Weight Loss

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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Clearly it's cabin fever...

Lookit all these posts. I've been stuck at home for too many days now.

I've posted about a lot of random things lately...evidence that I've been able to dedicate some thought to things other than school, finally. WLS blogs are funny things. We all seem to go through a similar process: first, we have this huge goal of weight loss, a scary prospect of major surgery to achieve it, and we start a blog to help ourselves, and hopefully others, through the process. We spend a year or more navel-gazing about our "Journey" and blogging about the smallest details of the process. Then something changes--we lose weight, we start to widen our view and our blogs change a bit. Some of us regain, and stop posting out of embarrassment. Others settle into regular life and post about everything but weight loss, because--guess what?--it's happened, and other things seem more interesting.

Major weight loss is a puzzle about life, and whether we have surgery or not, our Herculean task is to solve the puzzle. Over time, we come to realize that most of it is more dependent on us solving the riddle for ourselves than on the surgical procedure. And with a wider view afforded by achieving our goal (even partially), we come to see that the riddle applies to our whole lives, not just the number on our scale.

I'm not apologizing any longer for my blog not really being just about WLS anymore. If you are a reader who is doing research on WLS, I'd like to suggest that you see WLS blogs that shift focus after reaching goal or coming close as a sign of success. The success is not only losing weight or being thinner (or whatever the original goal was), but in sorting out our priorities and figuring out how to see ourselves in a greater context than our dress size. I'll always talk about the process somewhat, and I'll probably always have some health, fitness or weight-loss goal that I am working toward, just like everyone else. But thank goodness that I am no longer singularly obsessed with my lap band. I wish everyone the same success.

2 comments:

She Smiles said...

My blog is a perfect example of the shift from WLS -> anything/everything else....LOL.

I enjoy your writing Gwen--whether its about WLS, politics, medical stuff, whatever. Don't apologise for that ever, keep on writing!

Diz said...

Amen Sister Friend!