Why Am I Doing This?

I was spending some time out with a friend and discussing a little bit of the information about the weight loss surgery. I told him that I found great irony in the fact that I was required to lose weight in order to have weight loss surgery.

I told him I had lost around seventy pounds since Christmas (my surgery is scheduled for the 7th...and this morning I was listed as losing 78.5 pounds).

He looked at me and said, "If you lost that much weight on your own, why are you getting the surgery?"

Cut day is in five days and counting. The ex-lax treatment begins the day before that. My last day of work is tomorrow. I have so many things coming up...so many things to try getting done, so many things that need to be done, and one of the scary parts is that I need all those things to stress about or else I'm focused on how scary this operation and the post-operative changes are. That question weighs on my mind every single day.

"If you lost that much weight on your own, why am I getting the surgery?"

"Am I making the right choice?"

"Is this what I should be doing?"

What I told him was, "I lost weight. I still seem to be losing weight. But you don't understand the hunger...if I'm not occupied, I'm hungry. You think you weigh more than you should, but I don't think you know what it's like to be able to eat a whole Pizza Hut pizza without stopping. Or eat a twelve-inch sub with a bag of Doritos and still have room for a shrink-wrapped brownie. I'm eating much less right now...but I still can eat all that. If I wasn't thinking about it, I could, and probably would, eat that much."

The reason I didn't do it now is that I was like some culinary equivalent to a sociopath; I'd watch others and have to consciously gauge my intake to others and make the choice that I'd had "enough." I rarely felt "full", and other things smelled appetizing, but I would have to stop inhaling food and just wait for the next meal time to get more. I have to pretend I am more normal than I am, as a sociopath emulates other people to appear empathetic.

There are many possible reasons for this. I say possible because I don't know if anyone truly has an answer to what is wrong with me. Maybe my stomach is stretched so large that it just doesn't register full. Maybe it's all in my head, it's a comfort item. Maybe it's my aspergian side asserting a need for routine and part of my routine is a habit of large meals. Maybe The Hacker's Diet (Google it) was on to something with the idea that I lack the mechanism to sense fullness and simply can keep eating constantly, or it's a combination of these and other reasons.

What I do know is that statistically speaking this surgery is my best chance of taking the gremlin of hunger and banishing it. There is a chance it'll come back, especially if most of my problem is psychological. Right now the constant reminder that I really want that heaping pile of spaghetti with giant homemade meatballs and three slices of rich, creamy cheese, despite sticking with a reduced calorie diet, is my reminder of why I'm doing this surgery and why I end up pushing the fears I have back down.

Why am I getting this surgery?

Because I'm hungry. And I don't want to be any more.