Tomorrow is surgery day.
Fortunately for me, given my varying mood swings and changes of mind regarding this procedure (which seem to happen on increasingly shorter cycles as the date approaches) the NY Times published a story yesterday on weight loss that is incredibly apropos and has helped calm my second-guessing. Apparently, observing a number of people who lost a bunch of weight via diet and exercise (the winners of The Biggest Loser) over a few years, they made some interesting discoveries. tl;dr - although the study isn't fully scientific (no controls, low sample) they discovered that in all cases, these people's bodies reacted to their losing large amounts of weight via diet and exercise by dramatically lowering their metabolic rate and dramatically raising the chemical hunger levels in their bodies. In other words, their bodies frantically tried to get them to return to their original weight. The first part was bad enough - it meant that their 'maintenance level' of caloric intake after losing weight dropped, in some cases by 500-800 calories per day! So even after losing weight, you'd expect your metabolism to be up from all the exercise but nope, other way around! You can now eat 500-800 calories fewer per day before your body starts storing food as fat. The second bit deals with the levels of various hormones in the body, including ghrelin - low levels of hormone are correlated with subjective hunger. In all cases, the subjects' bodies showed dramatically lower levels of these hormones - indicating that they were suffering from constant hunger, much stronger hunger than before and much stronger than normal human replacement hunger - and all the time.
So yeah, your body totally fucks you after you lose weight via diet and exercise. The only way to keep weight off by doing that, for most people, seems to be to permanently lower your intake below your prior eating levels, deal with constant hunger, and continue exercising at the same rate required to lose the weight in the first place. Not conducive to long-term success.
I feel better about the surgery.
At work for my last day pre-knife, to close out stuff and hand it off to my team as necessary. I expect to be back to work in a week, but just in case.
Weight: 311.1 (I'm down basically 19 lbs in two weeks, hory sheet).
Sadly, my diet will be even more restricted after surgery. It's gonna be months of worse before it gets any better. :-/
Edit - later in the day
Again, many most humble thanks to all of you who have wished me well as I head into this. You're all good people, and this is why I continue to hang around this slightly threadbare internet clubhouse, despite the draughts and the lack of decent coffee and the bot mumbling to itself.
Yeah. I have a vision. It is a vision of a leaner, hipster-er version of myself. Black turtleneck. Hipster fashion sellout shoulder rig. Hipster gat. Fedora. Motorcycle. Yeah.