I’ll start by confessing that I am a former fat dude. I was happy to find this blog. As a dude who blogs about weight loss surgery, I also find that guys blogging about their personal experiences are in a minority. I am excited to be a guest blogger on Former Fat Dudes! In today’s post, I’ll introduce myself by sharing some of my weight loss journey and my evolution as a weight loss surgery blogger.

I am a blogger and have blogged for over five years. My blogging began during my recovery from a heart attack and triple cardiac bypass surgery. I played with journaling over the years and saw this new public form of journaling as a support mechanism to move me to a healthier life. My early years of blogging were a diary led of my life events with occasional rants about religion and politics.

In early 2008 I committed to change my life with weight loss surgery playing a big role in that change. In February I began the insurance approval process, pre-op testing and health assessments leading up to my July Lapband surgery. Early in this process I stumbled upon a blog of a successful post-op Lapband patient. He was quite a role model to me. His blog spoke to me and highly motivated me. I committed to blog about my weight loss hoping that my blog could possibly have such a positive impact on others.

My life did indeed change after my Lapband surgery. The weight came off slowly and steadily. I lost those 90 pounds and continued to blog. I began blogging about bariatric friendly recipes for about a year on Beariatric.com. I had made a commitment to concentrate on my weight loss when I was pre-op and soon realized that maintaining two blogs was too distracting. I abandoned Beariatric .com and continued blogging about my life and weight loss on my personal blog.

In the summer of 2009 my life took another turn. An on-line weight loss buddy cycled a charity bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I was amazed that he could cycle over 500 miles in 7 days as a one year post-op bariatric patient. I got on my bike and soon realized that I loved cycling. Through the summer, I invited friends and fellow bariatric patients to cycle with me. Our impromptu cycling group morphed into a bariatric cycling club, the Spin-Offs. I spent 2010 cycling 2-3 times a week with them. I cycled in a 150 mile charity ride and a century ride; quite an accomplishment for this former fat dude!

At two years post-op, I knew that my focus needed to change in my weight loss journey. I observed that at this point many bariatric patients veer away from the bariatric principles by which they have been living. It’s that pivotal time at which success can quickly turn into failure. I can’t speak for others, but for me this is due to boredom with my daily routine, being comfortable with my weight loss-to-date, and the daily pressures and demands of everyday life. I began searching for “the answer” that would keep me on track.

The answer came from my on-line buddy who initially motivated me so highly with his blog. He spoke about the wellness vision he was developing for himself. I Googled “wellness vision” and found out that it is your personal vision of wellness in terms of where you want to be at a given point in time. This vision is supported by goals which achieve this vision. I had spent many years setting goals for which I had mixed results. The idea of linking goals to a vision seemed to be the answer for me.

I developed my wellness vision. You can read it on my blog. I thought it was going to be an easy exercise. It turned out to be a multi-month exercise during free lunch hours and evenings. It made me dig deep within myself and really give some thought to where I needed to be at this point in my life. What surprised me as I gathered my thoughts was that the vision revolved around happiness. I came to understand that happiness is what truly defines my life.

That brings me back to my blogging. One of the key things I discovered was that I am a pretty decent writer and speaker. People have told me that my cycling has motivated them to be more active. I knew I had to focus these talents and energies on my blogging. Bariatric.com was reborn in January 2011 as my personal weight loss journey with a focus on living life to its fullest as a long term post-op bariatric patient.

I want to thank Rob for inviting me to be a guest blogger on Former Fat Dudes! He is a talented blogger and motivator. It’s an honor to contribute to his blog. In future posts, I hope to share how I am living my wellness vision and how that vision drives me to achieve the goals that support it. I invite you to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and my blog, Beariatric.com.

“The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination. — Don Williams, Jr., American Poet and Novelist

(Be sure to read Part 1 of Larry’s Story first…)

My wife Beth and I discussed having weight loss surgery in early 2008.  We had heard good things, and bad things about it.  As far as I know, we only knew one person who had actually had weight loss surgery.  That person was not very compliant, and didn’t receive much education about her procedure and follow-up.  She didn’t have a very good result, in fact she ended up having her band completely drained and is living with no restriction at all… and consequently little to no weight loss.

