Bariatric Struggles

This week on the podcast we are talking about eating bariatric-friendly on a budget. This is a topic near and dear to my heart. As I mentioned in a previous blog, I had bariatric surgery a little over three years ago and it hasn’t been easy because while I was going through surgery, I was also struggling mentally and financially.

That doesn’t seem like great timing to have a complicated surgery, I know, but the surgery was years in the making. In 2014, I noticed that something wasn’t right with my belly button, it was sticking out. I didn’t normally have a belly button that stuck out. After a trip to the doctor, I learned I had an umbilical hernia that had burst through my abdominal muscles. Because of my weight at the time (around 360 lbs.), the doctor told me the surgery was unsafe, and he suggested that I have weight loss surgery to lose weight quickly. As a teacher, weight loss surgery is covered (to a point) by my insurance if it is a medical emergency. So, I began the long process with my insurance. 

While waiting for my insurance, my hernia decided it could not wait, and it burst on me in the middle of class one day. One minute I was teaching and the next I was on the floor – it happened that quickly. I was rushed to the local hospital and had emergency surgery. So, I put off the process of weight loss surgery; aside from being overweight, I was healthy. Over the next few years, I maintained my weight until the summer of 2017 when two major things happened. First, I broke my foot and ended up in a wheelchair, and second, my father died.

After my dad’s death, my depression set in and the two years that followed were some of the hardest of my life. I retreated from everyone I loved and began deliberately working long hours so that I wouldn’t be home. I started secretly binge eating again to cope with my pain in silence. I was confined to my wheelchair for months because my foot was not healing properly due to a vitamin D deficiency. Due to my binge eating and lack of activity, I started gaining weight. At the same time, my husband was struggling to find and keep work, which added to my stress.

Then, in the fall of 2018, tragedy struck again with my mom’s death.  Both of my parents died of weight-related illnesses with the underlying cause of those illnesses being diabetes. I sat there numbly as family member after family member told me that I needed to take care of myself. Then one day my clothes didn’t fit anymore, my hip would pop out when I tried to put on pants, walking short distances made me way too tired and hurt my still-tender foot, and I realized that they were right.  Before my mom died, she had been advocating that I start seeing a doctor to restart the process of bariatric surgery. I was diagnosed with high blood pressure and pre-diabetes right before her death. My weight clocked in at over 400 lbs. I needed to change. So, I began the process, again.

When preparing for bariatric surgery, patients typically go through a psychological evaluation. My psychologist at the time questioned whether I was ready for surgery given all that I had been through. In all honesty, I probably wasn’t. My life, at the time, seemed in shambles. Both of my parents had died, my husband was struggling to find/keep work, finances were low, and I was also having problems of my own at my job. But I was determined. Maybe I needed something I could control in my life. Maybe I thought losing weight would solve all my problems. Whatever the reason, I soldiered on.

Many people think you save money on food after bariatric surgery, which is not the case. My doctor put me on a strict pre-op diet three weeks before surgery. Not only did I have to drink a certain amount of water per day, but I also had to drink a certain amount of protein per day. There are many different types of weight-loss protein on the market. You can either buy protein powder or already-made shakes. Either way, they are not cheap. For me, it was also hard to find a protein that I liked the taste of. Before surgery, I settled on a fair-priced protein powder called Syntrax Matrix and a liquid protein called Premier. I also stocked up on plenty of clear liquids for my post-op diet. When my surgery date came in April of 2019, I was ready to make that major change in my life. Or was I?

Evolution of my face post-surgery

As I mentioned before, I’m a binge eater. Food is my comfort. When things go wrong, I turn to food to cope. I was not prepared for the psychological ramifications of not being able to eat when I wanted to. For a while after surgery, I couldn’t even drink water. How would I ever get enough water and protein in my body? It’s a struggle. A daily struggle to this day. I remember back on those early days after surgery curled up in a ball, sobbing, “I just want to EAT.” I was so HUNGRY and then I wasn’t, bariatric surgery is weird like that.

When I finally could eat, I didn’t want to anymore. The surgery worked too well. However, as a binge eater, I had a hard time knowing when to stop and when I was too full, and I still struggle with that. I was right; my whole life changed. I lost 190 lbs., five clothing sizes, and the ability to eat most food for the longest time. Three years later, I still struggle with certain foods. Now, I must closely check what I eat and how much of it I eat.

412 lbs. versus 222 lbs.

In another previous blog, I wrote about grocery shopping on a budget. Today, I remain budget-friendly. I try to maintain a low-carb, high-protein diet as well as not eat over a certain number of calories. Buying in bulk and portioning out my meals in advance as well as limiting eating out keep me budget-friendly. 

