Woohoo for giveaways

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GGGOOOAAALLLLL!

I cannot believe it. It has been 6 1/2 months since my surgery and I have lost all the weight I wanted to. Every last stinkin ounce. 90.0 lbs to be exact. I stepped on the scale yesterday morning and imagine my surprise to see that I now weighed in at 150.8 lbs. The best part? No one believes I weigh that much ;) Gotta love having a body that can hide the weight haha!

So now here I am, weighing what I haven't weighed in 10 years. Yes seriously, I weigh right around what I did when I got married nearly 10 years ago. There was a short time period when I did get close to this weight due to some serious medical issues after the birth of our twins but that was short lived.

I can fit into my wedding dress. I can wear two juniors skirts I had from when I was a teenager. My rings are too big. Everything is too big! YAY!

Now that I have hit my goal I am beyond thrilled. I never cared too much about my weight, it was more wanting to fit into a size 8, which I do. Now I might just go for a size 6 ;)

Where were you?

10 years have passed since his horrible day...

I remember where I was, do you?

I didn't have children yet. I wasn't even married. I didn't even know my husband yet. I had never sent someone off to war. I was just a teenager who had just graduated high school a few months prior.

I had gone to my best friends house the night before. We stayed up late and planned to sleep in late. For some reason we both woke up. Her dad was in the kitchen and told us to turn on the tv. She turned it on, I thought it was a movie.

There is no way this was reality. Stuff like that doesn't happen in the USA. It. Just. Cant. Be. Real.

She changed the channel, there it was again. And again. And again.

We spent the morning watching the news until it was time for me to go. We watched it all happen. Over. And over. And over again.

I had never felt so scared, how could this happen? Who did this? Why did they do this? Are they targeting where we were too? Would I be safe to drive home? So many thoughts ran through my head that day.

I was terrified to drive home, scared to be on the fwy. Scared someone was going to crash a plane into somewhere I was going to be.

So many lives lost. So many families torn apart and left devastated and forced to rebuild a new life. So many heros risked their lives and many lost their lives trying to help the others get out.

And now here we are 10 years later. I have since met my husband, married my husband, sent him off to war twice, had 4 children, buried 1 of them, dealt with the PTSD after affects of war and countless other life experiences. And now little by little watch as our own country falls apart. Praying for no more terrorists attacks but knowing there are people who hate us. People who cannot stand freedom. People who cannot stand the one true and living God. It's an evil world. 10 years ago today, our eyes were truly opened to the evils of this world. So many lives changed forever.

Yet we have a chance now to look and see God's hand in this, He has carried us through this terror, He promises an eternal life in Heaven if we just trust in Jesus Christ. We don't need to be scared anymore. We have eternal life on our side. Praise the Lord for that!

I know I will never forget September 11th, 2001....

Restriction and 6 months

One of the best parts of the sleeve is restriction.

One of the worst parts of the sleeve is restriction.

The good part is that it forces you to limit what you eat. Let me tell you from personal experience, if you eat too much, even one tiny little bite over where you know you should stop, you risk feeling pretty crummy. You end up feeling like you ate a 10 course meal after 1/4 cup of food. You learn quickly where to stop yet temptation rises from time to time and you just HAVE to have 1 more bite and you pay for it.

Restriction from stress is the most annoying part though. Amazing how our bodies react to stress, it reacts in ways you never imagined. Like in your stomach tensing up and not being able to eat more than a few bites. This is where I am at right now. And it is not fun. To give you an idea of stress restriction today I started off the day with half a string cheese. Normally I can eat a whole one. For lunch I had 2 tortilla chips with a little salsa and about 1 tablespoon of shredded chicken in an enchilada dish at Church. For dinner I ate 2 tortilla chips and 1/4 of a chicken croissant. I just ate another 1/4 of the croissant. These are the small ones too so you can picture how little it really was. There was no room for any other snacks, nothing because my sleeve has tightened up so drastically. What a pain!

So after all that complaining, I will say I am still glad I had the surgery. It has been 6 months since I went under the knife and sit only 5 lbs from goal and I am not even concerned with losing that last 5 lbs. Apparently in person I look much smaller than I am, MUCH smaller. The latest comment was between 115-125 lbs! Craziness! And this came from different people at different times. I weigh 155 lbs right now. Granted I always was able to hide my weight well when I was around the weight I am now. I fit my wedding dress. I fit clothes I wore in high school. It is crazy! I am officially in the size goal I wanted to hit. So I am fine where I am, I don't care if that stupid BMI scale still lists me as overweight, whatever.

I am down a total of 85 lbs and who knows how many inches, I will take those again sometime this week. I go in soon for my 6 month check up and I am pretty certain this time my labs will be off. I am guessing I am anemic but that is nothing new, I spent most my life anemic. I see a different surgeon since my is deployed and I am so curious to see what this surgeon will say regarding my weight. I will also begin the fight for reconstructive surgery. After 3 c-sections in 2 1/2 years and having carried twins, my stomach is destroyed and only surgery will fix it at this point.

