Better Late Than Never

[mswillis5 127]

My story has been a journey and has a lot of ups and downs. Hopefully I can convey all that I can remember. When I was young I was always large. The youngest that I remember my weight was when I was in 8th grade and was 4'8" and 180lbs. In 10th grade I was 5'6" and 220 lbs and that was might high weight then. I went on medication for ADHD shortly after this time and I dropped down to 175lb and graduated high school smaller than when I went in. Throughout the years following I fluctuated considerably and went between 220 and 175 until I met my wife. Shortly after marriage I had a construction job and dropped to 145lbs. That is the lowest that I have been in my adult life. I have struggled quite a bit with Binge eating and it has affected my relationship with food. In the 14 years since I was 145lb I gained every year and grew to 280lbs. Of course there were times that I dieted and lost weight and times where I was able to maintain my weight but it has been a constant struggle since childhood.

My entire family is obese and I have never seen my mother at a healthy weight. Her health issues are one of the reasons why I choose to have bariatric surgery. In fact, my older brother had bariatric surgery about 14 months ago. With all of the health issues that my family has faced, I had to change my mindset of how I ate.

Over the recent last few years I have fluctuated between 280 down to 240 and then back again. When I was at my highest weight I lost a job and that affected me mentally quite a bit. I went into quite the depression and finally sought help. This psychologist has changed my life in a way I was never able to achieve. She was able to help diagnose the Binge eating disorder and re-diagnosed me with ADHD. This was the start of my change in my relationship with food.

Along with the binge eating, I also never had a sense of fullness or hunger. If I chose I could go without food all day long. Most days though I would eat all day and never calculated how many calories that I ate. At night I would also go back and eat and then shortly after would go and eat more. This was a bad cycle that I have been working on breaking and the diagnosis has helped me with this. 12 months ago I weighed in at 280. After the diagnosis and medication to help, I started to lose weight. I was able to get down and maintain between 250 and 260lbs, just by removing the extra snacking that I was doing during the day.

Last June, my wife and I started to have some health issues and we sought treatment for them. I had a hand injury and started to go to therapy for this and my wife had swollen joints and started to get tests to figure out what was going on. My wife and I have both been large and have sibling who are also obese. By August we were able to get a diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis for my wife. After the therapy sessions, I was not getting better and by September I had surgery to resolve my hand issues. At the time of my surgery my wife and I had determined that we should look into and pursue Bariatric surgery if we could as we were told this may help with her symptoms. We found a surgeon and proceeded with getting approved. Since we had done medically supervised diets already, we were able to take this previous diets and apply them to our application for insurance approval. By October, only one month after meeting the surgeon we had our endoscopy and were finalizing the requirements. We were able to submit to insurance shortly after this and were approved within 1 week.

On November 11th, 2020 my wife and I both had the gastric sleeve surgery. It has been quite the journey so far. During the Pre-op diet we both lost over 16 lbs. After surgery we have both been about on pace with each other with weight loss. In the previous year, I am closing 100lbs of weight loss since I lost ~20 lbs before I had the surgery. My wife and I are at weights that we have not seen in over 10 years now and are working toward keeping it off. My wife still has quite a bit more to go and I am approaching maintenance weight very quickly and could be at my maintenance weight in the next month or so if the weight loss continues at the rate it is going.

The good news is that the health of my wife has improved significantly since surgery and we have both been able to do more physically than we were able to do in a very long time. We are ready for what the future holds for us and are working together to make this lifestyle a success.

[Hop_Scotch 1,627]

Welcome and thank you for sharing. Great that you and your wife are going through this together, to be able to support each other.