Tomorrow is my consultation with the gastric sleeve surgeon.

Some folks have voiced their displeasure by unliking my Facebook page and unsubscribing to my blog and I was disappointed to see that. In the end, though, you have to do what’s right for you…and if you can’t even hang with the idea that I’ve made an appointment, then I guess I understand.

It reminds me of me 11 years ago, actually. My two best friends decided to have gastric bypass surgery…something I was adamantly against back then. Unlike now, when I feel like surgery is a tool that’s a very personal decision for people, back then I believed that it was WRONG. Surgery was a symbol of your failure to get your shit together. Surgery was not a tool, it was a band-aid solution to the real underlying problem: you can’t keep food out of your mouth. And I was a judgy bitch about it.

I tried to be a good friend and smile as my friends were excited about their surgeries. Underneath, I was absolutely seething with anger. I felt betrayed by my friends (which cracks me up to this day…because why did I have to make that all about me? It had nothing to do with me). So I guess in a way this is my karma for judging my friends when they were just doing what they needed in order to lose about 150 pounds each.

One of the things that sticks out in my memory of those days is the packets they came home from the surgeons office with about what they would have to do. Not surprisingly, eating healthy and working out was a major theme and that always sent me into a rant.

Why do you need surgery then if you’re going to have to work out and eat healthy? Why can’t you just do that???

The answer? Because surgery isn’t a solution to that problem – and we need to stop looking at it as a solution. Surgery is only a tool to help you stop the unhealthy eating and get the weight off consistently so that you can move again. That’s all it is.

I remember when I was little a friend of a friend of my Mom’s had her jaw wired shut for 8 weeks. People were freaked. Why on Earth would someone do that? Just put the fork down, lady! My God! Have you no self control???

No. Some of us don’t. We just don’t. We’re broken people. This doesn’t mean that we’re bad people, it just means our brains don’t work like other people’s in this way.

As for me personally, I know what my strengths and my weaknesses are. When I’m extraordinary when I’m eating healthy. I kick ass. But then the emotional eater kicks in. There’s something to celebrate, so I get dessert. Someone brings baked goods into work. I have 3 of whatever it is throughout the course of the day. The 7 Dwarfs of the Menstrual Apocalypse hits and I eat 37 brownies. Okay, that last one is an exaggeration, but I’m still loving and medicating myself with food.

What am I no longer doing? The things that got me to this weight in the first place. And those things are quite horrible. I no longer eat an entire large pizza for lunch. I don’t go through a half gallon of ice cream in a day. I don’t drink chocolate syrup straight from the bottle. I don’t make an entire loaf of cheesy garlic bread for dinner and chase it down with a container of Skinny Cows. (Yes…I really did this shit.) And I don’t get so impatient for cake that I drink the batter straight from the bowl.

These are all things I did to myself from the late 80’s to the late 90’s. Emotionally distraught from all the shit my dance teacher put me through, heaped onto my Dad’s alcoholism, my parents’ divorce, a guy in high school who stalked and tried to kill me, and my first love dumping me…from age 7 to age 22, my life was a fucking soap opera and that’s how I dealt with it. From my early 20’s to well into my 30’s I was an eating machine. I’ve been spending my 40’s trying clean this shit up.

So…if surgery is a tool that I can use in order to get some of this weight off my body quickly and put an end to my ability to take another piece of banana bread and drown my cramps with a pint of mint chip, then yes…after over 20 years of fighting this problem, I’m going to talk to a surgeon about it.

True to the spirit of this blog, I will share my experience with you…and I’ll share the decision I come to. One of the things I’m most proud of is the community of extraordinary people who have rallied behind me here and on my Facebook fan page. I hope you’ll hang around, no matter which direction I go. This “Battle of the Butt” that we’re all going through is very personal…and I love that we all support each other no matter what.

I’ll let you know what happens tomorrow. Promise.