Not The Easy Way Out After All

Many folks don't know this, though I've not kept it a secret. On January 2, 2009 I was in surgery to get a LapBand installed. Since November when I began the serious business of preparing for surgery, I've lost a little over 40 pounds, and I'm still dropping 'em at the rate of 1-3 pounds a week.

While most people respond positively, a few seem to drop their jaws and act as if I'd just done something incredibly radical. Here's what another bandster wrote to explain his decision. His eloquence is incredible. (Note: I do not advocate the use of any drugs. I'm quoting him.)

For a simple and effective tutorial on how I came to this choice, follow these steps:

1. Smoke the strongest marijuana you can find until your eyes nearly fall out of your head. Get hold of that feeling of the most uncontrollable munchies and maintain that pose for fifteen years - sitting opposite a bowl of your favourite comfort food. Keep smoking and stay in front of that food. When you succumb, invite people to mock you for another fifteen years for being a failure.

2. Go into a hall of mirrors and look at the biggest, ugliest version of you that you can find and proclaim that you love the way you look in that mirror...do this for fifteen years, whilst praying that someone smashes the mirror. When they do, turn around and realise all mirrors now show the same thing.

3. Go shopping for clothes that do not exist in your size and ensure that the assistants look down their noses for you having the gall to ask if they stock anything appropriate. Do this every weekend. For fifteen years.

4. Strap a fully grown small adult woman to your chest and walk around for fifteen years like that - don't worry, she will just hang there and say nothing. She may prod you in the liver once in a while, give you diabetes and make people laugh and be disgusted at you - but that's not too much for you to take, is it? When, after trying to get her off repeatedly for fifteen years and you decide the time has come to ask somebody to help you unstrap her...watch out - I understand that people maybe judging you for being a failure or for taking the easy way out.

Number 4 is the biggie for me. I've actually had someone accuse me of taking the easy way out. I do not call being poked with needles, scanned by every device known to medical science, prodded in private regions normally labeled "Exit Only" and humiliated for a year by nutritionists, trainers, and my own doctor "The Easy Way Out." (That's torture.)

I do not call resigning myself to never tasting high-carb or starchy foods like rice, bread, potatoes, ice cream, doughnuts, or my own birthday cake for the rest of my life as "The Easy Way Out." (That's torture.)

Oh, and let's not forget the "pleasure" of knife-like pain in the stomach until you throw up everything in your stomach because you either ate the wrong thing or simply ate the right things too fast as The Easy Way Out. Don't worry, your hostess won't consider you absolutely disgusting and rude for throwing up the delicious food she spent hours preparing. This is "The Easy Way Out." (For extra credit points on self-torture, do this at outdoor events where there's no place to hide and throw up privately.)

I do not call having to pay top dollar for adult chewable vitamins or liquid medications and being monitored for the rest of my life by paranoid doctors who must dutifully watch for malnutrition for the rest of my life "The Easy Way Out." (That monitoring involves needles, and that's torture.)

I do not call having to ask for a take out box from the waitress at the same time I order food in a restaurant because I know I can't eat all of what comes with the food and give away my biscuits, hush puppies, fries or whatever to my dining companions or the dog when I get home "The Easy Way Out." (That's torture, thanks.)

All in all, the evil monk Torquemada, who invented many of the devices used in the Inquisition, couldn't come up with a more horrifying way to inflict suffering than the medical profession's device known as a LapBand, all in the name of Losing Weight for One's Health.

This is not The Easy Way Out. Let's call it what it was for me: The Last Act of a Desperate Woman.