Hindsight Chapter VIII

Hindsight Part VIII
July 7, 2011
It takes years for your skin to stretch and years to un-stretch it, to tighten things up. Your energy level soars, because you’re no longer carrying excess weight! Even though I was always active, losing the weight made me even more active, and I truly understood why. I don’t know what the qualifications for having the surgery are now, but in 1992, you had to be at least 100 pounds overweight (according to the weight chart for your height) to even be considered for gastric-bypass surgery. Now I know that people shake their heads at this, thinking about how a person gets to be more than a hundred pounds overweight, but unless you carry a weight chart in your pocket, or have memorized your ideal weight, it is much easier than you think. Truth is, when you start out as a “chubby” child, you really don’t know anything other than being chubby, eating what you want, when you want, and not really worrying about weight. You just know that if you don’t eat, you’ll starve to death. You could miss a few meals, but you don’t want to. Food puts you in your comfort zone. What you don’t realize is that fat takes you out of it.
If we could all see the fat that we could stand to lose, we’d be grossed out. Remember when Oprah dramatized her weight loss by putting the amount of fat she lost in a wagon and rolling it out on stage? Gross, wasn’t it? Well, when you’re more than a hundred pounds overweight, you could put a fully dressed teenager (heavy sneakers and all) in a wagon and drag him/her around with you to dramatize the amount of weight you’d need to lose to consider yourself “normal”. If you’ve bought a bag of charcoal for the grill, that weighs about twenty pounds, imagine moving five of those around with you every time you move. There wouldn’t be much movement, now would there? I try incessantly to encourage friends who are carrying excess weight to get up and moving. The less you move, the less you want to move, and the more weight piles on. If you keep it moving, once you start losing weight, you’ll want to move more. It works to your benefit… the more movement, the more weight loss. The problem is getting started, and it takes a lot of mental energy to do that. I applaud all of my fellow fat people who keep it moving every day. Big ups!!
People who have never had a weight problem can sympathize, but they have a hard time empathizing. They just don’t “get it”. People who have struggled with weight problems all their lives truly get it. Gastric-bypass gives you a jump-start on weight loss, but it isn’t a quick-fix, as some people have suggested. Those people call it “cheating”. What they don’t understand is that it allows people, most of whom were “chubby” children, to re-train themselves about the correct way and the correct amount to eat in order to satisfy your hunger and put yourself in your comfort zone when it comes to food. The consequence of overeating is pain, and most people try to avoid the pain as much as possible. My surgeon tells me that I am “the exception rather than the rule”… that most people tend to gain the weight back, and some even gain more. Although I work hard trying not to do that, I understand it. Some more critical people ask how you could possibly gain when it took so much to lose, but if you never change your mind-set, you go back to the habits you learned as a child. It’s as simple as that. Unfortunately, you also go back to the same ridicule you experienced as a child, but this time, it comes from the adult versions of the cruel children you were forced to deal with as a child.
About a week ago, while channel surfing, I saw a couple on Dr. Phil where the husband excused cheating on his wife by saying that she (after two children) had gained weight, so he didn’t want her anymore. Although I didn’t watch long (I couldn’t), I listened to him say that she was not desirable anymore because she was fat. She wasn’t really fat, but he wanted an excuse, and he took that one, the easy one. From pictures, the viewer could see that she had gained about twenty pounds. I turned the channel before I saw the resolution of that situation. I wanted to slap that man until my hands got tired. I was reminded of the movie “Why Did I Get Married”, and the treatment of Jill Scott’s character, by none other than her husband… who cheated on her right in front of her face, and had the nerve to make her drive, rather than buy an extra seat on the plane. He used the same excuse, and called her names, and generally disrespected her (and she let him do this because she was unhappy with herself), but he “got his” in the end… and she got Lemmond Rucker (but I digress). Anyway, I was fascinated by what they called the 80/20 rule, and how it applies to relationships, and even though it sometimes has to do with being fat (in a round-about way, of course), it applies to relationships in general. Tyler Perry hit the nail on the head when he brought that out.
The 80/20 rule has to deal with the things we expect from each other in relationships, and brings out the reality that, at most, we get 80% of what we think we want from our mate. The other 20% deals with the minimum of what we get from them, and that 20% usually involves the most visibly attractive, but least useful and fulfilling things. As I said before, very early in this “series”, I have spent much of my life working on the inside of myself, my mind and my spirit, and working seriously on improving my body is only a relatively late development; and I have realized that, in many cases, weight has been the official excuse for that 20% that is unacceptable. Excess weight is the “excuse”, but it is compounded when you are too confident and self-assured to be disrespected because of it. Many people, men and women, gravitate to their “20” because he/she doesn’t expect anything from them; they can make “the minimum” happy by doing the minimum, and the minimum is all they are willing to give… all they “sign on” to give. Since I have removed the weight issue, I can’t use that as a reason for failed relationships, but I have to think more deeply about the things that mean something to me. I have discovered that the main issue, for me, is resisting anyone or anything that shows a disregard for me… my well-being, my independence, my mind, and my spirit. I had to “check out” of one relationship because I knew that I risked gaining the weight back if I spent too much time with a person whose food addiction was stronger than mine, and who was intent on being totally inactive. I knew I couldn’t change him, or anyone else for that matter, and after a couple of years of me trying to make him feel better about himself and him resisting, he went on to “his 20”. That was a “first” for me, I guess a kind of reverse weight-discrimination, but I think it was more an illustration of the fact that it isn’t really weight that is to blame, but rather a willingness to match mind-sets. I really thought I could do that.
The real lesson is that you can’t change anyone, and if you know who you are and whose you are, and you love yourself enough to undertake the monumental task of gastric-bypass surgery or any other serious weight-loss or self-improvement regimen (including going back to school to further your education), then you must love yourself enough not to allow anyone to keep you from achieving your goal. Once you achieve your goal, don’t let any person or situation deter you. If you allow life’s situations to change who you are, maybe you really weren’t that person, your best self, in the first place. Your major goal should always be to be your best self, inside and out.