Overweight

I know! I know! I know! I have been neglecting Pamelot again! I have many worthy excuses, I promise. Though, I'm sure you're not really interested in any of them. It's been a crazy few weeks getting things ready and set up for this year's Upward Cheerleading season. The work as Cheer Commissioner is keeping me a bit busy. I am also in a very busy phase of my project at work.

I am now 10 months out from surgery - hard to believe. I am in the phase where I am able to eat more and more foods - my body is adjusting nicely to my new insides - and I am feeling like I have adjusted to "my new normal". It's no longer this new novel thing to have had gastric bypass. I feel like I have finally adjusted and settled in to life with a smaller stomach and less intestines (romantic isn't it?). I don't have to think so hard about what I'm going to eat, or plan ahead so much. This is just my life and I have settled into it. And I like it.

The weight loss has slowed dramatically - as I knew it would. I would like to lose 20-30 more pounds. I feel that when I up my exercise (I have been slowly getting back to exercise since my ear surgery) I will be able to get a better handle on that and make some progress there. The scale still does move, which is encouraging.

I was having an interesting conversation with some co-workers about BMI yesterday. We were talking about what a "normal" BMI is - how most people are not "normal", and how even though I have lost over 100 pounds I would still be considered in the "obese" range. We were playing around with a BMI calculator and seeing what different weight and heights gave us. So I plugged in my latest weight and discovered .... I am finally overweight! I am no longer obese!

18.5 or less	Underweight
18.5 to 24.99	Normal Weight
25 to 29.99	Overweight
30 to 34.99	Obesity (Class 1)
35 to 39.99	Obesity (Class 2)
40 or greater	Morbid Obesity

Some calculators also put a category of BMI's above 45 as "Super Morbidly Obese". At my heaviest just before surgery my BMI was 47.6, and so I fell into that awful category. As if "obese" isn't bad enough - you add morbidly to it - then super morbidly. UGH! I always hated that! But it was telling me what I didn't want to hear.

Dictionary.com defines the word morbid as:

1.	suggesting an unhealthy mental state or attitude; unwholesomely gloomy, sensitive, extreme, etc.: a morbid interest in death.

2.	affected by, caused by, causing, or characteristic of disease.

3.	pertaining to diseased parts: morbid anatomy.

4.	gruesome; grisly.

Unhealthy mental state or attitude - check. I had a bad attitude (some would argue I still do!)
Characteristic of disease - check. High Blood Pressure, Sleep Apnea, sneaking up on Type II Diabetes, hard to breathe, hard to exercise, hard to do just about anything.
Pertaining to diseased parts - check. Not much to explain there - felt like my whole body was diseased.
Gruesome; grisly - check. That is definitely how I felt about myself.

But I spent many years denying and simply avoiding this about myself. If I can actually loose these last pounds I will find myself in a "normal" BMI range. That actually blows my mind a bit.