All that late night rambling just to say I still love my sleeve, even when the restriction hits hard. The results have been well worth it.

"I don't remember that"

Twice tonight I heard the words "I don't remember that" And this was after showing my before pictures. It's amazing how quickly we can forget just what a person we see all the time looked like. I know for me, I find myself forgetting just how far I have come in 5 1/2 months. I am now down 81 lbs. I am 9 lbs from my goal. So stinkin close! Yet at times I feel like I am still just a fat cow. At other times I feel like I have always been as "skinny" as I am now.

Lately there have been so many compliments, this is hard for me to take. I do not like receiving so much attention but at the same time it serves as a good reminder of how much I have changed. I am the same opinionated and sarcastic person I have always been but I don't hide so much from other people I do not know anymore. I am not ashamed of how I look, of course I still struggle with the new image I see in the mirror and constantly wonder if what I see is real but that is normal, especially this early out. So many people comment not only on how I look but how I carry myself, I stand a little taller, I have grown out of feeling the need to dress in frumpy fat clothes, I dress my age, I experiment with styles now instead of looking for the biggest thing I can find to cover my lard up. I put a little more effort into how I look including hair and makeup. My husband loves it. Most men don't encourage shopping but mine, well, lets just say he has restocked my side of the closet ha!

People are starting to see the real me again, the me that was hidden for so many years after struggling to get a handle on my weight. I have even started taking pictures again when I have hidden from the cameras for so long.

And now I am at a point where I am trying to fix the years of damage done to my body, it will take plastic surgery to fix my stomach, there is no question there. I have been on the wait list for 2 years anyways to fix that, long before I even considered WLS. After 3 c-sections in 2 1/2 years, the last of which being twins, there is no hope in my stomach naturally going back to what it ought to be. Just tonight I couldn't help but laugh at the reaction of several ladies who had no idea just how much is left of my stomach, it hides well under clothes but once you grab a handful, it is shocking. Needless to say their jaws dropped when they saw just how much was hiding ;)

So here I am in the home stretch, ready to hit my goal!

Would ya hurry up already?!

I am an impatient person.

Extremely impatient.

Right now I am far too impatient.

I am ready to hit my goal. I know, I know. Just quite whining, right? Yes I should just be happy that I have lost 74 lbs and counting yet that impatient part of me is ready to just hit goal. I'm ready to replace all my clothes and get clothes that will fit more than a few weeks to a month. Instead I continue to waste money buying these clothes that just won't last. I should be glad they won't last but wasting money drives me crazy. I have no choice but to buy them, I am out of my "skinny clothes" (which were not really skinny clothes lol), hubby does not appreciate when my clothes are falling off lol.

I have had no luck lately at the thrift shops, and trust me I have hit them all. Apparently when you are skinnier you are supposed to wear jeans that allow other's to see your fat gut hanging over them or see more than they should from behind. Everything is so low cut.

Over the weekend hubby insisted we go shopping, I did get some awesome deals but it took a lot of shopping. You see, clothing manufacturers must think we are all either teenagers or 90 years old. I am neither. I like to dress conservatively, leaving a little something to the imagination yet still look cute. It seems these manufacturers don't believe in conservative dress anymore.

At any rate, after hours of shopping over 2 days I walked away with a pair of heels, a pair of DCs (super cute black, pink and white shoes!), 2 pairs of jeans, 5 shirts, 2 shrugs, 1 pj shirt, 3 pj shorts, 4 tank tops to layer with, and a bunch of undergarments. Thankfully the only things that won't last are the pants and I got those on sale.

I am still amazed I can fit into a size 12 jean. Sounds big to some but man alive! It has been years since I fit into a size 12. I held them up and told my husband there was no way they would fit. And then they fit. HA! Just further proof that it takes a LONG time for the mind to catch up the changes.

72 lbs in 4 1/2 months at OneTrueMedia.com

So this took a lot of talking myself into it. This is one of those things that a person wants to share to show how far they have really come yet they fear sharing just how bad it really was. It's embarrassing to look back at these pictures but it's amazing to know I will not go back there again. I was fat, I felt gross, I looked awful, I was flat out miserable in my body.

Now don't get me wrong, I am still not happy with my body but I am not nearly as embarrassed as I was all those months ago. Making this video forced me to look back and see just how far I really have come. It's easy to let your mind play tricks on you and make you think you are still that same old fat girl even when you see the scale and the measuring tape move so drastically. But when you look at the pictures, you are forced to see what you looked like and what you now look like.

So after much talking to myself and my husband pushing me to show it, I will share my 4 1/2 month post-VSG results video. Eventually I will get around to taking more body shots but I still tend to hide from the camera and I'm not exactly sure where my camera charger is anyways ;) Oh and I should point out I am now down 74 lbs ;) I made the video last week. 16 more to go!

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com