All in all, I’m glad I had the surgery. My eating habits may have changed but I don’t have near as many health problems as I did before, I can walk long distances without having to sit and rest, and it’s a lot easier for me to find and buy clothes. Psychologically, I’m in a better place, and the need to binge eat gets less and less. Surgery is not for everyone, and not everyone has had the successes I’ve had with it. I’m thankful that I’m able to wake up every day and live my life how I want it.

Size 14/16 versus Size 30/32

I want to hear from our readers. Have you contemplated weight-loss surgery or have had weight-loss surgery? What were your successes and failures before and after surgery? Let’s continue the conversation here or on our Facebook group: MMC Chat.

How We Grieve and Why It's Different for Everyone

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and earlier this week, Amber opened a discussion on grief during the holidays. In our podcast, I shared a few things my family did to lessen the sadness of missing a loved-one during important family holidays, while Christen talked about working through a holiday, and Amber shared her personal experience with holiday grief on the blog. Dealing with grief is such an important topic that I wanted to dig a little deeper -- I want to continue the conversation about how people grieve and how we can help each other through the tough times.

Let us start by talking about what grief is, and how we experience it. Many people think that grief and mourning are the same thing, but they are not. Mourning is the outward actions that we take when we have a loss; grief is the internal thoughts and feelings we experience. Likewise, people often mistakenly attribute Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s 5 Stages of Death and Dying to the stages of grief, but in fact, her research was about people dealing with their own deaths. According to psychologist and author Dr. J. William Worden, there really are no “stages” of grief because grief is not linear. His model is a set of “tasks” that a grieving person works through to find the way back to some level of function and normalcy. These tasks can occur in any order, or even concurrently. Sometimes, in the process of grieving, a person will go back to one or more tasks repeatedly. The tasks are:

The most important factor in this process is time, and there is no specific timeline for grief. Every person’s response to it is different and quite subjective. But the idea is to work our way back to a level of function as we move forward. Charles Jacob, a psychologist and teacher at Sacred Heart University, says, “Eventually, we just start trending back to normal.” He says that the real key is to get through the pain and then to derive meaning from all of it that “doesn’t leave us feeling completely hopeless.”

One of the best things, besides time, to help with grief is to share it. Experts agree that talking with friends and family, and telling stories about our loved ones is beneficial. It can even be helpful to talk to strangers, thus the growth of online grief support groups and the trend of pop-up “grief cafes,” where participants join a group of strangers over coffee, cake, and, of course, lots of talk about death.

WebMD’s “19 tips for coping with holiday stress and depression” includes tips like:

• Make realistic expectations for the holiday season.
• If you are lonely, try volunteering some time to help others.
• Limit your drinking, since excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.
• Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.
• Spend time with supportive and caring people or contact a long-lost friend or relative and spread some holiday cheer.

One group that has an especially difficult time with death and grieving is children. Kids of different ages deal with grief differently, and it is often done in spurts because their brains simply cannot tolerate more. Moreover, children will continue to grieve in different ways as they age and mature, continuing into their 20’s when their brains are fully developed. Mila Ruiz Tecala, LICSW, Center of Loss and Grief in Washington, D. C., tells us that when “children are not helped to grieve at every stage of their development, they experience cumulative losses.” Unresolved grief has been shown to create a higher risk of depression, unemployment, smoking, over-eating, lack of appetite, and risky behavior, and has links to immune disorders, hypertension, cardiac events, and cancer.

No matter the age of the child, the experts agree that it is important to make sure they know that it is acceptable to show emotions and talk about the person who died, and that it is okay to be sad.

To help children during the holidays:

If you have more tips on dealing with grief, we’d love to hear about it. Please join us as we continue this conversation in the Facebook group.

Thanks for sharing!

For more information about grief cafes, please visit the following websites:

• https://deathcafe.com
• https://www.thegoodgrieftrust.org/need-know-info/from-us-to-you/pop-up-good-grief-cafes/
• https://www.thegoodgrieftrust.org

Four Christmases

Hey this is Amber Garvin with my first official blog post and I’m here to talk about grief during the holidays. The subject is hard for me because I don’t have a family in a traditional sense anymore. Both of my parents have recently passed away, and I am newly divorced. So, in a sense,

“Grief is like the ocean; it comes on waves ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can do is learn to swim.” – Vicki Harrison.

