The bigger issues of weight loss

I had all sorts of lofty goals when I returned home from work yesterday.  I was going to do some work in my backyard, go for a walk and sort through some paperwork in my office.  When it's light out later in the evening, I love how much time is left in the day after I get home from work.  Unfortunately, none of that happened.  I haven't been sleeping very well for the last couple of weeks so I decided to just take a little nap.  That was nine hours ago.  I guess I needed the sleep badly.

I have been thinking a lot about the surgery.  Who knows if that is what has been keeping me up or not.  The potential is there to change my life significantly and I so badly want that.  It is very difficult living in this body on a day to day basis.  If I sit and think about it right now, the chronic pain I feel in my left leg is pulsing, my back hurts on the right side and I'm feeling shaky because I woke up with low blood sugar.  Beyond that is the weight on my body. There are times when I look at my arms and truly do feel like the Michelin Man.  When I look down at my stomach, I wonder if there will come a time in the future when it doesn't protrude out father than my breasts.  With all these thoughts in my head, I wonder about those people in my life, or just in society in general, who have made comments like:

"Mind over matter"
"Just push away from the table"
"Don't you care about your body and your life?"
"I don't see what the problem is.  Just eat less and exercise more."

Trust me, people who don't quite understand, if I could just simply lay down the food, walk to the gym and be cured of whatever it is that pulls me to eating, I would.  It's not nearly as simple as that.  There is some sort of strange magnetic attraction that food has had on me over the years.  It has been a comfort, friend, enemy and devil all at the same time.  If you have a normal relationship with food, kudos to you man.  I mean, seriously, I'm so happy for you and wish I could be you.  Wouldn't it be fantastic to just say no to a piece of cake and really mean it?  For me, when I'm asked if I want a piece of cake, say when I'm at work and someone is having a birthday, I will say no.  Yet, I'll look at the cake with longing.  I'll walk by it too many times to torture myself, wondering what it tastes like in my mouth and wanting to eat the whole thing.  If I dared bring that cake into my house where no one is looking, I'd eat the whole damn thing.

Most people just don't react like that to food.  So when someone tells me to just push away from the table, it's not so simple.  I am working hard at changing my mindset and developing new, healthier habits.  It's not something that can happen overnight since food has been my "go to" practically since birth.  I know the surgery is not magic.  It is just a tool, albeit my favorite one in the box.  If used properly, it will help me get to a healthy body weight while I still do most of the work.  It reminds me of my first car.  My first car was actually the family car, but my dad decided to give it to me and he got a new one.  It was ten years old and had manual everything.  For me, I didn't care.  I could drive to school on my own, take my friends anywhere we wanted to go and freedom.  Ahhhh!  The giddiness of all of that was soon replaced with attempting to roll down the windows because there was no air conditioning except there was also no button to push that magically lowered those windows.  So I had to do all the work by cranking the windows down manually.  We also did not have power steering in that car.  While there was the tool of the steering wheel, I actually had to do most of the work.  Does anyone remember having to pull out of a parking spot without power steering?  There's a lot of arm work that goes into that puppy.

I do look forward to surgery and what the future can hold, but I also know that I need to continue doing the work now.  That means continuing to track my food, exercise and work on the emotional side of this journey.  I am so grateful to have this blog, supportive friends, a good therapist and my weekly classes that continually help me to keep exploring the emotional side of all of this.  It is fair to say that this is not just about calories in and calories out.  It is so much bigger than that.  Don't get me wrong, I continue to work on that, too, but there are so many layers to the onion.  I'm peeling them one at a time.

Water Challenge Day 65:  Drank 100 of 180 ounces :-(