Four years ago tonight (October 3rd 2010) I checked into the Comfort Suites motel across the street from St John’s in Madison Heights with my youngest son Tom and my wife Colleen, wondering what tomorrow would hold for me. I weighed 404 pounds and would undergo RNY gastric bypass surgery the next morning. Although I had no idea just how life-changing my surgery and the years that followed would be, I was pretty sure that life was about to change for me. Decades of fighting a losing battle against weight, and a couple of years of investigating and considering GB had brought me to this point in my life. A point where I was simultaneously accepting as fact that I had failed to manage my weight with the tools I had at my disposal (my own will power and self-control), while believing that I had made a sound rational decision to adopt, through irreversible surgery, the tool of GB to aid me in finally overcoming this obstacle to physical health, and happiness with myself.
I tried to imagine life after GB. I wasn’t scared, but I was a bit anxious. I had full trust in Dr Sabir, the hospital and the medical procedure. I had come to the decision to have GB surgery through quite a bit of deliberation. I had fought weight issues for decades and felt ready for whatever lifestyle changes would soon become my new normal. As Tom, Colleen and I sat around the hotel and talked, I found that I wasn’t reflecting on the RNY procedure, or any impact of GB, as much as the feeling that I was embarking on more than a journey of weight loss or even more that a journey of health and fitness. I didn’t know it then, but everything was about to change. Everything.
Tom and I went swimming in the hotel pool. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to lose weight such that I would not be self-conscience in a swim suit out in public. I remember trying to visualize what it would feel like to again be ‘normal.’ I had high hopes that this new tool I was about to receive would give me the resource I needed to become capable of managing my body. Little did I know that my RNY surgery would provide the impetus for a series of life-style changes that would affect every aspect of my life… my work life, spiritual life, and family life.
Four years ago my business partner and I were running our own business and I was working 100+ hours a week, working every day of the year. I would have said that my health, my family, and my spirituality were my highest priorities in life, but my actions would have shown otherwise. My time was spent working – not at a labor of love, or in following my bliss and passions, but in pursuit of money, of title, of position, to impress others, to buy and acquire material objects. I was defining myself by extrinsic rather than intrinsic measures. How I treated my body was just one outward example of my misguided priorities.
The complete story of my change is long and involved. I’ve blogged about it and written articles about it, but the condensed bottom line is this, when RNY gave me a tool to help me give my body what it needs rather than what it wants, it also ignited resources inside me that allowed me to do the same with my time, my energy, my creativity, my talent, my mind and my heart.
Within a year I had lost 202 pounds, sold my stock in my business and retired from consulting, volunteered my time in my community, ceased the search for more and bigger material ‘stuff,’ found peace in meditation, exercise, Tai Chi and Buddhism, reconnected with friends and family, took up or again practiced passions from my past such as hiking, travel, and bike riding.
I am a wealthy man. That is a strange statement in that I don’t have a job and I’m not rich. I am wealthy not because of any money or treasure that I put in warehouses for some potential future need, but because of the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve shared in the past four years. I learned to give myself what I need rather than what I might feel I want.
The ‘big bang’ of my new existence occurred four years ago tonight, in a rather bland motel room in Madison Heights, on October 3rd, 2010.