About the food...

[Guest guest]

It has been 2 years and 3 months since I had a proximal RNY. I am

down 208 lbs with about 42 to go. I have lost 53 lbs in the past 6

months and feel very confident that I will lose the last 42 and get

to my goal. I am exercising and eating like a normal person for the

first time ever in my life. I don't even worry about over eating and

have some sort of strange iron clad grip on it. A lot of this has

been possible because I have worked with a gifted psychologist who is

slowly helping me understand that my love affair with food was never

really about the food at all. It was about comfort, building a wall,

boredom, loneliness, childhood trauma, etc.

Here is my question... The past year has probably been the most

mentally painful period of my life. I wanted so desperately (or

thought I did) to lose weight, to be thin and to be perceived as

normal and attractive. Although I still need to get this last bit of

weight off, I have been told by my psychologist that I do look normal

and I am no longer the 400 lb fat person that I was for so many

years. Why then is this such a painful time? Is there anyone else

out there that has experienced this? I have cried more tears this

past year than at any other time in my life. I should be

ecstatically happy but am sad a great deal of the time. I should

caveat this by saying I have lived with genetic depression all of my

life but am controlling it through medicine. Even so, I was never

ever this sad in the 20 years that I was overweight. You would think

though that this would be a wonderful time in my life? I sometimes

feel that it was almost easier to be 400 lbs and insulated from the

world. I feel like many days that I lost my shield and my coping

mechanism and am so painfully vulnerable its agonizing. Has anyone

else felt like this? How did you overcome it?

Looking for answers....

R in Nashville