My life as an onion

I see my life as represented by the onion, a vegetable which starts small and grows many layers. The larger the onion, the more layers there are. As a morbidly obese person, I started off somewhere being The Ideal Weight. In my case I was a young adult weighing 130lbs.

As I carried on with life, it's ups and downs, successes and failures, happiness and sadness as for everybody else in the world, I grew layers around myself against having to "feel" any kind of unpleasantness (and again, everybody in the world has unpleasantness, it's just everybody handles it in a different way.)

In my case I turned to food but I wasn't aware of doing this when I began to get further and further  away from my ideal weight. Cheap empty calories were easy to get when I went through one of my many "poor" phases of my life. Macaroni and cheese, bread, day-old donuts, cookies etc were easy to come by. And then I had Amanda and gained over 70lbs but that wasn't her fault. Many women have children and get themselves right back on track but I didn't.

That's just a couple of examples and I am sure you can fill in your own blanks if you are overweight. But as my life went on, I stuffed down more and more feelings and begin to use food as a tool to get by. Sweet junk worked the best. As I kept gaining people began to say I let myself go, and I began to hide food (which I would buy on my way home from work and eat in secret when nobody else was around). Then started all the diets, both self-imposed and organised, such as Weight Watchers. But because I had unresolved issues the weight always came back "and brought friends".

At very close to 300lbs I was able to have this lap-band surgery done, and now I am down 20lbs. I have been down about 40lbs. with hypnosis but got no further. Sometimes I wonder if there are layers of fat (onion layers) that represent unpleasant things that have to be dealt with before I can pass that particular weight barrier.

The only person who can take this weight off is me. I have tools to help me to do it but it's my final effort that can help me succeed, or make me fail yet again. As I told the doctor, this is the end of the road. This surgery has to work or I'm done for.

But like the onion with it's many layers, I wonder what I will have to face as I start to peel the weight off. I might have to go back into counselling again as I did a couple of years ago to deal with whatever it is I "stuffed" inside me with the many Little Debbies I got my hands on