Making the change.

I created this blog a couple of years ago and at the same time I made a facebook page for the same thing. I have to say that I never really used this blog and did most of my posting to the fb page. I decided today to convert this to my main blog on this subject and have stopped posting to the facebook page. That being said, I started a journey 2 years ago. At the time I was pretty fed up with my life, I was staring down the barrel at 50 and wanted to change. The things that I wanted to change the most were basically my weight, the fact that I have sleep apnea and type 2 diabetes and the course of my life. I had never gone back to college after the Army and when what would have been my retirement date came and went it really got to me. I have been pretty much just marking time since I got out. I wanted to change all of these things so I set about making a two year plan on changing my life. The biggest changes I have made so far are the way I handle money for the better and I have gone back to school and it is going great and I am very happy with it. The big change I didn't make was losing weight and getting rid of my diabetes and sleep apnea. I have lost weight in the last 2 or 3 years. At my highest several years ago I topped out at 329. It was just after the holidays in Jan of 2006. I got on the scale and freaked. I went on a diet and lost down below 300 and leveled out at about 285 where I continued to hover until 2009. After my first and second hernia surgeries in the same week I had a long slow recovery that lasted just about 9 months. During this time lost down to about 245 but after my recovery I gained back up to the mid 250's and that is where I have stayed ever since. I have made multiple attempts to go back on a diet but can't seem to manage to get past 248. I have seen that number several times since then but for what ever reason I can't get past it. I spent this past week in the hospital with a bowel obstruction. I spoke with the surgeon and he said that it was a combination of my hernias, which have come back and scar tissue left over from my older surgeries that caused it to occur. I am better now but while I was there he told me that basically my abdominal wall is shredded now and will have to be reconstructed surgically and that since I have all this weight still on my body that no surgeon will do it because it would just rip itself back out. After telling me that he suggested that I have bariatric surgery. Now I have always been against gastric bypasses and the like. I have always considered them the cheaters way out of having to have self discipline, especially since I willed myself into losing weight so I could join the Army and lost over 80 pounds to do it. Believe me when I say this, it plagues me that I can't seem to find that kind of self discipline again even though I have such great seemingly motivating factors as diabetes and sleep apnea but at any rate I told the Doctor how I felt and he told me that it would also "cure" my diabetes and that for most patients, they were off their medication in under 2 weeks. He also told me that many insurance companies today do cover the surgery because of all the other health related things it addresses besides losing weight. This got my attention and I told him that I would talk to the people from the hospital's program which I did. We asked them many questions about different procedures etc and over the next few days laying in that hospital bed I decided to go ahead and do it. After I got out of the hospital I went online to my insurance and discovered that they would not cover any kind of weight loss surgery. Needless to say this brought me back down and for a couple of days I tried to cope with the idea of being right back where I was, getting nowhere and then it struck me. I got online again and looked up the diet that people who have had the surgery follow. I had just spent the last week without food and then when I did eat it was liquids for 2 days and then I have been on soft foods since. This is what people who have had the surgery eat and I am doing that right now. So after much contemplation, I am going to attempt to be on a bariatric diet without the surgery. I think I can do this, here is to hoping I can.