clendaniel
New member
Hey everyone....figured I'd introduce myself since I've lurked on here for a bit and finally registered a couple weeks back.
I'm from Delaware and am a professional computer geek which, as you can imagine, doesn't lend to an active work day. Of course excuses are what got me to where I was! I was an overweight kid that grew into an overweight adult. The ironic thing is that I've always been 'healthy' with very few problems despite being obese...low blood sugar, low cholesterol, low BP, etc.
Last year (well 2006...year before last I guess now) I decided to get control of things as I'd noticed that small weight related issues were beginning to crop up...back and knee pain, sleep problems. I was scared enough that I said it had to stop and I was gonna do something about it. I immediately made an appt with my PCP for a physical, scheduled a sleep study, and on the suggestion of a coworker I went for a consult with a bariatric surgeon.
Bloodwork was good and the sleep study revealed pretty severe apnea (was expected) but on the visit to the bariatric surgeon I was dealt a surprise. As some can probably imagine when you get >350 there aren't too many scales out there to use (in fact my PCP's scale maxes at 350). Last I had known I was in the 385-400 range and didn't anticipate being much more than 425-ish...much to my surprise I'd grossly underestimated that. I was 562...I didn't know what to think. It hit me hard. You always tend to discount things but when a bariatric surgeon tells you that you're too big for them to do a gastric bypass and to come back when you're under their 450lb limit there's no dodging it.
I was a little miffed that they had a fixed weight limit and it was not dependant on BMI (I'm 6'4" and was smaller than someone shorter at the same weight) and at first I played their game by going on the supervised liquid diet but was absolutely miserable. At 800 cals/day and NO solid foods I knew that I would not be able to keep doing it for a long enough period to lose the >100lbs I needed to.qualify. I immediately set upon creating my own diet (at that point mostly just caloric restriction) that I could follow for a long period and was flexible enough for me not to feel like I was starving every minute of the day.
It started working and not only did I start losing the weight I'd need to qualify for bariatric surgery but I also lost the feeling that I needed it. Yup, after awhile I realized that I could fix this myself given the time.
That was 10 months and a little over 130lbs ago. Based on a spreadsheet I keep on 3/9/08 (1 year since I started) I should be at my current mini-goal of <400.
Currently I'm still at ~1200-1400cals per day and am slowly phasing in more and more exercise as the pounds come off. Now I know all the arguments about you metabolism being adaptive, etc, etc and I recognize the validity of all of that but IMHO when you get into the morbidly obese category I feel that this is less of an issue. I've been going at this for almost a year and have had good results. When my loss slows I will adapt my diet accordingly but until then it's working pretty well so I'm not messing with it!
--Ian