We didn’t want to be like that.  We didn’t want to fail.  From our research online we found that people who have gastric bypass surgery lose weight!  Compliant or not, they lose weight.  Not saying that a person couldn’t drink milkshakes and eat cake and ice cream, and defeat the surgery, they can.  But, a large percentage of people who have gastric bypass surgery lose a significant portion of their excess weight.  We knew that we aren’t the most compliant folks you’ll meet, so our only choice was gastric bypass surgery.

Prior to that time, our insurance company didn’t cover any “elective” surgery, such as weight loss surgery.  One day I was going thru the insurance companies website and found that they had changed their policy!!!  They had some stringent guidelines, but it was possible to get the surgery covered!

We started talking to our primary care physician about weight loss surgery in earnest in about July of 2008.  At the end of July, the company I work for announced that beginning January 1, 2009 our insurance was going to change.  We were being forced to change insurance carriers, to one that didn’t cover weight loss surgery.  We had about 5 months to jump through all the hoops and get the surgery done!  During this time we discovered the YouTube WLS community.  Going online and watching people tell about their trials and tribulations made ours a little less stressful.  Just to know that someone else had already been down this road.  We started our own YouTube channel.

It was a hectic couple of months.  We both were denied for surgery, but our surgeon personally called the insurance company and we were approved.  We ended up having our surgery at the end of the year with time to spare!  December 16th, 2008 was our rebirth day.  Our Surgeversery.

I think Beth and I are a little special.  We’ve been together since late 2001 and when I say together, I mean together.  We are basically inseparable.  There are other couples who have both had weight loss surgery, but I don’t personally know of any other couple who had their surgery on the same day.  It was pretty cool.

Because we both “deflated” together, she has lost over 100lbs and I’ve lost almost 150lbs, we didn’t have many of the issues that people who have the surgery alone do…  If someone flirts with Beth now, it tickles me almost as much as it does her.  And when some woman shows me a little extra attention, most of the time Beth has to point it out to me.  She loves it…  ( I’m oblivious to that sort of stuff…  I never had it before so I guess I failed to learn how to detect it!!!)

Weight Loss Surgery has been the best thing I’ve ever done for myself in my 54 years of life!!!  I’m totally prescription free…  Other than the vitamin supplements I take daily I’m done with meds…

Oh!  And I had those damned eyes fixed!!!  Laser surgery!  I haven’t tried yet, but I wonder if I could catch a baseball now???

Hello!  I’m Larry, and I’m a Former Fat Dude.

I’ve never been to an AA meeting before, but that first line sounds like what they say there.  My name, and an acknowledgement that I was morbidly obese.  The difference between AA and FFD is Former Fat Dudes don’t have to attend monthly meetings, at least not FFD meetings.  But, the analog between AA and FFD is pretty stong.  Us FFD members have overcome a pretty big (pardon the pun…) problem in our lives just as successful AA members have overcome theirs.  And just like them we have to be constantly vigil to keep from slipping back into our old habits and end up back where we were.

The story of how I became a fat dude to begin with starts back in the first grade, or there abouts…  Just prior to the first grade I had a tonsillectomy. Before that I was a scrawny, sickly little kid.  After getting those offensive tonsils removed I “sprouted”…  And during the first week of the first grade Mrs. Thompson marched our whole class the two blocks to the Public Library and had us fill out library cards.  That library card would be well worn by the time I reached puberty.

Another aggravating factor was the fact that I couldn’t see.  I don’t mean that I was blind, I mean that just couldn’t see very well.  In fact when I finally had an eye exam, it was found that my vision was about 20/400!!!  What a normal kid could see at 400 feet, I had to get as close as 20 feet to see.  The funny thing about it was nobody knew I couldn’t see.  My parents didn’t know, they thought all kids liked to sit to close to the television set.  My friends didn’t know, they just thought I was a terrible baseball player who never got a hit or caught the ball.  (Kinda hard to catch the ball when you don’t see it until just before it smacks you between the eyes!)

