That’s Right…Obesity Is A Disease

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Today, the American Medical Association (AMA) came out and stated that obesity is a disease.  This is a pretty big deal.  This means that obesity can be medically treated as the disease that it is and not just treated as a character flaw.  All I can say is it is about freaking time.  Eating disorders such as bulimia and anorexia have long been treated as illnesses, but obesity has always been viewed as a deficit in the character of the obese individual.

I do not know what the full implications will mean, what insurance will be required to cover, etc., but this is a big step and one that I hope will lead to effective treatments for people struggling with obesity.  The Today Show did a nice little piece about this very exciting bit of news this morning.

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I know my personal experience with fighting obesity is complex.  Often doctors just said, “please lose weight.” Or asked, “What are you doing to lose weight?”  Now doctors will be able to look at you like an individual and work on a weight loss plan with you or recommend you to someone who can.  Insurance companies, in the past, have refused to pay doctor bills for my annual physical because the doctor added, “patient should lose weight” to their comments in my file.  The reason the insurance company used to deny payment was, “plan does not cover weight loss treatments.”  It didn’t matter that this was my annual physical, which was theoretically covered under the plan.

If insurances agencies and company benefit plans can be compelled to offer obesity treatments in their benefit packages, that would be great.  Many companies that provide insurance to their employees already try to offer incentives for people to improve their health.  Making obesity treatment and prevention part of the benefit package would really increase the likelihood people will be able to make those adjustments.  This would also hopefully remove some of the stigma attached to obesity and help many people receive appropriate healthy treatment.

I think this is a big health victory for Americans and could really go a long way to making it possible for people to receive proper treatment and preventative care for obesity.

Awesome Saturday

bariatric, diet, fat, fat chick, health, healthy, life, lifestyle, shopping, skinny, skinny girl, walk, walking, weight loss Leave a comment

So far, today has been pretty great.  I made plans with a friend of mine to do a morning walk along the bike path.  I got up, had breakfast and walked down the hill to the shops and met her.  Then, we walked for more than an hour on the bike path.  I rewarded myself with a nice large steaming cup of cappuccino with cinnamon sprinkled on top.  Isn’t everything just better with cinnamon sprinkled on top?  Even chocolate, which really does not need improvement at all, tastes a teeny bit better with some cinnamon.

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Then I walked back home and showered, changed, and went back out to buy beauty supplies so that I can color my hair later this weekend.  Then we went to lunch at Busboys & Poets where I had about 1/3 of a cobb salad.  OMG yum!

Now I’m going to rest for a bit and wait for my sister to call me.  She and I are supposed to do something today.  If she bails, I am going to an art show with a different friend of mine.  At some point, I really should take a nap I think.  But I feel so good, as if I have accomplished so much!  I never could have done this much so early in the day before.

I really do love my new life!

Am I Enough?

diet, fat, skinny, gastric by-pass, life, lifestyle, game, gamer girl, skinny girl, fat chick, weight loss, addiction 2 Comments

Last night I had a very long conversation with one of my gamer friends about why I stopped gaming.  He was calling BS on the fact that gaming is a problem for me.  Mostly because he would like me to really get into Guild Wars 2.

We had a great gaming-social network back in our WoW days and I think he wants to try to re-create that in GW2.  He misses the camaraderie of our group.  We played pvp (player vs. player) battles.  Our faction, the Alliance, battled against players who made up the other faction, the Horde.  Our group extended beyond our Alliance team.  We were also friends with many of the people who played Horde characters.  We talked back and forth on the message boards and we joined each others vent chats.  (pre-Skype voice chat program).  We had a lot of fun.

He misses that, and frankly I do too.  I just cannot bring myself to game right now.  I may never again, at least not at the same level I did before.

He is a recovering alcoholic and has been doing the 12-step thing for about 15 years or so.  And I have talked about my battle with food on this blog as if it was an addiction.  I feel that for me, it is.  He wanted to understand how I felt gaming was part of the problem.

He thought I was blaming WoW for making me fat, which is what he was calling BS.  I was not and I do not blame World of Warcraft for my obesity.  I was fat before I started gaming.  I have only myself to blame for that situation, (my mother will be greatly relieved to hear that).

Here is my problem with gaming: avoidance.  While playing games, I ignored all of my other problems.  I allowed the game to consume all of my time so that I didn’t have to deal with my life falling apart around me.  I did not want to deal with my financial problems or my health problems, so I immersed myself in an imaginary world where my characters were powerful, capable, and financially solvent.

Gaming didn’t stop my other problems from getting out of control and taking over my life.  Gaming didn’t make my real life any better.  Just like binge eating didn’t solve anything.  My problems only got worse because I was not dealing with them.  In the end, I had to face my problems, both health and financial.  I had no choice.  I had to reign in my finances or risk losing everything I have.  I had to deal with my health or start preparing to die.

