mathbabe

Hello, friends! I’m here to give you an update on my recovery from bariatric surgery.

Swimming and biking

I’ve been cleared to swim and bike and take baths, and I’ve been swimming and biking – mostly biking and taking baths – every day since I got the news, which was on Tuesday. A small bummer: I’m really out of shape compared to where I once was, and it’s hard work. It doesn’t help that the weather, except for Wednesday, has been insanely moist and humid, exaggerating my sweatiness and making my gasping helplessly for breath all the more sad and pathetic.

Fuck it though, I’ll do it anyway! I feel very grateful for having the freedom and energy to do this stuff at all, and it will only get better as long as I keep at it.

Scales

I got deeply depressed yesterday morning. Partly it was the awful horrible weather, partly the political situation of the country, but partly it was something that made me feel awful that I did to myself: I weighed myself.

Now, and I know many of you will relate, I haven’t weighed myself regularly for maybe 23 years, and for good reason: it didn’t matter, it made me crazy, and my mental health was better without it. That’s not to say I didn’t get weighed every now and then; I did, especially when I was pregnant, and it was fine because it was a medical requirement and didn’t seem to bother me, probably because somebody else did it to me.

But, and here’s the naive part of the story, I convinced myself and my husband that I might be able to weigh myself once a week to sort of understand the effects of the bariatric surgery on my body. I had somehow framed it to myself as a scientific lark, ignoring the heaps of evidence that I had accumulated 23 years before that it was a really terrible idea. I thought I was mature enough to handle it now.

Long story short, I weighed myself once a week starting a few weeks ago. At least I was smart enough not to weigh myself every day.

As an aside, my husband loves weighing himself and does so 5 times a day or more. He doesn’t mind when it goes up. He’s endlessly fascinated by how he weighs 4 pounds more at certain times than at others. He’s most assuredly in a different relationship to scales than I am, or probably than any woman I know. Even my friends who are skinny have problems with scales, for various reasons. AmIright?

And it was fine! It really seemed fine. One day last week I decided to nerd out for a bit, so I built a predictive curve of my weight loss based on the information I’d been told by the doctor and my research, plotting out what I could expect to lose each week for a year, and getting to almost exactly the expected overall weight loss I’d been told was appropriate for my height and beginning weight.

And then, yesterday morning, Friday, I weighed myself. And I came in 1 pound more than “expected” based on this totally made up, unscientific graph I had built from nothing. And at some level I was like, 1 pound is the difference between a poop and not a poop, so whatever, I didn’t poop yet today. But at another level I turned immediately into my 14-year-old self, blaming and shaming myself for behaving badly (even though I’d done nothing wrong). It was fucking crazy.

To calm myself down, I made the next fatal error, which was to go onto the chat boards (mostly old) about weight loss after bariatric surgery. For whatever reason – mostly selection bias – these chat boards are populated exclusively by people who are actually insane.

Either someone’s saying they eat 500 calories a day, exercise constantly, but still weigh 300 pounds, and asking if there’s another surgery that will cure them, or it’s someone saying they “jumpstarted” a loss of yet another 10 pounds with the simple trick of drinking only protein shakes for two weeks, or it’s someone asking how to “jumpstart” their weight loss once again, and on and on and on. If you removed the words “bariatric” from these chats, they’d be indistinguishable from those famous websites that exchange tricks on anorexia.

Then, my friends, something shook me out of my stupor, and it was that Steve Bannon was fired. It was the energy I needed. I stood up from my seat, walked over to my scale, and threw it the fuck away.

After all, I didn’t have this surgery to lose weight, I had this surgery to be healthy. And that’s not something you can measure on a scale, or even once a week. It’s a long term thing, and the scale was seriously getting in my way. And shit, I’ll know I’ve lost weight when my pants fall off.

One more thing. I’m an idiot for letting myself get sucked into this weight loss perspective, but it’s really not my fault. In my defense, the people at the surgeon’s office are obsessed with my weight loss, and are constantly trying to get me to name a “goal weight” as if that will help me achieve something. It won’t.

We live in a fucked up world, people. There are lots of things that we have no control over and that suck. Then there are things that we do have control over and that suck. My new motto is, if it’s something in the latter category, throw it the fuck away.