Consequently, either I wasn’t included in, or chose not to participate in sports.  Even I didn’t know that other people could see better than me.  I guess I just thought they were lucky to not get hit as many times as me.  Even though I couldn’t see anything at a distance, I could see from about 12 inches on in like I had a magnifying glass!  So reading was easy, and I did it a lot.  When I finally had an eye exam and got some glasses I was amazed!  It was like, finally for the first time in my life, someone focused the camera.  Trees suddenly weren’t just green blobs.  They were thousands of individual leaves clumped together with limbs and branches and trunks… Wow!

By the time I got to the seventh grade I was the chubby kid in the “Roebuck” husky sized jeans.  Always the last around the track in P.E..  I at least got some contact lenses so I could see. But, the die was cast, I would never be a jock!  I had something better.  I had the Public Library!!!  During the summer while all the other kids were out running and riding bikes and playing, I was reading in air-conditioned comfort in the John Cain Public Library in Stuttgart, Arkansas.

Over the years I went from being “husky” to “chunky” to “fat”!  But, there were times, along the way that I would diet like crazy, and lose a little weight.  Like the time in 1975 when I went to weight watchers and lost down to 179 lbs only to balloon back up to over 200 by 1977.  Over and over, up and down, mostly up.

Eventually, the ups continued and the downs were few and far between. By about mid 2007 I broke the 300 lb mark for the first time. Three or four years before I had been diagnosed with hypertension and Cardiac Artery Disease (CAD). I was on that slippery slope to oblivion. I was to heavy to enjoy doing much of anything and my metabolism was slowly headed for zero! There were many week-ends when I would come home from work on Friday afternoon, and never leave the apartment until Monday morning. I called it “Vegging Out” but it was more than that. It was dying a slow death. I had decided that I was going to die, and I might as well face the fact that I would never see my 60^th birthday. I was 53 years old at the time.

I’ll admit it, I was scared. I was scared that I was going to just lay down and die. That I’d leave my wife alone. That my grandchildren wouldn’t have their Papa Larry around.

(More to follow… )

Originally published November 12, 2008

Tonight was my first meeting in awhile regarding the WLS. It was a group intro session… they had a staff person from Unity talk… and she is 7 years post-op herself. BTW, I realize these posts are getting long and maybe boring… but what do you want me to do? I’ll try to start finding some sort of inspirational or maybe at least humorous images to go along with these posts in the future.

I got there just in time for the meeting. I don’t think all the people there were possible patients… folks are encouraged to bring a support person with them. There were maybe 9-10 guys out of the over 50 there… including myself. The presenter mentioned knowing what it was like to be “here”, to be sitting in this room, all nervous. I’m not though.

I think I’ve learned a lot about this whole deal, but I started getting more details I haven’t found elsewhere… gonna run through them here… now, if you are reading this cause you are looking in to this, one thing I should mention that I discovered tonight – different hospitals will do things slightly different. What I list here may not be how the hospital you check out does certain things.

At the beginning, after by-pass surgery, the “pouch” or your “new stomach” holds bout 1/2oz. It will stretch a bit, slowly, until after a year or so you’ll be eating about 3/4-1 cup of food per meal.

A difference here than with the lap-band, with lap-band you start out fairly normal after surgery recovery and work your way down to smaller and smaller meals as they tighten, or fill the band.

After the surgery, you’ll be downing nothing but clear liquids for a period of one to three weeks, then you start on puree’d foods, and by about week five you should be back to eating “real food”. Just a heck of a lot less. But even then, avoid bread, rice, and pasta for the first few months until you can see how your body will handle them. Soft breads especially, as they are hard to chew. Oh, and ground meats too. After WLS you need to chew and chew and chew your food until it’s the consistency of apple sauce. You need to do this because the opening from your esapaugus to your new stomach is only about the size of a drinking straw… if you don’t chew… well… ever had a banana shake and had a chunk of banana clog the straw? You don’t want that to happen.

