Back to the Past!! Last Holiday Season

Christmas time is so much fun. You get to see some of your family and you all eat together. Last Christmas, I had started a serious diet after Thanksgiving and was really proud of myself in this photo. I had already lost about 15 pounds.

Weight: 285

The previous 30 I had lost were a little different. Okay, I admit it...I was addicted to diet cokes and smoking. In October of 2003, I quit smoking and got up to the 330 on the previous post. In January of 2004, I started thinking about getting the gastric bypass. Since I am a really thorough person, I began researching gastric bypass. One of my most informative sources was a lady who sat next to me at work. She had lost over 150 pounds with gastric bypass. She had only been at the office for a few weeks and was happy to tell me about her success. She looked thin, but had a lot of excess skin. I also noticed that her eating habits were really bad. She would eat half a strawberry and would be full. It didn't seem that healthy to me. I continued to probe and found out a few facts about the surgery:

• You must quit drinking beverages with carbonation (They stretch your stomach)
• You cannot eat steak for a year after the surgery (or any other coarse foods, as they will tear your stomach)
• You cannot consume foods with processed sugar
• You cannot sit down and eat a meal because your stomach will only hold about half a large strawberry
• You must take vitamins and supplements
• If you overeat, you barf and could seriously injure yourself (while she worked at the office, my friend was out twice getting surgery for a hernia).
• You cannot undo the surgery easily (this is something you will live with for the rest of your life unless you want to go through another risky surgery)

These facts, coupled with the high mortality rate of the surgery, made me give pause. I didn't eliminate the surgery as an option completely, I just decided to try some of the post-surgery guidelines ahead of time. I immediately quit sodas.

Quitting sodas was very, VERY difficult. I was inspired by 1 thing and it was that if I could quit smoking (as I had) then I could do ANYTHING. Quitting smoking was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. The way I quit smoking was to psyche myself out. I said to myself, "You will never quit again." The reason I said that was that, up to that point, I would quit and get through the hardest part (the first two weeks) then just start smoking again. I had done that like 10 times! So, I said to myself, "You will never quit again. If you start again, that is it, you are Rebecca the smoker."

It worked. I have not smoked since October 7th, 2003. Therefore, although quitting my 7 diet cokes-a-day habit was very difficult, it was doable. From January 2004, when I quit sodas, through November 2004 I lost 30 pounds and made no other changes to my diet or otherwise.

After Thanksgiving 2004, I started eating right. And lost another 15 pounds (above).

The picture below are a few days after Christmas... The front view: