When I lived in California a few years ago (this would have been early 2005) I had a friend who had a sister who had WLS - gastric bypass, not the band, but all the same.

She kept an on-line journal of sorts, similar to this I suppose. One day I came across a post of hers that put into words exactly how I feel, only way more eloquently than I ever could hope. Not how I feel, I guess, but how I hope to feel maybe. The part about the dread, and especially about the 'eternal loop' -- that's how I feel. I just hope one day it turns off.

So, to plagarize (and summarize) Jen:

"What is the most compelling is that feeling of dread I once hefted about, the feeling that things could only get worse, that I would get bigger and bigger forever until I died of diabetes or heart disease, or maybe just of misery...that feeling is finally, at last, thank god, GONE.

I finally feel free of its enormous weight--the weight of a miserable dark future, spent hiding and aching.

My pain is mostly gone in most every way. I can run now. I can breathe freely now. I'm actually never hot, so strange. I'm enjoying the summer. I am strong. I have a bathing suit. My shoes are all too big. I am sitting cross-legged right now. I wear a size 8, and sometimes a 6.

And I'm actually able to start thinking of myself as truly human now, not that I was inhuman before, or that fat people are somehow less human. But that supreme loneliness creates an absence in you, holds you just outside real life, makes people pass you by like clever landscaping. I can even say I'm occasionally beautiful, when the moon is right or from the left. I can claim normality, or at least its close cousin. And though I've never striven for normality, I recognize its virtues.

Suddenly it hit me, just one day, upside the head, that I've turned off that voice in the periphery that played the eternal loop--hide, hide, hide, hide. Don't go out. DOn't leave th house. Don't stand too close. Hide. Always hide. The pain of knowing in any situation you likely won't fit in, and maybe won't even literally fit, is just simply gone. The fear of being seen, th worry about impressions, the misery of shopping for clothes or eating in public or admiring someone whom you know would never, god forbid, admire you.

All of that is gone.

Of course, I still worry about how to pay the bills, why my boyfriend won't take out the trash, the mercenary nature of the capitalist machine -- you know, the usual. But that other worry, the worry that has stalked me tight since I was 9 years old and 50 lbs heavier than my classmates is entire gone ... or at leaast almost entirely on its way out. See ya later."