And the big thing – no drinking while eating, or bout 30 min after. WLS as a tool works because it’s about getting your body to feel full, and stay full. If you drink, you’ll empty out your stomach too fast, get hungry again, and eat more. Think of it this way… pour some actual apple sauce into a funnel and let it drip through. It should sorta dribble through. Now add a couple tablespoons of water to that sauce… it runs through a lot faster, right?

And of course besides sticking to the 3-meal-a-day deal, getting 30min of exercise a day is huge. Even right away… even if you have to break it up in to five or ten minute blocks. Beside burning calories it can help with your skin and energy levels and other stuff.

Things aren’t gonna be all sunshine and roses even after you lose the weight, there are some general changes that it seems just about everyone goes through…. like they become much more cold-sensitive. Now as a guy that sweats when it gets above 35, right now that don’t sound too bad. But I suppose, like I joke about when I play paintball in 40 degree weather in a t-shirt, I am well insulated. Who knows how I’ll feel once I lose that insulation.

Course there’s the risk of loose skin. Keeping hydrated, making sure you get enough protein, not smoking and exercising can all help minimize the problem as you lose weight, but the risk is there. Sure, if you can afford it, cosmetic surgery will take care of that. But even if you can’t… what’s worse? a bit of loose skin, or an extra 150 pounds?

The hair loss thing I’ve mentioned before – no biggie for me. The presenter and a couple other women that have had lap-band all said they lost hair, but also most of it did come back. Heck maybe I’ll get lucky and end up with more than I’m starting out with now?

Then there’s “dumping”. I’d heard it talked about a lot… but never in much detail. Basically, it is mostly for those who go through by-pass. Since you are by-passing the bulk of your stomach, certain foods that are normally broken down there end up right in the intestines… and when it comes to sugary or greasy foods… that’s not usually a good thing. With a lot of people, ya eat too much and it’s gonna cause all sorts of issues… usually not serious, but likely rather uncomfortable or maybe a bit embarrassing if you’re in public. They suggest being at home when you try reintroducing such foods back in to your diet.

Also, there is “psychological maladjustments”. This covers a rather broad area, that I’m not sure I can touch on just yet. But they did go into common emotional changes. You may end up asking yourself “did I make the right decision?”, or mourning loss of food in general. Relationships can, and likely will change… but on the plus side you may also end up more outgoing, getting more socially involved.

Now when you compare bypass to lap-band (I’m leaning toward bypass at this point), the advantages it has are a more rapid weight loss and the total weight loss tends to be higher. And like lap-band, there is a minimally invasive option available. Lap-band work by restricting the amount of food you can eat, but after that everything that happens to the food is like normal. Bypass on the other hand is a “mal-absorptive” procedure. Basically means since you’re skipping over the bulk of the stomach, you skip absorbing some some of the “bad” stuff like fat and sugar.

And there are other things that pretty much become a non-factor after surgery. I can eliminate acid reflux, type 2 diabetes, and in some cases high blood pressure almost immediately. Others are gonna be helped by the fact your losing weight, light the blood pressure, cholesterol, sleep apnoea. And if they’re not eliminated, they can be severely reduced. I’ve got three of those issue and at risk for the other two… so… this just about seems like a no-brainer for me.

Oh, along with the skipping of sugars and such, you also end up skipping the absorption of some of the good stuff, so you need to take supplements the REST OF YOUR LIFE. I emphasized that because this is … forever. Lap-band, worst case, can be removed. Bypass, you can’t undo. So from then on, yer doing vitamins, calcium and b12… at the least.

And other than the supplements, you’ll need to watch over what other meds you take. Make sure they’re not too bid… or that they can at least be dissolved in water, or crushed or chewed, or maybe they come in a liquid form.

Generally, pre-op, you are going to need to lose about 10% of excess weight. Probably looking at 15+ pounds in my case. I’ve read on other sites that this is mostly done right before surgery when they put you on a liquid diet for 2-3 weeks. Unity doesn’t do that. You still need to lose the weight though, it help clean up the liver and make it easier for the surgeon to get in there and do what they need to do.

