Yes, I belong to TOPS still!  I figure that for $3.00/week it is a good way to keep track of my weight and also to share my experience with other people who have weight issues.  I changed groups recently and really like my new group.  I feel like I fit in well and when I disclosed that I had WLS they were interested and accepting of me.  I shared this with them because my WL will be a constant over the next months and I do not wish to make the other persons in the group feel badly.

I share this “diet club” information with you because I don’t think that I have let you know what sort of diets that I have already tried and lost weight with, only to later put it back on.

When I was young I did the model diet, over and over again (about 2/3 of each year for 10 years).  This is essentially a diet where you eat 0 calories (lemon and salad) with two small servings of protein (chicken breast, boiled egg or tuna) every week day then go off it on the weekends and eat whatever you wish to. On this diet – I lost weight over an over again!  I toyed with anorexia and binged crazy when the willpower to eat 0 calories was drained from me.

I used the cabbage diet – which is a nearly 0 cal soup diet, for a couple of years and does it make you fart! During this time I became a vegetarian.  Excepting milk and milk products I took no animal byproducts at all, and the interesting side effect was that I began to be able to smell both grass and cow in all the dairy.  Pretty weird eh?

I tried Atkins but I have not ever been a big meat eater so this was only once for about a half a year.  I had to force myself to face meals during this diet, that I did with my mom who loved to eat meat.

I did Dean Ornish for a year, this was not bad for me – but a lot of prep is needed, similar to vegetarianism.  The nice thing about using the Dean Ornish diet is that your house stays so much cleaner, because you do not use any oils to cook with.

I also stayed on Herbal Magic for one year – cost me thousands of dollars and I lost about 20 pounds which I immediately piled right back on the moment – the VERY moment – that I gave it up!  This was the least successful and most expensive diet program that I ever used.

Then I tried Weight Watchers a few times for about three years in total.  This is a diet that works, the problem is who wants to be on a diet for the rest of their life? I always felt very deprived on this diet.  They day you can eat anything but hell… my problem is that I never feel full and this just is not comfortable.

I also did a year long specialty program at the Queen’s University Nutrition and Exercise Pilot Program which was the best program by far, but again deprivation!

TOPS which I do now and have done for about a year is a good program, if you land a good group.  They basically want you to eat fewer calories and move your booty – but this said it is a diet, so for me this is equal to being deprived.  But I like the people, the weekly meeting/routine and it is not expensive at all so I will stay there until I feel ready to leave.

So with TOPS the total number of years is the above equals about 16 but does not include the two years in there where I fanatically exercised, took benny’s and over the counter WL pills (do I really want to tell you that???) and just did not eat – so all together this is 18 years of dieting all together.  I started my first diet at 16 years of age almost exactly on my birthday.  

I think that one is an adult at 18 years of age and I am now 42 so this means that I have had 24 years as an adult and I spent 18 years of those on a diet!  What a waste of my life!  Particularly sad is that the 8 years that I was not on a diet I was still obsessing about food… but binge eating instead of dieting.  In those 8 years I gained the 100 pounds over and over again.  Now I wish my husband was home because he could make me a little math symbol so you could see what that looks like.  Since I don’t do math I will just say it was not an easy on easy off situation for me!  That is 3/4 of my adult life on a diet and 1/4 on a binge.  

 

When I started thinking about this a while ago after hearing about WLS – I knew I had to have the surgery done!

I am so happy that I don’t have to live with the eating madness anymore!  So far I have had 2 months of freedom from food. You know, I am not on a diet, I am not binge eating, I am simply letting the band do its job; it is working because at TOPS tonight I found that I had lost one more pound!  

The super fascinating and unexpected outcome is that the weight is not really so much of an issue for me anymore!  It worries me very little because I have found that the freedom from food has released me from obsessing about what I weigh.