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Hello!
My name is Emilee and I was born and raised in West Michigan, U.S.A.
Welcome to my very first blog post!
If you have found this blog, chances are you were looking for some sort of support during your journey into weight loss and living healthily for YOU! And if you aren't a person looking for lifestyle support, you are always welcome here. :)
My intention for this blog is to support other people going through bariatric surgery, creating a healthier lifestyle for themselves, need a friend or support or anyone who just enjoys creativity, art, learning and being open-minded. This is a judgement-free safe place for you and I!
I wanted to really document this journey for myself. I then realized that there is a need for people to be supportive and connect with each other in general. So I feel this will not only be touching on my life but also of our current way of living, our world, our climate and just generally how it feels to be a middle age woman in 2025.
I will be turning 41 in about a month or so and these past 40 journeys around the sun have brought happiness, tears, joy, frustration, bad choices, good choices, new relationships, destroyed relationships, addiction, sobriety, disordered eating, over exercising, having no self confidence, learning to love myself, losing loved ones, becoming an Auntie, becoming a true world traveler, embracing creativity and art and so so much more! To say my life has been jam packed would be an understatement.
When I was born way back in 1984, I was 12 weeks early. I am an extreme premature neonate. I spent at a minimum of 6 months in the NICU and when I was allowed to go home, my mom tells me I went home on so many monitors and tubes and medications that for her age being 19, she felt very overwhelmed and scared. Mind you this was in 1984, so technology was not as advanced as it is today.
Being a premature baby brought with it some interesting quirks. I had PDA heart repair surgery and Inguinal Hernia Surgery as a newborn. I also had a retinal detachment in my eye in high school and have since had numerous laporoscopies, a hysterectomy and eye surgery. My health quirks are generally just something I tend to roll with. I know I'm not like anyone else in that regard and I'm okay with that. But as an adult, they do tend to continue.
I was always active in sports in high school. I loved down hill skiing/racing, dance, track and weight lifting. I loved gym class (except running - running is SO hard for me!) and I tended to keep myself in pretty decent shape through the first half of college. However, as most individuals, I had some severe disordered eating in the second half of high school and the first half of my college years. I am a self diagnosed previous anorexic who spent at a minimum 2 hours in the gym 6 days a week (and on Sundays I'd do a pilates workout). I was picky about what I ate and I also was using over the counter "diet pills" which did have ephedra in them at the time. And to be quite frank, they worked really well! But, I wasn't addressing any of the reasons as to why I felt like I needed to take them to fit in or my lack of self-confidence (I will get into this more in future posts).
I have spent the better part of my adult life either thinking about being in better shape, thinking about weighing less, comparing myself to others, pining to live that Instagram healthy lifestyle, obsessing over every inch of my body, comparing myself to others, feeling extremely self-concious and always being so hard on myself all of the time. The amount of energy and mental health I have spent on my weight and looks is just a waste of a life. I say this because it doesn't matter. And I wish I could have told myself (and actually believed it!) back in my 20's. I feel I could have lived so much more life with all of that time and energy.
I tried every diet, every exercise program, every logging app/notebook, counting calories, being in a calorie deficit, going gluten-free, going vegetarian, going vegan, going whole food, going pescatarian, low carb, Weight Watchers and keto.....you name it, I'm sure I've tried it. I would lose maybe 15-25 pounds and then get tired of it and go back to my disordered eating/emotional eating/binging and put on a little more than I lost. This went on for years and years and years.
In the past two decades I have been diagnosed with: Type II Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, High Cholestorol, Uncontrollable Anxiety, Higher Depression, Insomnia, Severe Allergies, Severe Obesity, Degenerative Joint Disease, Scoliosis (very mild), Degenerative Spinal Stenosis, SI Joint Disfunction, Hip Bursitis, Shoulder Bursitis, Three Herniated Disks between my Thoracic and Lumbar Spine, Chronic all over arthritis, Low Iron, Low Magnesium, Low B12, more severe Asthma (requiring I have a nebulizer machine at home), I take at a minimum of 20 pills everyday, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Opioid Dependance, IBS, Pancreatitis and OCD. And I am sure I probably forgot something. Now I know that is more than a quirk. That is related to my lifestyle choices and my emotional eating habits due to past trauma and abuse.
The older I am getting, the less any of my attempts to drop weight are working. In fact, between June of last year to current - I have ganed back all 45 pounds I had lost on Ozempic plus about another ten pounds. That is roughly 55 pounds in ten months!! No wonder why I feel awful! Unfortunately, Ozempic or any of the GLP-1's are no longer an option for me because they gave me pancreatitis that required two or three trips to the emergency room over a week and a half. They do work really well - but - just proceed with caution as the side effects can been really severe. On the other hand, some people have absolutely no problem with them. I just happened to fall in the quirky 10% of people who get pancreatitis from them. I have family members that have been very successful on these medications. So I do recommend at least trying them as a first step tool to use to drop some extra weight.
