| Gastric Bypass: No comfort! |
[Aug. 24th, 2007|07:58 pm] |
I'm uncomfortable every day.
I live in extreme discomfort.
Someone said that about ME last night.
Can you imagine?
But I thought about it.
Yeah, I guess it's true.
I AM uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable and proud.
Hi, my name is Lisa and I was a comfort-a-holic.
See, comfort, the kind the media touts and sells, is way overrated.
Comfort is often confused with pleasure. We've been conditioned to believe that happiness is a pleasant, pleasurable mood or a GOOD feeling, a state of being totally comfortable.
This faulty conditioning leads us to a life of constant pain avoidance.
We have been conditioned to believe that being comfortable is the most desirable state.
We HAVE to be conditioned that way or capitalism will fail.
Every product on the market is designed, or its marketing campaign is designed, to make us WANT it because we believe it will make us more comfortable.
Hey, there's nothing wrong with comfort.
Nothing obviously wrong.
Look, I see the suffering kids in the two-thirds world countries sick and starving. It hurts me.
I have compassion for them. I want them to be COMFORTABLE as in FED and CLOTHED and receiving adequate health care. And please throw in some basic human rights while we're at it. Please.
That's not the comfort I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the comfort that's sold on TV by every commercial we see.
Everything from dick hardeners to pain relievers to diet pills and ass wipes.
My first problem with that kind of comfort is the symptom-relief aspect of it.
If we're dependent on dick hardeners, pain relievers, diet pills and we wipe our ass 17 times before we stand up from the bathroom throne then SOMETHING IS WRONG with our health.
Healthy, vibrant people don't need all those things on a regular basis.
Healthy, vibrant people take care of the underlying causes of their ailments by creating optimal health.
Our economy thrives on symptom relief at the expense of our overall health.
I guess there's no money in keeping the public healthy and thriving.
Air, food, water and movement. Put all those into action in your body IN A HIGH QUALITY WAY and you won't need all the symptom relievers.
A healthy colon produces quickly eliminated, formed stool that doesn't leave a disgusting residue that requires half a carton of butt wipes to clean.
I don't have my own dick but I imagine a healthy, vibrant person who thrives on high quality food, authentic self expression and daily aerobic movement might not need that little blue pill.
As a matter of fact, a healthy, vibrant person who thrives on high quality food, authentic self expression and daily aerobic movement won't need much of ANYTHING they're selling on TV to relieve the symptoms of an unhealthy, low chi, sedentary, depressed lifestyle.
Comfort inducing products are making hypochondriacs of us all at the expense of our very lives.
And that's not my MAIN COMPLAINT about the comfort sell.
My main complaint is that comfort produces nothing of value for the evolution of our society.
Comfort does little for the development of the individual.
Too much comfort retards the progress of humanity.
It retarded me.
I was so STUCK in pain avoidance mode I nearly died.
Look at me.
370+ pounds.
Diabetic.
Undiagnosed, severe Obstructive Sleep Apnea.
Depressed.
I'm fat-packed with sadness.
Yeah, I was desperately seeking comfort.
It was all I could do to get through my day.
Avoid pain.
Falsely nurture myself with numbness from food and drugs.
Keep myself from feeling the painful body I was stuck in.
Yeats once said he felt like he was a soul "tethered to a dying animal."
I can relate.
What I learned from 40+ comfort seeking years???
PAIN AVOIDANCE
IS
LIFE AVOIDANCE.
Life is supposed to hurt.
NOT the way I was hurting.
Not in the knees, back, ankles, lungs and heart.
Life is NOT supposed to hurt every time you take a breath or try to move.
That's not the hurt I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the hurt of living authentically.
The discomfort of facing life head on instead of cowering in the moldy darkness of addiction.
Pain avoidance, issue avoidance, emotion avoidance ROBS us of our authenticity.
We rob ourselves of our self expression with our pain avoidance habits.
We cling to non-feeling because feeling is too much to handle.
And then we waste away and die from our ailments. Our ailments that are REALLY internalized emotions that we have swept under the rug.
That lump under the rug?
Look down.
See that gut lopping over the waist of your pants?
That's where they went.
All those avoided emotions settled there, inside you.
Is the gut big, round and kinda hard?
Like a "beer belly"?
That's all the mucus and yeast packed into your gut along with all your undealt-with issues.
Hey, I'm not talking out of my butt here.
I LIVED IT!
I'm cleaning out my gut along with my issues.
And it ain't comfortable.
Does this mean that folks who are seeking comfort are somehow defective??
Hell no!
I wasn't defective back in my sick, morbidly obese, over-eating days.
I was disempowered.
Disenchanted.
Disenfranchised.
I was dissed.
Dissed by myself and the rest of the negative influences that conspire to rob every one of us of our lives.
The comfort I sought was a false comfort.
Ever have a cheap piece of cake?
Or how about a super-cheap imitation Twinkie or cookie from the Dollar Store.
Compare a cheap dessert to one you've had at a fancy restaurant.
Heck, even the desserts at Applebee's have a richness of flavor not found in your average, el-cheapo sugary, crap, snack-cake.
