Our Journey Begins...

Sherikate

I don't have a good name for this blog and don't really know why I'm doing it... other than I have too many ideas swirling around in my mind at 1am in the morning to sleep and one day my friends are going to be tired of hearing me blabber on.  

So here it goes...

My name is Sherikate...
*hi, Sherikate*
And I'm about 2 weeks out from having gastric bypass surgery
*silence falls*

There needs to be a 12-step program for fat girls like me.  I've spent so much of my life trying to NOT obsess about how much I weigh and what I look like.  Hell, I spent most of my academic career conducting feminist analysis of things like the "beauty myth" and the effects of pornography and objectification on women's self-esteem.  Now I run a nonprofit that helps women transition to work by - among other things - helping them look the part by giving them professional clothing.

I'm a contradiction in terms.  

So now I'm just adding a new one to the mix, I suppose.

Something changed in my life this past June.  I woke up - or better never fell asleep - with a terrible pain in my right side.  By 4am I was in such pain that I did the unthinkable - I went to the emergency room.  I was admitted immediately with a kidney stone the size of an M&M.  The next thing I knew, the girl who had never had any major medical procedure spent 2 days in the hospital and had 2 procedures 2 weeks apart to remove the stone (wow... that was alot of 2s!).

And the stone was my wake up call, I guess.  

2 years ago (wow - there's another 2!), my doctor used 2 small words to convey on big (no pun intended!) concept for me:  morbidly obese.

Wait a minute!  I was just a fat girl!  I wasn't morbidly obese.  

What did that mean, anyway?  

I spent the better part of the last 2 years contemplating what this meant.  I'd look at people on the street and compare them to me - was I that big?  Were they fatter than me?  Was I healthier than they were? 

Suddenly medical problems started mounting up - pre-diabetes was hovering around the 'do not pass go and collect $100 mark' into full-blown diabetes.  I'd always snored, but now they called it sleep apnea and said I could die without a breathing machine.  Pain in my back from cysts meant I could no longer walk the 2 miles to work.  And now I had kidney stones.

The writing was on the wall - I was, in my own words, too fat to live.  Or at least too fat to live the life I wanted.  

I didn't want my niece to look at me and ask "why is your stomach fat."

I didn't want my friends to worry that I wouldn't see retirement with them.

I didn't want to spend Saturdays in a shame spiral brought on by my "lumpy toad frog" moments.

I was tired of being embarrassed everywhere I went that I was taking up too much space.

  

And it was time to do something about it.

My doctor had mentioned surgery and 2 years ago, I thought that was insane.  I'd lost weight before, after all, why not just do it again?  But then I started reviewing my own personal weight loss journey - as people like Oprah and Doctor Oz are so apt to call it.  It wasn't a journey, though, it was more like a  the time warp from Rocky Horror: 

It's just a jump to the left . And then a step to the right / With your hands on your hips / You bring your knees in tight

In other words... it was going nowhere.

Not telling anyone what I was thinking, I spent hours online researching because that's what I do.  And all those hours and hours of researching and introspection have lead me here.  

I'm hoping that now it's a journey.  I'm hoping it will lead me to a place where I am healthy.  Where I have more confidence.  Where I can be the person on the outside that I feel like I am on the inside.

So here we go...