Patient – AW
Age 48 · Gastric sleeve patient · October 2021
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In 2020 I hit a wall with depression. I was 255kg, I had undiagnosed type 2 diabetes and I ended up in ICU in Wellington Hospital. I was very down and didn’t think there was any saving me. I was 44 years-old.
I was always a big kid and I had learnt to food medicate to make myself feel better. But when you get massive levels of depression, food medication gets out of control. Having an ice-cream to make yourself feel better is all right. But having a tub of ice-cream is a whole different story.
As a teenager I suffered sexual abuse at boarding school. I was holding this dark secret that was driving my mental illness, and that’s really what put me over the edge.
My weight yo-yoed up and down but moved slowly upwards until it got completely out of control in my early 40s. In those last few years I really leaned into the coping mechanism of hiding – staying in bed and isolating myself from people and feeling huge shame for everything.
When I was 35 I discovered I had a hormone imbalance brought on by my weight. My ‘hungry’ hormone would stay switched on even when my ‘full’ hormone kicked in. So I would get a mixed message from my body which added to the propensity to keep eating.
At the time bariatric surgery was the only thing known to fix that problem. So it had been on and off my radar, but I’d been too scared to do it. But being in Wellington Hospital really lit a fire within me. I had this massive fright and decided my only chance was to get bariatric surgery.
I also started getting psychiatric help around that time. I was really worried that if I didn’t address the eating problems underneath it, surgery wouldn’t be a long-term solution. I used to wonder how people went to the gym all the time. I just didn’t get it. But once I dealt with my mental health, all of a sudden it was do-able.
In the end, I had to lose 60kg before I was even healthy enough to have surgery. I took medical retirement from my job and moved home to my parents’ place, eating carrots and meal replacement shakes for months trying to shed 60kgs which ultimately I did. I withdrew money from my KiwiSaver on medical grounds to pay for the surgery. My logic was I could keep the money and die, or I could take the money out and actually have a retirement.
The initial thing that spurred me to start getting better was realising that my cat was going to starve to death without me. It sounds silly, but I loved my cat more than I loved myself. I will go a million miles for those I love and I’ve had to learn to be kinder to myself.
I was pretty frightened about the surgery. I was really worried that if I didn’t learn to handle my eating habits, that I might hurt myself. And that I was going to change the way I eat for the rest of my life. But it came to the point where the risk and danger was less than not doing it. As I pulled apart my mental health and started to learn to like myself, I started to want to invest in myself more as well.
I had surgery in October 2021 and today I weigh 115kgs. I went from not being able to walk to the mailbox to doing the Tongariro Crossing. I regularly do events like Round the Bays. When I got on an airplane for the first time afterwards, I was excited and happy that I fitted in the seat and didn’t need a seatbelt extender. But it wasn’t until I got right to the end of the flight that I suddenly realised that no-one had given me the look of ‘please don’t let the fat guy sit by me’. And I burst into tears.
I’ve been revisiting a whole lot of things I used to do as a kid like roller skating and I have a new partner; we’ve been together two years now. I previously couldn’t hold together a healthy relationship because my self-esteem was so low. Now I sing when I walk in the street, and I smile.
I love being able to go into a normal clothes shop and pull something off the rack. And I feel full for the first time in forever. I can eat and then not think about food again for hours.
I didn’t expect to hate the post-surgery food so much. It’s like adult baby food and it tastes quite good until that’s all you can eat for a month until your stomach has healed enough.
I also made the mistake of rushing to weigh myself too soon after surgery. I felt thinner but the scales said I hadn’t lost anything. That sent me down a negative spiral but when I weighed myself again in a month, a whole lot of weight was gone.
My advice would be don’t rush. Be really honest with yourself and plan how you’re going to manage your weaknesses and moments of stress. After the surgery, I had a real mental blip moment where I freaked out and I tried to eat straight away without even thinking about it. Thankfully, I didn’t harm myself. But it was trauma programming.
My eating habits weren’t habits. They’re actually programmed automatic responses. The word ‘habit’ makes it seem like something you can tackle. Programming is the stuff underneath that you never see. It’s way harder to change. So that was probably my biggest surprise and that’s the bit that always seems to trip bariatric patients up – where they haven’t acknowledged or done the work with their programming underneath. I still have to use a lot of techniques that I’ve learned through my psychologist just to balance things out. Like I said, I can have a single scoop of ice-cream in a cone. I can’t have a tub of ice-cream in the house.
My confidence, self-esteem and general health is so much better now. I believe in lifelong learning and I’m still on a path of learning, but I’m a completely different person to who I was.
I absolutely love helping people, and that’s why I’m currently studying to be a health coach. I really believe that in weight management there is not enough acknowledgement of mental health as a cornerstone issue.
I’m already helping assist with clients and my first client was a bariatric patient so it is coming full circle. My job is not to tell people what the solution should be. It’s about helping people find their way to their action and their truth so they can discover a solution that’s right for them.
Read more: Patient – MO · Patient – DR · ← All Stories