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.
