My Story

I've always been big. As long as I can remember, I had to have the biggest shirts set aside for me at school and activities, and I had to shop in a different section of the store when I had to wear school uniforms.

I remember lying about my weight when I was six because I was ashamed to already be 100 pounds. So I said I was 99. When I find this fake little baseball card, I'll share it.

But no matter my size, I was healthy. Several doctors would comment how if they put their finger over my weight I was perfectly healthy. I find myself thinking that doctors wanted something to be wrong to scare me straight.

But scare me straight to what? I pretty much dieted since I was eight and I joined my first Weight Watchers group in the upstairs of a local Nordstroms. Of course I literally haven't dieted every single day of my life for the last 23 years, but sometimes it feels like it.

When I knew people watched me at parties for how much I ate.

When parents of friends looked at me playing on an age appropriate but not size appropriate toy.

I even spent three summers of my younger years at a girls weight loss camp. I had success at camp but would always end up gaining it back. But if I hired someone to cook for me and several different trainers (and someone to do crafts with) I would probably lose weight easily.

In the following twenty years I led a normal, active life. I participated in sports like soccer and basketball until high school and I started to love running.

Finally, in the summer of 2016 I hurt my leg running, training to go from running 10Ks to a 12 miler. It even hurt to sleep on the injured side, and I started to realize something had to change. I was at my highest weight of 340 pounds and married for about a year, which meant having kids was popping up. Not only was I worried about fertility, but also about how I was going to chase one (or two) of those little rugrats. My husband got a job that had a temporary cut in pay which meant having kids right at that moment wasn't the smartest idea. We'd have more money in a couple of years.

It meant that it was the perfect time to consider weight loss surgery.

And that's where the story begins...