About Me

Here's a little bit of information about me. (Gee, how self-centered can I be?)

I'm 33 years old and reside in a fairly large city in the United States. I have a loving boyfriend (hereafter referred to as GeekBoy) and we've been together for 3+ years, living together for the past year. I work full-time in a fun and interesting job that could stand to pay better and I spend my spare time on strange creative projects and entrepreneurial pursuits. Generally, I'm a fairly happy and easy-going individual.

I've been overweight my entire life, but I don't feel like it's really held me back all that much. The biggest issue surrounding my weight has been my relationship with my parents who, despite both being mildly overweight themselves, are extremely fat-phobic. A combination of parental pressure paired with concerns about how my weight would affect my health led me to start down a road of dieting attempts and failures from a pretty young age. I'm another statistic: one of those all too prevalent (and still fat) "you name the diet/gimmick/desperate measure, I've tried it" people.

As I grew older and heavier, some of the health-related concerns I'd always been worried about started to emerge. First I was diagnosed as being pre-diabetic. Then I was diagnosed with hypertension. I kept fighting my weight as I knew that was the only thing that was going to get my health in check, but attempt after attempt failed.

Finally, I started researching the idea of weight loss surgery. It scared the bejeesus out of me, but I was intrigued by the idea that it really seemed to be working for a lot of other people who had tried everything else and failed - just like me. It was hard to accept that I might need to take such drastic measures to get things under control, but I did a lot of research and decided that if I was going to do it, the lap band was the type of weight loss surgery for me. Somewhere during that phase of coming to terms with the need for surgery, my employer announced that our health insurance would now cover lap band surgery. That was the push I needed to move forward with the process.