I was explaining this to my gamer friend when he asked me, “So what changed?  Why make these changes now?  Why, all of a sudden, are you enough?  What do you see now in yourself worth living for that you didn’t before?”

Those are hard questions, and I struggled to find an answer.  I imagine that these are questions he had to find answers for during his own recovery from addiction.

I am not sure if I have a complete answer for this or not, but I simply just decided that if I did not want to die, I had to find a way to live.  To quote Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption, “It comes down to a simple choice.  Get busy living or get busy dying.”

I may not have thought I was enough of a reason, or good enough period, but I knew that was something that I needed to work on.  And I did.  I wouldn’t say I’m completely cured of low self-esteem, food addiction, avoidance, etc.  I struggle every day with all of my problems, but each day does get easier.

Once I started working on my problems, I was amazed at the number of people who were willing to help me, who cheered me on, who were so supportive in so many ways.  My sister encouraged me through the whole process and took me into her home for a month.  My mom helped me financially and came down to Virginia for the surgery.  My niece, who may not understand all of the changes I have made, totally loves it that I can go to museums with her and walk all over DC and go to fairs with her.  My brother and his wife are really happy to see how much I have improved.  My writer’s group dedicated an entire meeting to writing stories for and about me.  Not to mention, the members of my writers group routinely cheer me on and tell me how great I’m doing and how happy they are to see the positive changes in my life.  (I totally heart you guys!)  Even my gamer friend is happy for me, even if he is disappointed that I am not playing GW2.

I may not have thought that I was enough of a reason to live for when I started this process, but I quickly found out that a lot of people care about me and want good things for me.  I am constantly amazed and overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and love.  They think I am enough.  And that’s good enough for me.

The Walking Project

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I know I have been walking for exercise, but I have not actually fully committed to walking a certain distance every day.  Life is busy and it is easy not to make time for something like exercise.  But if I want my diet to truly be successful and be in good shape when I am done, I need to exercise more.

I downloaded an app that a friend of mine told me about.  It’s called Zero to 5K.  It’s a running app.  Let’s be clear, I have no intention of running.  I hate running, always have.  But I will use it to improve my walking and actually walk for exercise and not just take a leisurely stroll.

Today, I am going to walk for 25 minutes.  There is a 5 minute warm up, 15 minutes of walking, and a 5 minute cool down.  That’s what the app says anyway.  What it boils down to is 25 minutes of walking.  I am going to do the walking during my lunch.  I have my writer’s group tonight and will not have time for a walk after work, so lunch time is the only time during the day I can make this work today.

Once I actually have time and money at the same time, I will join a gym.  I can get a discount a Gold’s gym because my niece works there, but I am going to price around and see what kind of deal I can get.

I also need to upgrade my walking shoes.  I am thinking of purple New Balance.

Rebooting My Diet

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I have been feeling all out of sorts over the past few weeks.  I have been upset that my weight loss has really slowed down and really plateaued.  I have had a lot of emotional ups and downs.  And I have fallen off the wagon, so to speak, a couple of times.  Nothing too major, but enough that I feel I have had several setbacks.

I have decided that I just simply need to reboot my diet.  I got out the diet plan that the surgeon’s office gave me and I am going to examine the food that I have been eating to make sure it is in-line with the Dr.’s recommended diet plan.  Then, I am really going to focus on exercising.  I have been walking a lot, but not really doing anything more than that.

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I still have not joined a gym, which I plan to do.  But until I actually can get in one to join, there are lots of things I can be doing.  A friend of mine suggested an app called Zero to 5K.  It is a running app.  I have no intention of running, but he suggested that I could use it to train for walking, biking, or swimming as well.  I love doing those things.  I downloaded the app today.  I will start tomorrow.

I also need to cook more.  I love cooking.  I just have not been taking the time to cook my meals consistently.  I have been eating out some and eating things I can grab quickly, like cheese.  I love cheese and I was not able to eat it for years.  But the truth is, it is very high in calories.  Maybe I should not have 2-3 meals every day.

So, tonight I am making my homemade chicken saag.  Chicken Saag is my favorite Indian dish.  I have a friend from Mumbai who helped me improve my own version of this yummy dish.  I took some to her a couple of weeks ago for lunch and she said it tastes just like authentic Indian cooking.  It should.  It’s her recipe!  I still have it simmering on the stove, but here’s a picture.  I promise to add the recipe to my skinny girl recipes tab.

saag

If I Didn’t Know Any Better…

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I’d think I had PMS.  I haven’t had PMS since the last time I bitched on this blog back in March about my periods, or mostly lack thereof.

