Better late than never

Well Hello Blogging world, how do ya do? My name is Wayne and with this blog I hope to spread information about my Weight Loss journey. You will notice right off that I capitalize the first letters in the words Weight Loss, and this is no typo, it is done on purpose. But maybe I am getting a little ahead of myself and should start at the beginning as I am starting this blog a little late, as my journey has already begun.


When I was a little kid, I loved to play baseball and basketball, I ran everywhere or rode my bike. I was the skinniest kid in my class and only a little below average height, this would have been grade school. I had a decent amount of friends and was raised by a loving mother and father who were always there for me when I needed them and even a few times when I didn't think that I did. I have a sister that I didn't get along with too well when we were growing up as we were always competing for attention, or something or other. We were raised in a blue collar middle class environment, not rich, but never wanting for much either as our parents were very generous to us. We travelled a lot as kids and I got to spend my thirteenth birthday at Disney World in Orlando Florida with my cousin Jason, who was a year younger than me, my sister, mom, dad and my meme and my pepe.(french background)

Exciting, that is the word I would use to describe my childhood. Their was always a game to play, a friend to play with, a family outing to attend or a great family vacation that we were going on.


ALONG CAME HIGH SCHOOL


So, my high school years, yeah, what can I say, it's a story similar to many others I would imagine. No big epiphanies, no relationship that changed my life. Well of course my first love was in high school as so many others, but that turned out to be for the best when it collapsed, but let's stay on track here... I don't remember a specific day that it became a problem for me, but an event when it all starting to unfold. My Pepe(grandfather to you anglo's) was diagnosed with cancer, lung cancer at that, not a good kind if there ever was such a thing. I believe I was sixteen when he died, we were very close, close from a very young age. I spent many a day with my Pepe and he was a big influence on me in my life. Well, it must have been some time after he passed away that I started to over eat. I'm not saying that event in my life caused me to reach this Weight that I am now, just that this was the time in my life that I remember it really starting.

As high school went on and I gained more Weight, I bought bigger shirts and wore them untucked, and bought baggier pants to hide my growing girth. High school was just that, high school, and the end of it came and I graduated and was preparing to move on with my life.


AFTER HIGH SCHOOL


I enrolled in college, Journalism actually. Then a real life changing event did happen in my life, just as I was preparing to go to college I got a part time job at a convenience store near my house where I was growing up, and I met her. Her being my now partner of 13 years and my biggest supporter in everything I have ever tried to do. We dated for four years before we got married and in that time, we ate out a lot, and I mean a lot. Probably at least 5 times a week we would go out to restaurants, whether they were fast food or sit down, we were there. I can't even begin to think how much money we would have socked away had we just ate with our families and saved the money we spent eating out. So, my girth increased in size and I did the only logical thing I could think of at the time, I went out and bought bigger clothes. I mean the idea of dieting hadn't even crossed my mind. And when I continued to get even bigger I bought even more clothes, and then more the next time and the time after that. It went on like this for more than a decade until we reach the point I am at now.

The winter of 2000 was a rough time for me, I had begun taking anti depressant medication the year before because I didn't like myself, my life or my job, even though I had the best family a guy could ask for. One scarry Saturday morning I got an early phone call from my mother, she was at the hospital and my father had had a heart attack while at work that morning. My wife and I rushed down there and dad was moved to ICU, while in emerg, I looked down at my father, this guy who had instilled everything in me, this man that I so took for granted and I couldn't believe this was happening. I glanced up and there was an ER nurse that met my eyes and she nodded ever so slightly and I picked up on the hidden meaning in her gesture, she was telling me it was over, that my dad was going to die. My father had a lot of colleagues, you see he was a trade unionist, part of a bigger family, one that I didn't understand yet at this point in my life and they came in droves to the hospital to visit us, I say us, because he was in ICU and could not receive visitors other than family. My mom and I slept at the hospital for the better part of a week, only breaking for a few meals and a shower now and again, and in that time, it was family, friends and trade union people that we hardly knew that came to offer their support. That is something that to this day I will never forget. We lost dad on Christmas eve 2000. He just couldn't hang on any longer, he never regained conciousness in the hospital, we never got to tell him those last things that still haunt us today. I have now followed somewhat in his footsteps and hope that he would be proud of me. I know he would support me in my Weight Loss journey, just as my mother is now.

I am a big guy, fat, morbidly obese by any chart that any doctor has in their office. I have heard everything a fat person could hear, and endured many indignities that some people put us through. I have broken chairs and also found many that I could not fit into. I have endured the stares of people when ordering 2 bigmacs because one wasn't big enough.

I have reached a time in my life, I am 36 years old, and I want to lose Weight. I have now tried all those diets that would never have entered my mind so long ago, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Atkins, Zone, Low Carb, I have been on xenical, which promotes a very not nice thing to happen to your lower extremeties if you eat high fat, and I have been on a Dr. supervised program, all to no avail. Sure they all worked in their way, I would lose some Weight and then as soon as I stopped the program, the Weight would be right back on. What I needed was something permanent, something that would actually help me stop over eating, what I needed happened to be Weight Loss surgery, I just didn't know it yet.

To me, the words Weight Loss deserve to be capitalized because it is a very hard thing to attain, something I have yet been unsuccessful at achieving. Weight Loss is something I respect, so I capitalize the words as a way to show that, because I realize those words carry so much weight(pardon the pun) in our society today. Weight Loss, to me, will give me my life back, I want to be able to play with my 3 wonderful kids, instead of sitting on a chair watching them play. I want to be able to go out somewhere and not have to search out the heaviest duty chair in the room and claim it as mine, or heaven for bid, go to a movie and leave with bruises and the outsides of my thighs because the seats are two narrow for my girth. I want to lose this Weight for me, and only me, this is how I know that surgery will work for me and I am committed to it.


THE JOURNEY BEGINS


So, this is a lot for my first post, hopefully it isn't too boring, but when I post again in the next couple of days I am going to go through the process I followed to get here, through the consult, the paperwork, and the talk with my family Dr. I wanted to give you a little background about me before we really got started with things.


Seeya next time,


Wayne