The cheapo snack cake is the comfort seeking life I was living.
It looks appetizing.
It seems like a good idea.
But it's ultimately unfulfilling.
It fails to deliver the pleasure it promises.
Then it fails to nourish us in even the most basic way.
Comfort seeking is like the cheap dessert.
And it usually gets worse before it gets better.
Pain avoidance is a perfect example of the snowball effect.
Starts out basic and small.
The it rolls into a boulder-sized snowball of crushing destruction.
Don't take my word for it, go see a good therapist.
Read a good book.
Do some issue dredging.
Take an honest look at your past.
(Warning: this could take years of difficult emotional work. But I promise the payoff is worth it.)
Look at your past.
Something HURT you.
I was hurt.
Maybe it was a fight my parents had in front of me when I was a little girl that disillusioned me.
Maybe it was a major disappointment in my relationship with my mother or father or both.
Maybe it was some form of abuse.
I have so many emotional skeletons rattling around my emotional closet....just pick one.
Better yet, pick one from yours.
Some form of abandonment, rejection, death of a loved one, physical or emotional abuse.
Pick a scar, any scar.
That's where it started.
Our failure to adequately FEEL the uncomfortable emotions and express them in a healthy way started us on our snowballing journey of self-destruction and emotional avoidance.
We didn't work it through.
We didn't express our pain.
We internalized it.
Then we spent most of our lives trying to cover it up, like a cat in the litter box.
Dig, dig, dig, dig, dig,
scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.
What were we left with?
A giant lump of s**t buried under our litter of addiction.
(Usually residing in our gut somewhere.)
How do I know this??
What gives me the authority to talk this way???
You could look at my credentials.
That might make them worth the 100G's in student loans.
I'd RATHER you look at my life.
No, better yet,
LOOK AT YOUR OWN!
Yeah, I'm f***ing uncomfortable every day.
I don't like looking at old pictures of myself.
I don't like looking at the damage I've done to myself when I look in the mirror on my way to take a shower in the morning.
I don't like pushing myself to do what I don't feel like doing.
Tough s**t.
I liked my comfort-seeking life even less.
It wasn't enough of a life.
As hard as I pushed myself to get out there in the world at 400ish pounds the pain was almost unbearable. The rejection from men. The rejection of people in general. The sneers, insults and unwanted advice. The finger pointing. The fist slamming against the table (my father). The suffocating mother who unconsciously tried to keep me fat. The prejudice.
The inability to move.
The immobility.
The lack of oxygen to my brain from my sedentary life and sleep apnea.
The death of my cells from diabetes.
Lack of hope.
Lack of passion.
Lack of fulfillment.
Who wouldn't seek comfort under those circumstances?
Fortunately I decided to seek comfort in different way.
I re-defined "comfort" as having a life of being able to "comfortably" look at myself in the mirror.
To have self-respect and integrity.
To have what Susan Powter calls "a foundation of wellness" upon which to build a life.
Do I FEEL like ironing and photographing and listing the rest of my clothes on eBay today?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
How God awful boring!
Do I FEEL like writing that recommendation letter for one of my students?
Catching up with paperwork?
Preparing the online grading system for my classes this fall?
Doing laundry?
HELLL NOOOOOOOOOO!
The old me would have avoided all those chores in the name of comfort-seeking.
BUT and you knew that big BUTT was coming.... I'm no longer going to settle for Dollar Store cookie comfort.
The refined white sugar is NOT all that satisfying.
It's not even that pleasurable to begin with.
It makes my teeth sting.
It makes me feel guilty for hours and hours after eating it.
I no longer wish to pre-occupy myself with all that.
Spending all my time and energy obsessing about food and dieting and weathering the binge-purge cycles.
That's not a life that gets me up and out of bed in the morning.
Make me uncomfortable so I can have the comfort of having some integrity.
Make me uncomfortable so I can dedicate my energy to something other than obsessing about food and how I hate the way I look.
Make me uncomfortable so I can KNOW and LIVE a life that feels ECSTATIC
ACCOMPLISHED
MEANINGFUL
and worth living.
Give me discomfort or give me death.
Death no longer seems all that appealing.
Andy's right.
You'll never be driven if your car is stuck in neutral.
Put your car in gear.
Drive.
Read my DAILY blog:
http://TheSkinnyOnline.blogspot.com |
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| VIDEO of Lisa 8 weeks after her gastric bypass |
[Aug. 12th, 2007|08:51 am] |
I say that I'm depressed, sad and suffering a crisis of meaninglessness since I can no longer
overeat.
Filmed when I was in pain, feverish and frustrated, and
in the throes of going cold turkey off of sugar and fats during post-op detox on October 14, 2006.
And then I sit outside and eat breakfast.
{Warning: Adult Language! I say the "F" word a few times...}
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gl6IbaIXmk4 |
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| Overcoming OverEating |
[Jun. 25th, 2007|09:12 pm] |
for Lisa's daily blog posts go to http://theskinnyonline.blogspot.com
What if I hadn't had the surgery?
Would I have been able to overcome my overeating?
