Taking care of myself

Yesterday I had posted about, among other things, seeing a wonderful new man in my life.  I deleted the post in a moment of extreme emotion.  This person, a scientist here where I live, was amazing.  Intelligent, attractive, easy to talk to and we were both having very strong feelings for one another.  I talked to one of my friends about the intensity and she advised me to pull back a little.  She was right, really right as it turns out.  I decided it was time to research him.  I started by searching his name.  Everything seemed in line there with what he told me.  Then I decided to do a picture search.  I learned this from watching that "Catfish" show.  I took the images I had of him and searched through Google.  The second picture rocked my world.  It linked me to a dating profile.  Not too shocking because we met online.  Except for his pictures and the fact that he is a scientist living in my city, everything else was different.  In the profile, he was looking for kink.  He wanted a woman with a certain look to come into a room, dress in a sexy bikini and humiliate him.  There would be no sex but he wanted to be talked down to for an hour each time.  He would pay for this "service".  I sat there with my jaw open initially.  Then, the more I read, tears started to fall down my face.  Who was this man?  We were talking about our hopes and dreams, possibly having children in the future, amazed at our similarities.  All the while, there was this other side to him.   The work he had done with me was absolutely elaborate, if, in fact, it was all a lie.  So I confronted him and ripped him a new one.  I wouldn't let him explain because, really, there was no explanation.  The profile was accessed the same day so I knew it wasn't old. I told him to never, ever contact me again.  And I told him that just because a person is intelligent doesn't prevent him from being a prick. 

I thank God showed me his true colors before it was too late.  The only problem is that I already was having feelings for him.  What he did was cruel and I know it was a sickness on his part.  I took a sleeping pill so I could get some sleep.  When I took up, I made the conscious effort to not eat over this and go work out.  I did an angry work out.  My body took s pounding for the next hour and a half.  I needed it, though.  I can't eat over this.  That gives him too much power over me.

I know that I will move on and he was a toad on my way to finding a prince.  That doesn't make it hurt any less.  However, I will not eat over this.  My body won't let me after the weight loss surgery and my heart won't give him the satisfaction.  The sting of this will get better, I know.

Updates in my world

Oh my goodness, I had absolutely no clue that I have not been blogging as infrequently as I have.  All I can say is that I am incredibly sorry.  Sincerely.  Things have just been so busy with work, dating and graduate school.  No, these are not excuses but I have to own what has been going on. So let's see if I can update a few things.

I went to see my surgeon this past Monday for a check-up appointment.  He is absolutely thrilled with my progress.  Here I was thinking I wasn't doing great because I'm in a stall right now but he actually told me that I'm doing amazing.  Amazing?  Yes!  At three months, their hope is to have Bariatric patients at a 60 pound loss.  As of that morning, I think I was at a 73 pound loss.  He said all of my numbers looked fantastic and that, basically, I'm a very healthy girl.  Let me tell you, that was absolutely wonderful news.  I always worry that I'm not getting in enough protein.  I know I certainly don't get in enough water and I have to do a better job of drinking it.  It has always been my challenge to get in enough water, but it is even more of a challenge now that I can only take sips.  However, the sips are bigger now so I need to remember that the drinking is for continued good health.

On the dating front, I can't even begin to tell you how crazy that has been. I was seeing someone exclusively but there were issues there and so I decided to stop that relationship. So I have been dating other people and getting to know them. Online dating is not an easy adventure at all but it has been fun and certainly entertaining. I keep telling friends that I need to keep records of the various people who contact me - their pictures,  their comments, their messages - because it will make a fantastic book one day, certainly entertaining.  The one thing I can say is that of the various men who have contacted me, I certainly have felt incredibly beautiful and pretty. When I started this online dating adventure, I was hoping that perhaps I would be contacted by one or two people but it has been amazing to me that it's been quite the opposite experience. On a daily basis, I have no less than about 10 men contact me who are interested in getting to know me better.  Obviously there are some that are just out for sex but that's not surprising when it comes to online dating.  You take the good with the bad.  They have been distracting, however, so I have to be aware that the time I spend talking to various people takes me away from other activities so I need to be careful about that.

Grad school has been going great. It certainly is a lot of work, don't get me wrong. However, I am really enjoying the program and the fellow students in my cohort that I work with.  I love my program and I'm so glad that I decided to pursue this masters program.  Right now, the work I need to do in the program has to take priority over dating certainly and any other activities that I choose to participate in that distract me from spending the time on my graduate work.

Today I have myself s very special treat, one that has been in the works for quite some time.  I have always wanted a tattoo and I decided to go for it and get myself one for my birthday that's was last week.  I had something very specific in mind.  I wanted to commemorate the fantastic journey I have been on since getting the weight loss surgery.  I'm about halfway to goal and so I wanted something special that symbolizes the things I have been through.  So my idea was to inscribe the date of my surgery and a beautiful, colorful butterfly flying away from it.  It would symbolize freedom, hope and a new beginning.  Through a friend, I found an artist who was able to bring my vision to life.  Now, I have never had a tattoo before so I was imagining a world of pain.  People telling me that it would be crazy painful didn't help things at all.  But I figured that if I was brave enough to have gastric bypass surgery, I was brave enough for this.  It took three hours of me laying in my tummy, but I did it!  Thanks to my good friend who stayed with me the entire time and took pics.  That meant so much to me.  In terms of the pain, it wasn't bad at all for the most part.  Most of the time, it felt like just a deep scratching.  There were times, though, where it hurt because it was near bone.  That tends to hurt more.  Anyway, I put together a little pic slideshow.  Click on the following link to view it: 

http://flipagram.com/f/NVYGOz4lII

Here is the finished product.

This was an amazingly emotional experience but one that I would do in a heartbeat.  The tattoo artist accidentally left out a line in the date, so it should say 8-22-2014 in Roman numerals.  That's an easy fix so he will work on that this week.

Okay, I think I have you all caught up for now.  I do have to work on blogging here more though.  Thanks for continuing to follow along!