starzee78

My name is Star Tingle and I'm 34 years old. Ever since I can remember I have always been overweight. I've always bought plus size clothes. Actually when I was a child there really wasn't a plus size section for kids, you just shopped in the adult section. I am bi-racial: Caucasian and African-American. I was raised by my African-American side of the family. Those of us that have grown up in an African-American family knows that we have a love/hate relationship with food. In our culture food brings us together for every emotion and occasion like holidays, birthday parties, family gatherings, weddings, and even funerals. Since my father was a single parent raising a girl he had a lot of help from my grandmother (his mother). I remember my grandmother was the type that cooked for every meal (well maybe just breakfast and dinner). Since I spent majority of my time with my grandmother I got to eat all of her meals and you couldn't leave the table until you were finished with your food, whether you were full or not. For holidays my grandmother would fix a big spread of food. We actually had a table dedicated to dessert. There would be about 10 different desserts on that table. Our family really enjoyed (and worshiped) food. So you can see this was the behaviors I grew up with. My grandmother was a diabetic as far as I can remember. When I was 20 years old she passed away. Prior to her passing she had renal failure due to diabetes which also led to her having both of her legs amputated. She was on dialysis and decided she no longer wanted to go. She passed almost 2 weeks later. My father was diagnosed with diabetes in his late 40's. Shortly after that he was diagnosed with liver cancer. My father followed almost the same fate as my grandmother. He had renal failure, ended up on dialysis, and passed in August of 2012. I think his passing was a wake up call for me. I'm terrified of getting diabetes. I'm turning 35 this year and enough is enough. I've been through Weight Watchers several times. It's a great program and I can't explain what went wrong. I like to exercise but starting is a different story. For the longest time I refused to consider weight loss surgery. I honestly felt it was for people who were immobile and couldn't exercise at all. Obviously I changed my mind. I woke up one day and decided that I didn't want to struggle anymore. Why, why do that when there are options. I had to stop beating myself up. My highest weight was 320lbs. I lost over 20lbs after my divorce in 2009. I realized in that relationship I was doing a lot of "eating my feelings." When I decided to have my PCP refer me for bariatric surgery I was 296lbs. I had my first doctors appointment in March. My surgery date was May 23, 2013 (writing this I'm only 5 days post-surgery) and on that day I was 281lbs. After surgery was a little hard, as expected. I was groggy from the medicine and anesthesia. My stomach felt like it sat in my chest but my whole abdominal section was bloated (they pump air into you during surgery). I was sore. It didn't help that I had a catheter and I was on my period. That was the bad part of the experience. Before they would let me leave the hospital I had to get down 16 ounces of liquid through my mouth. At first I thought how hard could this be? Boy was I wrong. It was really hard. It took me all day to get down 16 ounces. The only nausea I experienced was the day after surgery when trying to drink the 16 ounces of liquid. I haven't experienced any nausea since leaving the hospital and only slight pain. I was given liquid pain medication and that has been fine. So that's my story. Feel free to contact me for any questions. I had a lot of questions going through this experience and I was googling everything. I found a few resourceful websites and some not so great. I like that this website is available for people to ask questions and interact. Hopefully soon I will be posting pictures of my progress.