Speaking of which, the operation will likely take anywhere from 45min to four hours. Most insurance companies require an overnight stay, and they get you up and walking around hours afterwards. Never too early to start exercising. They said here you wake up with an IV, but no other tubes. And depending the the kind of work you do, you’ll likely be out for one to six weeks… mostly depends on if you need to be able to do any lifting and such that might effect your incisions.

Speaking of incisions… this is surgery. Pretty major surgery at that. There can be complications… from bleeding, infections, blood clots to leakage. They said if that happens, you will get sick very quickly and to notify the surgeon ASAP. At Unity, you end up with the pager number of your surgeon, and they (or someone working for them I figure?) is available to you 24/7/365. Period.

Now worst case, yea… you can die from this surgery… or bout any other. National average is 1 in 200. Unity though, their average is about 1 in 3000. That’s kinda nice to know. After the bypass surgery, there are a number of follow ups. 1 week, 5week, 3month, 6month, 12month, and every year after that. But Unity balances it out and seems to offer a number of free services as well, such as support groups and fitness/diet consultation and such.

I’ve already taken the next few steps… I have my nurce clinician appointment next week as well as my psyc evaluation. Week after that I meet with a dietician. I’ve been checking with my insurance company and think I’m pretty well covered there. Which I hope so, because if I were to have to pay.. I’d be looking at $15-20,000.

So that’s where I’m at right now. By the way… PLEASE realize that none of the above is actual medical advice. I don’t guarantee any of it to be accurate. This is what I took away from the meetings… don’t be stupid and take my word for it. If you have questions, talk to YOUR doctor. K? K.

Oh, and if you want to see a lap-band surgery, the surgeon at Unity did one a couple weeks back and they broadcast it live. You can still catch it at or-live.com

My name is Tim Grayless and I’m from Indiana. I used to weigh 385 pounds until I had my RNY surgery on August 5, 2009. I have discovered so much about a disorder that used to control my life, and from time to time I will share those ramblings with all of you her at FFD.com

I am married to my lovely wife Doreen, who is the Director of Scholarships at Indiana University, South Bend, IN.

We have three children: Megan, who is 27  and going for her PhD in Communications at the University of Kentucky. Erin, who works for IBM in San Jose, CA, and Andrew who is finishing his certification for becoming a Physical Therapist. Andrew and Erin got their BA’s from Purdue, and Megan got he BA at Columbus State in Geogia, and her Masters at the University of Arkansas.

I am a part time United Methodist Pastor, and currently on disability. In the near future, God willing, I will be off disability and back to full time work.

Enough for now…see you on formerfatdudes.com.

Alright, I have to credit a frequent reader of this site, MissMaryMac with this idea. In a posting on her own blog entitled I Am Not a Kangaroo! she mentioned naming her pouch.

I found the idea intriguing, and decided to steal.. er.. run with it as well.

She named her pouch Simon… cause what Simon sez, goes. I’m not quite that creative, and have settled on the simple name of “Joe”.

Joe and I are going to be together the rest of my life… yea, a sort of life-partner, but not THAT kind. (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Sure, I’d rather spend the rest of my life with a Rachel, or Suzy… but I don’t think my pouch has any sort of female tendencies… so Joe it is. I kind of get images of Snoopy as Joe Cool when I think about it… and Snoopy is sort of a picky eater at times as well, so it’s all good. Also, he’s a much better mental picture than my pouch is.

So yea… in the weeks, months, even years to come… when you hear/see me talk about Joe, you’ll know who… or rather what… I’m talking about.

Well, I sort of gave an introduction already, but I thought I would follow Benson’s lead and tell a bit about my motivation to have WLS. In a word, paintball.

A lot of guys play golf, I play paintball. Nearly 10 years ago I was a founding member of a woodsball team that at one point had over 50 members.