I may have become an in-patient in an eating disorders facility.
Some grand, emotionally significant event would have had to disrupt my pattern of destruction in order to hoist me onto the high road to wellness.
Although I'm on the road to wellness,
I still eat in order to cope.
Sometimes I forget I have the gastric bypass.
I forget to eat slowly, to chew my food, to limit my portions.
Last night I was eating absent mindedly.
Granted, the food was fat free, high protein and completely healthy.
I ate a bit too fast.
I was anxious about something. My mind wasn't on chewing my food.
The next thing you know I was hanging over the kitchen sink with my finger down my throat because unchewed rice and broccoli had gotten "stuck" in the tiny passageway between my mini-stomach and my intestines. If I hadn't made myself throw up the food would have sat inside me, hurting, not going down. I would have gone to bed. The undigested food would have found its way back up my esophagus and choked me in my sleep.
So I helped it out, literally.
I got it out of my stomach so it wouldn't kill me.
What if I hadn't had the surgery?
How would that have changed last night's eating episode?
I may have succumbed to automatic eating.
I may have sat there with my mental wheels spinning as I ate and ate and then suddenly noticed that I had finished an entire order of tofu with broccoli (and don't forget the rice!)
I'm not sure that eating some fat free Chinese food would make or break my steady weight loss. Working out 6 days a week is helping me take off an average of 10 pounds a month no matter what.
But that's the weight issue.
What about binge eating?
Could I have eliminated that from my life without the surgery?
Back in the days when I had the gastric band, I still overate. The band functioned by preventing food from dropping down into my stomach to be digested. The food would just sit there above the band at the entrance to my stomach the way water sits in the sink when a drain is clogged. I could binge then easily "get rid of it" by inducing vomiting.
Although I lost weight, the binge behavior was still there.
Had the band remained intact, I may have vomited myself to total thinness. Granted, I may also have worn a nice bloody hole in my throat that would have killed me. I wouldn't be healthy. I'd be malnourished. My breathe would stink from the daily puking. My teeth would rot. But I'd be thin.
A thin binge eater. Compulsive and sick.
I'm still compulsive, but I'm more 'well' than I've ever been. The gastric bypass has forced me to sit with my feelings rather than push them away with food. The pounds and pounds of carbs that once served to bury my emotions are no longer an option. I had to find a way to process my feelings and actually FEEL them and then work through them. But finding a way to do that was forced. The gastric bypass forced me to stop eating and deal with uncomfortable feelings.
The detox was miserable physically and emotionally. The feelings were dizzying. That period of transition between being a compulsive binge eater to becoming a healthier, portion-controlled eater-in-recovery was brutal. Rather than avoid the rough feelings with any number of sabotage methods, I fought through to where I am now. I could have remained determined to use food to numb myself. I could have force fed myself and then purged to avoid the gastric distress that follows eating foods that upset my stomach. I hear stories about gastric bypass patients who binge and purge the same way I did when I had the gastric band. Gastric bypass patients usually cannot tolerate fast foods. Some eat giant value meals from the drive-thru then force themselves to throw up before it can make them sick (getting sick to avoid feeling sick, go figure).
I could have found a way to eat around the surgery. I could sit here inside my apartment in front of my computer or TV and graze on junk food all day. Eating a little at at time would lessen the gastric discomfort caused by processed garbage foods, but even a little at a time, junk food will keep you fat.
I could be eating a soft food, carb heavy diet the way some gastric patients do. I heard about one woman who defeated the surgery by living on mashed potatoes with gravy. She didn't lose any weight.
The surgery alone won't cure compulsive binge eating. I acknowledge that I AM doing some rigorous emotional work on myself. It's not JUST the surgery that's saving me. I'M saving me.
I ride the wave of the surgery rather than paddle against it by sabotaging it. I don't even TRY to eat junk food. I LET the surgery make me sick on the rare occasions when I eat something that's not a good food choice.
I remember back in November, I ate a cookie. It was one of those nice big Pepperidge Farm oversized cookies. Back in my binge eating days I could easily put away 3 bags of them. Back in November I ate one, just one cookie. It made me queasy. I didn't throw up. It didn't hurt. It just didn't feel right inside me. It felt the way one imagine it would feel to drink shampoo. Kinda nauseating. Kinda gross. Kinda chemical tasting. Not a pleasure.
I never ate another cookie.
I have no desire to.
Even smelling a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies makes me ill.
Yuk.
But really, YUK.
I didn't have to settle for YUK. I could have eaten a cookie a day until my body found a way to become accustomed to them. I could have found a way to drink a bunch of ice water or milk or something to wash the cookies past my mini-stomach to bypass the queasy feeling. I could have found a way to binge eat.
Instead, I rode the wave of YUK into a world where cookies no longer soothe me.
Blogging soothes me.
Working out soothes me.
Sitting out in the sunshine soothes me.
Walking soothes me.
The soothing feeling comes from working things out rather than pushing things in.
Would I have succeeded without the surgery?
I don't know.
I'm pretty tough.
As a matter of fact, I'm relentless.
I would have found a way. |
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