The holidays are coming, and it is not my favorite time of the year. In the past, I looked forward to November and December. Not just because I am a teacher and I get some much-needed time off work but also because I got to spend time with my family. I come from a very traditional family. On Thanksgiving, we had turkey and dressing at my Maw Maw’s house sitting around my great grandmother’s table eating family style. My family always had at least four kinds of pie on Thanksgiving as well. After dinner, we would play board games with football playing in the background. My mom, cousin, and I also have November birthdays, so we usually celebrated our birthdays on Thanksgiving as well.

Christmas was a big deal in my family also. Every year, we picked out a real Christmas tree from the local tree farm and we decorated it together as a family. I’m an only child so it was just my mom, dad, and me. Every year my mom and I also made Christmas cookies and candy together to wrap and deliver to extended family and friends. Christmas was my mom’s absolute favorite time of the year, and she went out of her way to make it special for everyone throughout the years. Her favorite thing to do (and she did this well into my adult life) was play the role of Santa for my dad, Maw Maw, and me. In the early hours of Christmas morning, she would fill the family stockings with various knickknacks and would place bigger presents under the Christmas tree. I remember the Christmas after I became a teacher, “Santa” surprised me with office supplies for my classroom. Around noon on Christmas Day, my whole family would gather at my Maw Maw’s house, and we would have a family gift exchange. These gifts were usually handmade, or food related of some kind. Food gifts were also a huge tradition in my family. Every year, my mom was always the one to pass out the gifts as well. The holidays were special.

My dad died in 2017 and in 2018 my mom died just a little over a year later. The Christmas after my mom died, I obsessively tried to fill her shoes as “Santa.” I went over the top with gifts and baking. In my grief, I tried to make it seem like there weren’t two giant holes in the holiday. In the year after my mom’s death, my ex-husband and I fell out with the rest of my family due to grief and differences of opinion. In 2019, I had decided to forgo the holidays and my then-husband, and I took my Maw Maw to a casual diner for a Christmas lunch. We didn’t exchange presents at all that year.

The last picture taken with both of my parents: Christmas of 2016

In 2020, amid the pandemic, I had a lot of time for clarity and self-reflection. I was finally able to deal with my grief over the loss of my parents. My ex-husband and I had also separated right before the holidays as well. 2020, was looking to be another year of holiday avoidance. At the same time, I didn’t want to avoid them. I was ready to take my grief head on and channel it into something more positive. The holidays are overwhelming as it is but adding grief to the mix can make them unbearable for most. In November of 2020, I began to make amends and my extended family was happy to welcome me back into the fold. Once I became open to trying new things, I realized that I wasn’t as alone as I thought.So, in 2020, I started new traditions with four Christmases. 

The key to coping with grief is to not completely abandon your old traditions. Last year, I decided to mix old traditions with new traditions to see where I would end up. The week before Christmas, I made around 200 Christmas cookies to wrap for family and friends, then on Christmas Eve, I began a three-day long trek across Texas to get my holiday groove back. 

I started in Carrollton with my Modern Musings family. Cindy and Christen have been inviting me to their family Christmas for years but this year I completely immersed myself into their traditions of gingerbread house building (my first one ever), Christmas caroling, and Christmas Eve pajamas. It was like we had been having Christmas together for years and I was grateful for the love that my Modern Musings family has shown me. Next, I went to my hometown of Vernon and spent Christmas morning with my childhood friend Stacy and her family. For dinner, I went to my cousin Stephanie’s house. I had not seen her and her family much after my mom’s death. Some of my extended family I was seeing for the first time in two years, but it was like I had never broken tradition. My family welcomed me back with open arms and open hearts. We had dinner, played board games, and exchanged food gifts. My cousin Steven even showed the family his new hobby of axe throwing, which may just become a new family get together tradition. Finally, I was invited to my extended cousin Lavonna’s house the day after Christmas for a family get-together that I have never attended. 

I went through many stages of grief in the years after my parents died and my marriage fell apart. For a long time, I was scared of new traditions and opted to avoid the holidays altogether. I realized that aside from hurting myself in avoiding the holidays, I was also hurting the extended family and friends that wanted to see me and experience their traditions with me. My takeaway is that it’s okay to start new traditions after tragedy. It’s okay to keep old traditions. It’s okay to combine traditions to whatever works for you. For the longest time I avoided the people that loved me because I was grieving, and I was being unfair to myself. I’m not sure what I will do this year for the holidays, but I take comfort in the fact that so many people have been there for me in the past year, and it makes me feel less alone and more hopeful for the future.

The holidays are hard when you’ve lost loved ones, but you are not alone. What are your favorite holiday traditions? Have you experienced the same things that I have? I want to know. Comment below or e-mail me at info@modernmusings.net.