Skipping Monday

Wow that work week is nice when you skip Monday. Of course it also helps if you work a nice traditional Mon-Fri schedule which I am doing right now for pretty much the first time in 8 years. I'm enjoying my job and my schedule.

I came home this evening after stopping at the gym and signing up for a water aerobics class tomorrow and picking up a September schedule and actually cooked dinner. I had cooked some chicken breasts last night and tonight I took them and shredded them up and made chicken and dumplings which turned out ok. It was a little overly salty (too many bullion cubes) but since I like salt (even if my blood pressure doesn't) I didn't mind much. Plus this time my dumplings were pretty much perfect. That's always nice too.

I also made an appointment today to see the surgeon (towards the end of the month) about the gastric bypass. I'm really feeling like I'm going to do this and go through with it. I know I've went back and forth a lot in the last several years but I am looking at this from the perspective now of planning to do it. My trip last week sort of worked to convince me. Outside of the discomfort of flying etc because of my size I ended up feeling very much like I missed out on things I really wanted to do because of my weight. My weight is such that made walking around very difficult on me physically (feet and knees) which limited what I was able to do. I don't want to feel like this anymore. I'm tired of hurting all the time and it affecting so much my day to day life. I don't know what hoops I may have to jump through to get to the point of surgery and if any obstacles will arise but I'm taking the forward steps. I know that my primary doc said something about needing to do 6 months of MD supervised diet plans before I qualified. No one else has said anything about it. It's not like I haven't tried every other diet out there at least once. Right now I'm also planning to do the actual bypass and not the banding. I know that many people have pretty strong feelings about the 2 different procedures and in the past I have been one who has said that I didn't want to drastically alter my GI tract like that but in looking at the two procedures I also can see why it would likely be the better procedure for me. With the banding you don't really get the dumping syndrome which means that you can eat (and drink) whatever in small amounts. Since I have a tendency to get a lot of calories from sugary drinks (I love Dr. Pepper and don't tolerate sugar substitutes very well). I also love and could somewhat happily live on sugary stuff (for at least a few days) and if I was able to eat stuff like that from the beginning I could see how it would be easy for me to fail. Yes this is sort of a punishment system for weight loss but I have failed at cutting back on or eliminating that stuff from my diet numerous times already. Yes with the bypass I may be able to someday eat very small amounts of sugary stuff but in the beginning I won't be able to and I'm hoping that my forced time away from it will give me the strength I need to be able to get into better shape and be able to exercise more (which is really difficult for me to do now when it hurts to walk etc) and mostly stay away from some of the really bad food choice I make now. For me it's not an education thing. I know how I need to be eating I just don't seem to be able to follow it. My dietary habits feel out of control and have for a really long time. So if I can have the surgery done and have my insurance cover 95% of it and it will help with lowering my blood pressure, decrease my risk of becoming diabetic and maybe even make it a little easier and safer to carry a baby to term, not to mention make me feel better physically and decrease some of my pain then it's worth it. I won't say I'm not scared because this is a huge decision but I'm feeling more confident with it all the time.