I had a pretty crummy day today.  I thought that it started out pretty good.  I had an odd dream this am that left me feeling somewhat hopeful about a particular situation.  But as the day wore on and the more I thought about it, the more I accepted that it was just a dream and was more a reflection of my own wishes and not really a predictor of my desired outcome.  That brought me down a bit, but I can live with that.

Then I was very busy at work and at one point became a little overwhelmed.

I was rained on during both the commute into work and home.

I had to take my work laptop back to the office today.  My back was killing me from carrying it around.

I left my debit card at home and could not pay for my coffee this am.  That was embarrassing.  Fortunately, I took my lunch to work and my fare card for the metro was fully charged, so I was good.

I came home and I was totally deflated and just wanted to cry.

Normally, this kind of day would have been enough to trigger a binge attack for me, and it did.  Fortunately, I did not succumb.  I almost did.  I gathered up change out of my change jar and I went down to the market in my building.  Now, the market in my building is a dangerous place for a food addict, and my apartment is immediately above the store.  They have chips, eggs and bacon, more chips, sodas, beer, wine, frozen foods, frozen pizzas, cookies, crackers, candy bars…all the junk food you could want.  And I used to shop there a lot.

I stood there with my fistful of quarters looking around the store, and I couldn’t do it.  I could not buy the horrible junk food I was craving.  I really wanted chips or pretzels, but I couldn’t make myself buy them.

Instead, I bought a box of saltines and some spaghetti sauce.  I then made 5 saltines mini pizzas for dinner, and yes, that is a bariatric-approved meal.  It was actually recommended to me in the diet plan provided by the surgeon’s office.  The tomato sauce counts as a vegetable and the cheese as protein.  The saltines are really just filler food.  I also had a side of string cheese to make sure I had enough protein.

I’m still feeling kind of blah today, but at least I know I’m not totally helpless against the binge monster.  I fought it off today.  That makes me feel hopeful that I will be able to fight it off again in the future.

Old Habits Die Hard

addiction, depression, fat, fear, game, gamer girl, gastric by-pass, health, healthy, life, lifestyle, skinny, skinny girl, world of warcraft 6 Comments

Sometimes, living with change is hard.  I have had a great run with the changes that I have made in my life.  I am very happy with how I look, how I feel, and the weight that I have lost.  Sometimes, though it is really hard to to keep old behaviors at bay.

kermmy

One of my World of Warcraft characters.

Recently, I have been fighting the urge to game.  Omg I loved World of Warcraft when I was heavy into the gaming scene.  I have been thinking about WoW a lot recently.  I loved the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.  That’s when I played the most and was at the top of my game, so to speak.  I did every raid, every pvp (player vs. player) battleground.  I was the second ranked alliance restoration shaman (healer) on my realm.  My guild was the second alliance guild to down the Lich King (end game raid boss).  I had several twinks (low-level, overly geared characters made just for pvp).  I was on the game day and night, sick or well.    I was obsessed.

My obsessive problems were not limited to gaming either.  I think my gaming addiction was simply one of my addictions.  Obviously, my other addiction was food.

The gastric by-pass certainly helped me control my food addiction.  And managing one addiction helped me let go of another.

I am worried though.  When I start thinking about gaming, I wonder if I am starting to fall back on my old ways.

One of my gamer friends from the WoW days now plays Guild Wars 2.  I did go out and buy the game back in January.  I created a character and played a bit.  Sometimes, when this friend contacts me, I would log on and run through the game with him a bit.  But playing GW2 made me realize that I really have no desire to game.  Thus, I think my character is still level 5 and probably still standing in the middle of the field where I left her.

Last night he sent me messages on Skype trying to get me to log on.  I was tempted.  I miss my gamer friends.  We had fun together running around killing imaginary crap or instigating world pvp battles.  The problem is, this particular friend just does not get what it is I have been through trying to manage all of my addictions.  I haven’t really take the time to explain it to him, but he does have access to my blog and could read it, but doesn’t.  Not that I don’t think he would understand, I think that he would.  I am just afraid that I would fall back into the same trap and end up right back where I was.

I think that is one of my biggest fears since the surgery, backsliding.  I have worked so hard to get where I am and I still have a little way to go before I reach my goal weight.  I am so happy with the changes that I have made.  I feel good.  I look better than I have in years.  But I’m terrified of ending up right back where I was.

It is possible to regain all of the weight lost even after a gastric by-pass surgery as extreme as mine.  I would hate to go through all of this pain, expense, suffering, and sacrifice just to regain the weight and be just as sick as before.  I think that is why I just cannot bring myself to jump back into the gaming world.  I am afraid that if I start gaming again, the whole new life I have built for myself will collapse.

Maybe one day, I will be able to play video games and have them  be a part of the healthy new lifestyle I have created for myself, but not yet.  The pain of the past is still too close and the fear of failure to too near.