The 500 Pound Voice

Two friends told me about this Oprah repeat the other day and I managed to catch it...

Stacey Halprin lost over 300 pounds with the help of gastric bypass surgery. The smart thing about her is she recognized even before she had it that it wasn't a cure-all for her disease, the obesity that was killing her---body and soul. She knew it could help, give her a leg up on her disease, but to really start to recover, she had to reinvent her relationship with food. Many who have the surgery find out that their disease can come back --- the part of the stomach left has the ability to stretch, some people become bulimic. The disease is insidious.

The word "addiction" came up more than once in the interview. I strongly empathized with what she said about her life now:

"It's a hard adjustment. People think that's going to be all great; it's not all great. It's a life to get used to, it's a new person. I never thought there could be anything harder than losing weight, but there is. And that is getting rid of that 500-pound voice in your head all the time."

I still feel like a 300 pound woman in this 145 pound body. It's as if I'm squeezed into some high tech ultra-girdle... I imagine this is part of my disorder, this feeling of being an alien, someone who isn't quite a full citizen, liable to be ejected if I goof up, I don't know if I'm ever going to get rid of my 300-pound voice. I don't think I want to totally disavow it, because I want to become accepting of all of me. I can't blot out that part of my life like I tried to blot out every emotion with food. I believe that voice came out of my genes and my experiences.

I was a very buoyant swimmer when I was heavy. All that fat helped me be an excellent floater. I think it made me possible to survive the turbulent waters of my life too, anesthetize myself to my father's rages and drinking, my mother's depression and paranoia.

They died in very sad circumstances, exactly 6 months apart, Mom from lung cancer, Dad finally relieved from his deepening dementia by a stroke. After caring for them as best I could, I was left with my sad memories and my coping techniques run amok. A few months later, my own physical health crashed and I was diagnosed with hypertension and adult onset diabetes. I lost a significant amount of weight but it wasn't until I had gained almost all of it back again that I was given a gentle shove into OA by a supportive therapist. Then I started to really look at what my 300 pound voice was saying.