My secret is out!

But first, happy Christmas! I hope you are all having an enjoyable and peaceful time. I’m spending Christmas with my Dad and the rest of the family. We’re having a good time. We had a lovely Christmas dinner today and are currently sitting around chatting. Yesterday was interesting….

Shortly after arriving, Dad brought up the subject of what I was going to eat for Christmas dinner – I had mentioned a week or two ago that I was ‘on a diet’ – in an effort to ensure that he didn’t go out and buy loads of extra food for me! His partner explained how she had been on a diet herself and lost 18 lbs, and then we got into a detailed conversation about dieting. Then the questions flew – what kind of diet was I on, how many calories a day could I have, what types of food was I allowed to eat, how much had I lost, what weight was I to start with, what made me decide to go on a diet, what is my target weight….and on and on! Some of the questions got a bit awkward – like “do you meet your weight loss people once a week?” – and my evasive answers started to arouse some suspicion! I then got talking about the fact that coming to the end of a period of deep depression had been the trigger for me to start ‘dieting’ – and at that point, I thought ‘Oh to hell with it – I’ve gone so far down the line of telling them private stuff I might as well tell them the complete story’. So I did.

I just came out with it and said I’d decided that a radical approach to weight loss was necessary, and I’d decided to go for surgery. At that point, Dad’s partner mouthed ‘band’ just as I said it out loud. She knew quite a bit about it already but I had to explain quite a lot of the details to Dad as he hadn’t heard of it before. I told them how I came to find out about Healthier Weight, I told them about the surgery itself (though my Dad has had so many operations he wasn’t very impressed with my scar!!), and I told them about the long term outlook, my new eating habits etc. They took it all in their stride and said they wouldn’t say anything to the rest of my family. They were remarkably calm and comfortable with the whole thing – I was quite surprised. They seemed to be very understanding as well and revealed the fact that they had been quite concerned about my weight for some time. In fact, my Dad said in his own inimitable way that he didn’t want to outlive any of his four children, but that if he did, I was “at the top of his list…”. So, all in all, I think they were actually quite pleased that I was doing something, anything, about my weight.

So there you go, there are now four people who know me who also know my secret.