BariatricEating.com Health & Nutrition
Rant - Shannon? Sarah? Stephanie?
I reference my post op friend Stephanie a lot because she is an endless
source of un-freakin-believable statements that blow my mind. Of course
there is NO CHANCE that she will ever read this, because even though her
best friend is a one-woman bariatric conglomerate, she doesn’t do
anything she should do to stay healthy and keep her weight off, such as
take vitamins, pay attention to protein, hold back on carbs, or check
out my website on occasion for a little support. Which is why I feel comfortable
in talking about her without changing her name to ‘Shannon’
or ‘Sarah’ in order to avoid embarrassing her.
I was telling Stephanie about the New Years Eve party we had at the condo for our friends and being the Food Network gourmet that I am, I was describing the great food I assembled for my guests. I had platters of sushi, a huge bowl of cracked stone crab claws, an Italian antipasto platter, and an impressive cannoli cake from a local pastry shop. This was a domed mountain of a cake… layers of rum moistened sponge cake and sweetened ricotta cream, completely covered in whipped cream, sprinkled with tiny chocolate chips, and studded with broken cannoli shells… it was beautiful to behold and so NOT sugar free. It was a veritable killer of a full sugar cake.
Miss Stephanie listened to the description of the cake in awe. I told her that I had two small bites, amending my own three-bite-rule, as it was sweet, and I didn’t want to get sick in front of my guests, falling on the floor twitching. I told her that the cake was so large that I had the remaining half in my fridge, and was going to take it to work the next day.
She interrupted me and said, ‘You know, if you want to eat more of that cake, you could do what I do. When I eat something yummy like that I drink water with it and if I wash it down with enough water I only get a little tired.’
I am not going to tell you exactly what I said to her, but it had to do with getting on a plane, flying to LaGuardia, taking a taxi to Brooklyn, and smacking her silly.
Then she made the statement that is the subject for the rant…
‘You are so lucky that sugar makes you sick. If there was a person who needed to get sick on sugar it should be me’
What??!! I am soooooo over post-ops who give that heavy 'sigh', roll their eyes, and say they 'wish' they got sick on sugar. Guess what? We all started out with the same line in the sand. The same degree of fear implanted by the surgeons. The same fresh start. We shouldn’t really know if we get sick or not but what makes some of us test the limits, and others make that limit a part of our life?
'Poor me... I wish I got sick on sugar.' I have never heard anything so stupid in my life! Stop being a victim and acting like 'not getting sick on sugar’ is a unfortunate travesty that just happened to you. Who squeezed that toothpaste out of the tube that you can’t put back? We fooled ourselves that we weren’t fat for all those years, how about fooling ourselves that sugar will make us deathly ill. Do we loathe ourselves so much that we must sabotage our potential for success? Why is this different from putting a hand on the stove burner to see if it is hot? I know when it glows red, NOT to touch it. What makes this different?
While we were reading the label on a new protein bar, my post op friend Glen plainly stated that it had too much sugar, and that he got sick on sugar. I asked him if he really got sick, or did he just think that he would get sick? Did he know the boundaries of his limits or was he just scared enough to resign to the fact that he couldn’t have sugar?
He thought about it for a minute and laughed. He didn’t know for sure if it would make him sick; he just didn’t need to go there and lived within the boundary of that line. Why are some of us willing to change our life while others slip comfortably back into the passive role of the victim?
When Stephanie made the comment about how lucky I was that sugar bothered me, I started to really think about this. It is true that I accidentally got very sick on a couple of bites of birthday cake very early on, but I don’t know for sure if I would get sick today on the same few bites of that same cake. I think that the body adapts after a few years and ‘dumping syndrome’ lessens, but I am not sure. I don’t want to know; I don’t need to know. I am willing to live within the shadow of the Cannoli Cake, and assume the worst. A small taste of something fabulous is truly satisfying while living life in a pair of size 10 jeans. We had the same surgeon, but did he forget to implant the control in her during her exact same procedure, or are our differences coming from inside of us?
If I lost you earlier in this rant and you are still thinking about Stephanie’s water ‘tip’ and if it would work for you; please let me know so I can send someone to smack you silly too!
Ciao,
Susan Maria
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© BE, Inc. 2011 - Susan Maria Leach. All rights reserved.
