The Fabled First Post

Well here it is, and here I am. My name is Kat and I'm from California (obviously.). I am twenty-two years old, college graduate, and currently unemployed. Why? I'm waiting for something quite drastic to happen in about two weeks. It's really the focus of this blog, of everything in my life at this moment. I'm in line to have gastric bypass surgery. It will be in the first week of December.

That is what this blog is about. This has been such a long road, a road only understood by those who have traveled it, or who are currently traveling it. For someone on the outside, you can never truly understand. Being obese is becoming more and more common in our country, yet most of us try to hide from it all I've noticed. We withdraw into ourselves and keep a tight barrier around the whole subject. I broke my barrier recently around the end of June, when I suggested to my doctor that I was interested in weight loss surgery.

I have *always* been overweight. The reasons that people come up with are usually the same; being lazy, eating too much, not moving around, wont stop eating and things like that. Note...that the people coming up with these reasons have never been obese. They don't know what its like to digest food different, to have the chemicals in the brain process hunger differently, or simply to struggle with the fact that our bodies are dying from it.

I was one of the people who did not believe that obesity was a genetic disorder, or even a disease, until my surgeon explained that obesity is pretty much the mirror disease of anorexia. Think of it this way folks...no healthy living organism on this Earth wants to willingly kill itself. A person who does drugs knows it may kill him, that's its rotting his teeth or poisoning his blood...he knows, but its the addiction, the part in the brain that can't handle not having that drug. Food is the same way, you hear of people even over one thousand pounds...no one is happy like that, the body itself is near death, no healthy person willingly wants to kill themselves like that. Perhaps that's not the best way of explaining it, but if you move the pieces around you may start to see the big picture. Being morbidly obese is the result of food addiction. Sadly people like me have been ridiculed so much throughout time that the disorder itself, and the treatment are being ridiculed.

People say (note, yet again, the ones who say the following are not obese) that weight loss surgery is the easy way out. We don't have to work to lose weight, we just sit and eat as much as our new tiny stomach allows us. If we simply stop eating we will lose weight, gosh why can't we just stop? Those two subjects are what medical professionals scoff at. 1) The weight loss surgery journey is one of the longest, most stressful, and most costly experiences. 2) After surgery we have to work our entire lives just to maintain a healthy weight. We will never be perfect, our skin will sad, we will have scars and stretch marks, and we will always have the "fat person" brain which tells us we're still fat and subject to ridicule. 3) When a person stops eating, the body believes its being starved, so it goes into survival mode, locking down everything even the fat. You cannot lose weight by simply not eating, unless you don't eat for many days, and then you are doing nothing but ripping the nutrients from your body and causing muscle loss.

So there's it all in a nutshell, one Ill likely crack open later in other blogs to pick apart.