life, then spent the next three years losing most of the weight. 

I have a picture my friend took of me right before I started dieting.  She recently sent it to me as a "see how far you've come" kind of thing.  I showed it to someone who didn't know me before the weight loss.  She asked me, "Who's this?"  She was stunned when I told her it was me almost four years ago.

There are other things that I still have trouble adjusting to.  This paragraph from Such a Pretty Face sums up one of them:  "I still moved as if I were heavy, giving myself extra space I didn't need.  I automatically cringed at the thought of airline seats and seat belt extensions, movie theater seats, and chairs in general.  And then I'd remember."

I went to Six Flags two weeks ago and for a terrifying moment before I got on the first ride, I was afraid I wouldn't fit in the seat.  I did, of course, without trouble.  But there's still a small part of me that worries, because I worried about it for so long.  It's possible that I always will.

***

There's one other problem which I didn't expect to have happen.  I have two people I ran around with in high school that I still consider to be my "best friends."  One of them, C, has been absolutely thrilled with my weight loss.  The first words out of her mouth when we see each other in person these days are, "What's up, skinny bitch?"  She even credits me with inspiring her to lose those pesky 15-20 pounds she says she's been needing to lose for a while.

And then there's E.  When we were in high school, E was the thinnest of the three of us--in grade school, she was into tumbling and cheerleading.  As she's gotten older and had two children, she's put on weight.  Like me before I started dieting, E grumbled about needing to lose weight without doing anything about it.  And until this past December, I thought she was as happy for my weight loss as C was.

Then she made a comment that has stuck with me ever since.  She told me I looked pretty good for being a month post-op, and added, "I guess this makes me the fat friend now."  The comment didn't register with me for a little while, until C and I were going home from E's house.  That's when the implication of what she'd said hit me.  If she was the "fat friend" now, then that had been my role in our relationship before I lost weight.

It hurt, and it still stings.  I try to tell myself that I'm reading more into it than she meant.  I try to tell myself I'm overreacting even though I have not confronted her about what she said.  I probably never will.  And when we saw each other last month, she complimented me on how nice I looked and that she was impressed.  She has said other things that make me believe that she is happy for me.

But always in the back of my mind, there's going to be that comment.  And it's always going to make me wonder.