I get it, but it got me first

Have you ever watched one of those health shows with a really really really morbidly obese person bedridden and gaining more weight everyday? I've seen a few and the first thing I think is at least I'm not that big. Then I think WTF (that F stands for "freak" for my mild-mannered friends)? How could anyone allow themselves to get that big?!! Didn't he or she feel the bones start to ache, the heart beg for space to beat and the feet crying under the pressure? Yep, I've sat there and smugly said THAT could never happen to me... today I walked into the building at work, looked into the security camera and wondered who would see my tubby body waddling into the building and notice that I was breathing heavy. I use to measure how fat I was by the fat that I didn't waddle. I am...was a bouncer. You know the folks that bounce when they walk. When I am conscious about it, I walk...walked with twist. So there I am in the camera and a voice that has been quietly whispering a sing-song chant in the back of my head like Rafiki in the Lion King, suddenly starts yelling. It shouts in that sing-song taunt "Now you know, don't cha? Now you know, don't cha?" What is it I'm suppose to know? You know what its like to see your body get out of control, to feel the disgust with yourself, to wonder what's wrong with you, to know that you are not this person you are slowly becoming, to want to yell for someone to pull you off the cliff you are hanging from, and to tell the people who rudely look too long or stare at specific body parts, that this is just a momentary lapse in judgement. Yes, I know now.
The main reason I started this blog was to process what's about to happen in my life. I am about to have bariatric surgery. Its been 10 or close to 10 years in the making. When 9/11 happened, I spent days like everyone else trying to grasp the enormity of the event. After several days I remember talking to 3 other ____ (you fill in the blank, fat is like the new Black you never know what to call yourself or others) friends of mine. Everyone had the same thought, "would I have survived the building only to die of a heart attack on the trek across the bridge out the city?" Like my psychologist said no gets to be over 250 just because they like potato chips. No one wants to die on a bridge leaving family, friends and a life not led. But somewhere along the line the stars align themselves in a way that the fat monster seems to run faster, plan strategies better, and mount massive attacks that you FEEL you can't possibly beat. To me the fat monster is a mix of my seventh grade classmates who put a tack in my chair and waited for me to sit on it, a bit of my well meaning relatives who said wait until she meets a boy she likes she loose it, a bit of my pediatrician who always looked disapprovingly at me as though I were the only fat kid in the world, a bit of my mom who rewarded me with fattening food for being good (quietly sitting in my room reading, basically invisible) a bit of my brother who looked at his wife and disgustingly said, why ain't somebody taught her not to smack like that, momma lets her eat whatever she wants", and there's a bit of the first boy that ever told me he would never date a fatty like me, but mostly the monster looks like the face I see in the mirror. The one that has failed over and over again at millions of diets real, made up and just plain insane.

So as I begin this journey, I begin with a very clear understanding that I'm no better than the bedridden soul who's been beaten longer or harder by the fat monster and is holding on to a rock or a tree root on the cliff edge just like me. I get it, but not before the fat monster got me too.

Okay, I'm too much of the family clown to let it end like this...I don't believe in saying die, uncle or giving in when its this important. The fat monster has me in a corner but I firmly believe that I'm about to open a can of you know what on him/her. So stick around and watch the fur fly.