So, medications are out (I also failed on phentermine). So I was referred to a local bariatric center several weeks ago and I had my initial appointment with them last week with the physician's assistant. I have consistently said that I was in no way ready or wanting to do weight loss surgery. My biggest reason was because I have emetaphobia (the irrational fear of vomiting). And, in my head, if you are monkeying around with someone's stomach - it's almost a guarantee that said stomach isn't going to be super happy afterwards. And it's major surgery - they do a bit of rearranging in there - and that was really scary to me. (My last major surgery was 2017 when I had my hysterectomy). So those things (at the time) just didn't sit right in my mind.
Fast forward to my appointment with the Physicians Assistant, we reviewed all of the options they offer. The options were - weight loss medications (which I had tried and failed, so that option was no longer an option), a diet program that insurance didn't cover that lasted 6 months and cost roughly $750, or surgery - which the two options were gastric sleeve or roux-en-y gastric bypass. Both have positive and negative things to each option with their own possible complications, etc. By the end of the appointment I was leaning towards gastric sleeve surgery because out of the two options, it seemed less invasive. But I wanted to take the weekend and talk with my husband and family members who had this done and get a better sense of how life would be pre and post surgery. I took half of my Saturday and wrote out my pro and con list and it ended up being FIVE pages long! Something I realized when I went back to it was that the majority of my cons included words like "Might", "Could", "Maybe" etc. My pros list included words like "Reverse", "Will" and "Make" etc. So I realized a lot of my cons were my fears of the unknown. A lot of my pros were positive changes that could drastically affect my quality of life! And at this point in my life, I am all for that!
I ended up scheduling and having my surgical consultation this past week with my bariatric surgeon. He took time to explain how I do qualify for weight loss surgery based on the NIH (National Institutes of Health) requirements. My BMI was over 40 which automatically made me eligible (My BMI is currently 46.8). But I also have several comorbidities (fancy medical term to say I had diseases from being overweight). So check box 1. Next, he explained because I am a Type II Diabetic and I have GERD (Gastroesophogeal Reflux Disease, fancy medical term for chronic heartburn) that the Roux-En-Y Gastric Bypass would be the best option for me - so check box 2.......Not quite what I wanted to hear, but, having been in the medical field for the last 20 years, I sort of knew he would lean that direction vs the gastric sleeve surgery. Finally, my private health insurance I have through my employer were one of the easier ones to work with in regards to bariatric surgery - the office will just need to request a prior authorization for surgery - so check box 3.
My surgeon did say because I have had GERD for a good period of my life, they will have to do a EGD (esophagogastroduodenoscopy - fancy medical term for when they put a tube down your throat with a camera on it to look at the upper part of your digestive tract) to see if I had a hiatal hernia. If so, they are planning to correct this while I am in surgery.
But that is all I know so far. I am being assigned to one of the two coordinators at their office and will be having surgery in the next couple months (as long as everything is approved with my insurance company). I have some upcoming travel and so my first available week would be the last week of May (the week of Memorial Day).
In the meantime, I have joined many Facebook Bariatric groups and have been watching others go through surgery and move through there first days, weeks, months and years. The before/after photos are astonishing of these people. Out of all of the people that have posted out there - only a handful have regretted their decision. Usually because they feel they rushed into it. For me, after having sort of processed everything last weekend a bit more. I figured out a few things:
1. I am doing this for ME. Probably, for the first time in my life, I'm doing something positive that will be for ME (again, having dealt with negative self talk and negative self confidence).
2. I am doing this for my HEALTH. Five years ago, if I said I was doing this, hands down I'd be doing it just to be skinny. Nope. That is the wrong reason to do it. Over the past weekend I had to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons and not the wrong ones.
3. I am doing this to better my life, my marriage, my husband's life, our future traveling, to able to do things that my weight has stopped me from doing and to have energy and feel better on the inside. I want to get off most of my medications, I want to reverse my diabetes and high BP/Cholestorol (from my surgeon's words - not mine! - I know people out there don't believe you can "reverse" disease.)
This blog - area - is for all of us to have someone to talk to. Someone to vent frustrations, emotions and the good things too! But mostly, it's for you to know that you are not alone - and neither am I! :)
I'm looking forward to sharing my journey with you and getting to hear from you about your journey.
Until next time - find your balance.
Emilee
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