Like Benson said, most of us “fat dudes”, we’ve been dealing with weight most of our lives. But while I’ve always been big… the 300# plus kind of big the last 12+ years… I’ve always been pretty active. Not your “running a marathon” active, but active enough I could get out on the paintball field and play all day. But in late 2007 that started to change.

I suppose age has a bit to do with it. I hit the 40 year mark that year. I was slowing down… either because of the extra weight or because I was slowing down my weight had been creeping up. April of 2008 I hit my heaviest recorded weight of 377#.I played very little paintball last year. I would get wiped out just walking out to the field.

Then there’s my niece and nephew. A couple of twins who are just… well, I adore them, they adore me. It’s a pretty good arrangement. And even at 40 I have no problem getting down on the floor and playing around with them. No, the problem started becoming how to get up after I was done playing.

My Aunt had RNY in May of 2008. By that fall she had lost 80+ pounds and was running in a 5k race. Before October of last year, I had …idley thought about WLS, but realizing that it was a life-long, life changing thing, I always told myself “I can make those changes without surgery”. And I would… for a while. Losing some weight… only to fall in to old patterns and all the weight I lost would find me again and bring some buddies to the party. So I started reading more and more about WLS, and by November I decided this was something I had to do. My doctor agreed with me.

I was lucky in a way… I didn’t suffer from a lot of the co-morbidities many morbidly obese people do, but I had my problems. High blood pressure that was under control with meds, occassional acid reflux issues, and while I wasn’t using my CPAP, I had been diagnosed with sleep apnea a few years earlier. (I couldn’t keep the damn mask on while sleeping!)

And while it took longer than I had expected and hoped, I actually had a pretty easy time with my insurance company… and after jumping through all the required hoops I had my surgery on April 8, 2009. I was 322# the day of surgery. Today I’m just under 280.

I guess technically I’m not quite a “former fat dude” just yet… but I’m getting there. Mentally, I’m in better shape for this than I’ve ever been. Physically… I’ve seen the differences already. I know it won’t be easy, there are and always will be challenges ahead.

But everything is coming together, and now I have the tools I need to pull this off. For good.

Hey there… this is the first posting, and I suppose I should come up with something profound and earth shattering here, but… well, I’m coming up blank.

Basically, I had weight loss surgery (WLS) on April 8, 2009. It’s about five weeks later and I’ve lost a bit over 40 pounds… and that doesn’t include what I lost on the regime I went through pre-op. All in all, I’m down close to 100# in the last year.

I did a LOT of reading online prior to taking the WLS step, and there is a LOT of great information out there, much of it by other WLS patients. The biggest problem though, is the vast majority of WLS patients are women, over 80% by most estimates, though this is slowly changing. So lots of those great sites out there by default end up geared towards women and the things they go through. There’s a few sites by guys, but not many… so as I got further and further in to this, I decided there should be a site that can help focus on stuff us dudes go through… for example, watch out the first time you take a leak after surgery. They really should warn you about what it’s like after they take that catheter out.

One of the general WLS sites I found just before my surgery was bariatrictv.com – their tagline is “The Place for Surgically Altered FREAKS”. That alone told me I’d probably fit in pretty good over there. I discovered a great group of people there… many with senses of humor even more … well… we’ll say similar to my own. And when you deal with something like this, a sense of humor is another tool you just gotta have.

It was there I met Roadblock, another guy who had WLS recently. Because of his sense of humor and just plain openness about what he’s been going through I thought that he was someone who could help make this site a reality. And lucky for me, he agreed to pitch in.

We have no “game plan” for what’s going to happen here. It’s basically going to be a place for us to tell it as it is from a dude’s perspective. And while we’re both works in progress when it comes to being “formerly fat dudes”, we’re gonna get there.

So if you are considering WLS as an option, have already had WLS, or are just curious… feel free to check things out, drop some comments, or fire of suggestions for future postings (you can email us at mail-at-formerfatdudes.com ). And you don’t have to be a dude to hang out either… chicks are more than welcome… but no complaining about the socks still laying on the floor next to the laundry basket.