teddywood77

My name is Ted.  I'm a 62 year patent lawyer and a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel.  I got the initial idea of bariatric surgery from my oldest son, who has several friends that had recently had surgery.  Since around 1988, I've likely gained and lost more weight than anyone else in my BMI category.  My weight when I made my first call to attend a bariatric webinar was 286 (BMI about 43).  My weight in 2010, as a competitive cyclist, was 184 with body fat of about 10.5%.  At that time, I was training sometimes twice a day, using an online app to track weight, food portions, and caloric burn of workouts.  My last Seagull Century time (2010), riding with a team (and drafting), was 4 hours 38 minutes.  But I couldn't maintain the riding and the workouts, and remember the day I backed down in my mind.
Over the years, I've lost weight via intense exercise, Herbal Life, the D. Gregory Diet, Atkins, the Soup Diet, every kind of pill known to man including Alli (suffered a couple of embarrassing incidents - lmao), "eating healty," and Nutri-systems.  I lost the most weight in recent years (2016) using Nutri-Systems (about 34 pounds over 3 months).  But as I got older, the excess weight came with severe health consequences (sleep apnea, high blood pressure, fatty liver, Type II diabetes, and a few others).  I had also suffered two instances of DVT/PE and prostate cancer.  And all of my weight gain was in my abdominal area - the worse type of weight gain for an older black man in a high stress environment.  It looked as if I was carrying triplets.  The only comfortable t-shirts were 4Xs, which were increasingly hard to find.
[Weight-gain is so unforgiving.  It's like the drug commercial for Shingles, when they sasy "Shingles doesn't care."  That's just like weight gain.  It doesn't care if you exercised 211 days in a row (as I did).  If you overeat and under-exercise over a weekend, you gain weight instantly.  It doesn't care how fast you can ride or run, or for how long.  You get no brownie points or freebies because of the past.  Weight gain doesn't care.]
I was embarassed by the way I looked in a suit, my confidence as a lawyer was gone, and most signigicantly, my health was on a steady decline.  The heavier I got, the less I moved around, and consequently - the more weight I gained.  I was always physically tired from carrying around more and more weight.  Although I have a full gym in my house, was not exercising at all.  And most weekends, I sat in one spot, basically the entire weekend - eating, sleeping, and snoring - very little energy.   At one point, I hadn't even been to the upper level in my home, where my young daughter's bedroom was, in over a year because didn't feel like climbing the stairs.  Most depressing, sometimes I found myself eating junk foods (hot dogs, chipes etc.), when I wasn't hungry, at 1 or 2 am whipe up working - it just seemed like the thing to do.  I knew the eventual end result of this self-destructive trend. Having said that, I want to do all I can, within my power, to be around for my family.
I had always thought bariatric surgery was for those on TV shows like "My 600 Pound Life."  But once I did the research, I discovered I was also a candidate, and that my insurance would cover it.  My first solid inquiry into bariatric surgery was early Mar 2021.  I would eventually go through the initial inquiry phase with two different clinics until my insurance company pointred me to one of their preferred providers (Maryland Bariatrics).  My surgery was early Sep 2021.  With all the pre-surgery conditioning that is part of all bariatric programs, by my surgery date, I felt like I could have skipped surgery and still lost the weight I needed.  
I lost 23 pounds on the 2-week pre-surgery liquid diet.  I'm a little over 2-weeks post surgery, in the post-surgery liquid diet phase, and am  down an additional 12 pounds.  I start soft solid foods in 4 days.  Don't care to see another protein shake, ever in life.  And the thought of broth is nauseating.  But the process of arriving at your bariatric surgery date is as hard as any project I've ever undertaken and an achievement of itself.  My state of mind is different now.  This new journey has started and I'm excited.  My greatest desire is that my son will also pursue this path - doing all that he can do to be around for his family.