As I’ve talked to people about my experiences with bariatric surgery, I’ve heard the same thing over and over – “But you didn’t look that big.” “I never thought of you as fat.” “I just thought of you as my normal friend.” It reminds me of things I’ve heard about other parts of my identity: “You don’t look Mexican.” “I never think of you as introverted.” “I just thought of you as my normal friend.” But just because you don’t acknowledge one part of my identity doesn’t mean I don’t live it. And when denial of the problem is the response to the fact of my surgery, it assumes exactly the thing I was trying to avoid: that I did it because I wanted to improve my appearance.

I’ve talked about the numbers, but if you’ve read my earlier posts, you know that just numbers don’t tell the whole story. The experience of living in a body that carries a significant amount of excess weight is constant, it’s difficult, it’s humiliating.

The insults and limitations start at the beginning of every day. I get up and go to my dresser or my closet, and think “What can I wear that is both comfortable and doesn’t make me look like I’ve given up on myself?” Women’s bodies vary so much in shape, and as we gain and lose weight, that shape can change drastically, so it’s not a matter of finding a style of clothing that works for me, it’s a matter of finding a single brand, manufacturer, or single item of clothing that reliably fits and is comfortable (I am of the opinion that clothing that fits correctly and is comfortable is automatically flattering. Feel good, look good.)

Now I’m dressed, and I face the challenge of breakfast. What to have? I could skip breakfast, telling myself that I’m sparing myself the calories, but I also know that one of the down sides of having a suppressed metabolism is that if I miss a meal, it may spur my body to either eat more at my next meal to “make up” for it, or to hang onto calories it would otherwise burn easily because it’s in starvation mode. So, skipping breakfast not a great idea. Most days I’d have tea (I don’t drink coffee, but I drink so much tea…) and toast, perhaps some fruit.

Now comes the challenge of incorporating exercise into my day. I would sit at my desk for a few hours working on stuff, and the longer I sat at my desk, the more guilt I felt because I know I should be getting my steps in, should be taking breaks to walk around, etc. But because I work from home, if I got up from my desk, I had a choice between go out for a walk or getting actual chores done, and there are always chores that need to get done. This is a reality for a whole lot of people – the time it takes to work out is a luxury a lot of folks just can’t afford. Similarly, if I’m out running around on errands and it’s way past lunch time and my toast and tea have worn off, it’s easy to make choices that aren’t the healthiest. Have you ever tried eating a salad while driving down the freeway? It’s worse than texting. But you can eat chicken fingers with one hand.

Dinner time is the next hazard. I have a family, and nobody has the time to make three entirely different meals and then clean up afterward. It means that there was not just food that wasn’t the best for me (tons of pasta) but a whole lot of it (because my family can put away a whole lot of pasta). Worse, there were a lot of days that we didn’t even start thinking about dinner until it was too late in the day to begin cooking, so we opted for take out – pizza, Indian, Thai, Chinese. And I would eat not just because I was hungry at the end of the day, but to be social with my family and to ease the tension and stress of the day. It wasn’t uncommon to get up from the dinner table with some variation of “I’m stuffed!”

Bedtime. The final challenge. By bedtime, my lower back and left hip were so painful that I knew I won’t be able to sleep. I take ibuprofen, I take CBD, I put a couple of Salonpas patches on my lower back and hip. One doctor said I should stretch more because I hike without stretching first. Another just said to take more pain killers. Every doctor said “lose weight,” although not one would tell me how. It could be hard to fall asleep and impossible to stay asleep because the pain in my lower back was so great.

And then I would get up the next day and do it over again. And none of this includes doing things like shopping for clothes (I couldn’t walk into a mall, go into any clothing store, and count on finding clothes that would fit me), taking public transportation (being embarrassed because people would rather stand than sit next to me on the bus, and if they were standing and I was sitting, it wasn’t unusual to get hostile stares from them as though I were purposely denying them a seat), grocery shopping (the feeling of shame and self loathing as I put things like ice cream or potato chips in my cart, even if those things weren’t for me), or doing anything that required me to ask someone for help in person (it would be unusual to get the attention of a service worker, and when I did, they were almost never motivated to put much effort into helping me solve my problem).

So, while I appreciate that you didn’t see me as fat, I hope that you understand that I didn’t do this to change anyone’s opinion of me. That’s ultimately not my business. I did it because there were realities of my day-to-day existence that I didn’t want to live with anymore.