190; Our Separate Journeys

I started getting up before work to head to the gym and walk on the treadmill.  At times I'd do 30 minutes on the treadmill and 30 minutes on the weight machines.  My own circuits.  Pete would sometimes go, but more often than not, he'd stay sleeping. 

That's the thing about Pete and I.  Our journeys both include the gastric band, but the road taken for each of us is different.  It seems that when Pete is super motivated and going to the gym a lot, I lose my momentum.  But he always encourages and asks.  When I am super motivated, he lacks motivation and I always ask.  It's not judging or putting the other down at all.  It's simply asking if he wants to join me.

After a couple of months the Y had  Personal Training Blitz where you got some free sessions for buying a package.  So I bought one.  Then I got scared.  I was at the gym every Monday when it opened at 5am with my trainer Tanya.  I didn't know what a trainer was supposed to do, but she fit my schedule so it worked.  At the time I thought that she wasn't a very good trainer, but I was wrong.

Tanya and I would spend 60 minutes doing a different routine and then I'd repeat it later in the week.  She gave me cardio goals and helped track my eating.  At that time I was using SparkPeople to track my food on my iPhone.  But I was a slave to that phone and even that I lied to.  I'd eat 2 of something and call it 1 or I'd eat part of something and call it one serving when it was really 3 or 4.

By the end of the summer I'd had 2 rounds of training with Tanya and I felt stronger, but hadn't lost much more than 20 pounds.  Pete and I left in October and went on an anniversary trip to the Southeast US to see his family and see a bunch of cities.  I'm not going to lie, I planned where we stayed by the food I could find in restaurants on TripAdvisor and other websites.  Pete and I had our anniversary dinner at High Cotton in Charleston, SC.  It was the best meal I've every had.  I still dream of it.  At the end, we had staff take our photo.

Pete at 325 pounds and me at 260 pounds.

Pete says that he knew that this trip was his rock bottom.  He looks at this photo now and can't believe how big he was.  At that time, I thought I was cute.  I thought I wasn't 'that' big.  I thought I was doing ok and I wasn't ready for what Pete was.  Pete was ready to seek out the help of the gastric band.  And when we got back home he made an appointment to see a surgeon.

I have lots of older posts about Pete's journey. In fact, if you search the label: Mid Week With Pete, the posts I did about his journey should come up. My journey takes a back seat here, and that's ok. It's not to say that I wasn't working, it's just that Pete's journey is part of my journey.

Pete went to see a bariatric surgeon. Actually he had to go to a group meeting thing that explained the surgeries and then he could make an appointment. So I went with him. I remember sitting in the room in the over sized chairs and thinking that this really wasn't for me, because I didn't fill up the chair. Pete decided that he wanted to have a gastric band and made his appointment.

Part of the process for the center that we both went to is that you have to meet criteria for your insurance and their program. This means a BMI of over 40 and if under that, co-morbidity's to qualify you. Pete had a sleep study done to rule out apnea, he had a psychological evaluation, appointments with a nutritionist, had to show that he had tried to lose weight on his own...there are other things, but that's most of them.

In March of 2011 he had his surgery. At the time, he had already lost 60 pounds. Like I said before, when he makes his mind up to lose, he's a pro at it. But he wasn't working at the time and could spend 2 hours a day in the gym doing cardio and still be the house husband. And to be totally honest, this is when I started getting jealous of him and started wondering if it wasn't my path to do this too.

By June 2011 he was down almost 90 pounds. I was jealous as HELL. And I made myself a deal to work out and watch what I ate until 9/1/11. If I wasn't getting anywhere by then I'd seek out gastric banding myself. I spent that summer working out 4 days a week, running on weekends when we were at motorcycle camping events and sharing meals with Pete because he was restricted. I lost some, but not a whole lot.

In September I made my own appointment for the group meeting. I decided I wasn't going to do it on my own. I was tired of the continual struggle and didn't want to live like that for the rest of my life. I couldn't seem to get all the pieces together myself and I realized that I needed some help.

I remember sitting in that meeting and noticing that I was the smallest one there. Everyone stared at me. But I made my appointment with Pete's surgeon and got kind of excited to start a new chapter.