Jenn's Transformation Journey

This morning I found out my sleep study results.  Honestly going into this appointment I was really nervous. The hardest part was over, the actual sleep study, but finding out the results from a test is kind of always nerve racking.  So I got called in and sat in a room and waited for the PA. She was actually really, really nice and her name was Jennifer as well so easy to remember.  She was like let me know you your test results, it was a lot of charts. I felt weird asking to take a picture of them so I will show you my fit bit tracking of my sleep because it shows the same thing on a much more dumbed down level, as it doesn't track a quarter of the amount that a sleep study does.  The first chart, is the one from January 9th- the night of my sleep study.  All of red lines are were I am "waking up" but really those are were I am gasping myself awake when I start breathing again.  The Chart below, is from the other nig...

Throughout this whole process everything has been a waiting game.  Part of me thinks that you have to jump through so many hoops and everything is extended out so that you have time to make a decision on if this really the best choice for you. Honestly I have appreciated the waiting game. The wait between appoitments, the wait to be approved on so many different levels because for me I take things in and I listen. I work to pick them apart within my head and then talk to others about these things.  I will find out my results for my sleep study Tuesday and after that I can schedule an appointment with the surgeon for a pre-op appointment to talk about what would be next and how to move forward.   This process started in October for me when I decided to sign up for the first seminar. It is now January and if all goes well I should have a pre-op appointment in the beginning of February.  The biggest conversation I h...

The hardest part of all of these appoitments was my sleep study. Not because it was hard but because I worked my self up and got really, really nervous about it all. Honestly looking back at it, it really wasn't that bad. Before going in for the actual sleep study I had an appointment with the doctor in the same office where the sleep study would be held. The Doctor was super nice and everyone at the office was great questions from how I sleep to basic medical history type things.  The Doctor asked me so many questions about all of those things and  from there I scheduled my sleep study. & the next wait was on 3 weeks waiting for the actual sleep study.  It was scheduled for January 9th and I had to arrive at 7:30pm, so typically I got there early. Luckily my room and all my stuff was ready. I didn't take too much with me other than my nalgeene. I wore sweatpants and a tshirt to be comfy, you can take your pj's and change there but I figured it would b...

In my last post I talked a little about how I trained for and have run 4 half marathons, one in each season. So I wanted to take a minute and write a post about being active and my training and all of that good stuff.  My first half marathon was rough, but training for it was life changing. My first half marathon would be in January, so it would be of course the coldest day in 2014.  Getting out of bed and running or getting out of work and running, pushing myself to run almost every day if not 4+ days a week was hard! But I found the drive within myself and I did it.  I have always been surrounded by runners my whole life. My Dad was a marathon runner until his accident, my brother and sister in law are ultra marathon runners and my sister in law almost finished the Vermont 100 mile running race! At the point that I was running these four half marathons I was also dating a runner and her family was also runners.  Finishing my first half marathon ...

Nutritionist Appointments are hard... Group Appointments are awkward! Before I could meet with my nutritionist 1:1 I had to go to a group seminar that lasted about 2.5 hours... What a drag! The group was filled with some interesting people to say the least all working on being qualified or making the decision if bariatric surgery was right for them.  My nutritionist asked a lot of questions and went over a lot of things during the seminar. But leaving I was ready to leave.. I knew what I had to do for the next month after leaving that group. I needed to track every single thing I ate for the next month and not gain any weight.. But eat better, low carbs, low sugar, no drinking anything within 30 minutes of eating! Essentially the gastric bypass diet once completely healed.  Before my seminar I had my abdominal ultrasound.. Which took just about an hour and a half.. When I got the results I kind of laughed... This may be TMI but I needed to Fart the whole tim...

So here it is, this was me on Christmas 2017. 290lbs  With that being said I went to my first appointment- The Physical. Getting there I felt comfortable, other than the office being a little hard to find as that hospital is a little complicated. Once I got to the office everyone was so extremely nice.  There were over sized chairs and normal chairs. I can fit into a normal size chair but the arms do go into my thighs a bit. So I sat comfortably and didn't feel embarrassed about it.  I was taken back by nurse who had me get on a scale. This scale you walk up on, it has a ramp so no one has to step up. Now I am an active person. Yes sometimes lazy but I consider myself active so making that step up wouldn't have been a big deal for me but I could see how others may struggle with this depending on their size.  I consider myself to be an active person. In 2014/2015 year I ran 4 half marathons. One in every single season, starting with...

Starting in the summer of 2017 I really started contemplating weight loss surgery. As my interest peeked in finding out more, I was also finding out and seeing more people around me have had it. One of my cousins had it and having her that close to me made it easier to ask questions. For me, contemplating all of that made me feel like crap. Like I had not succeeded with my own health. I felt ashamed of myself for even wanting to contemplate if this option was for me.  I started googling... And asking my cousin surface questions, like what surgery did she have.. and how long did it take her to get back to work. Google.. Well google just showed me that this is not at all the easy way out. For those that think that weight loss surgery is the easy way out stand by I'll probably write a post on that as well.  Back to what I found on google... Okay so the picture on the right is one of the things I found.. There are quite a few different types of surgery you can have.....

Well here it is from a young age I have always been the heavy kid. I somehow always knew that food was going to be a problem, that being like my brother who ate everything was what I did but it didn’t have the same effect on me that it did on him. When I was 17 years old I was 280lbs which at that point was my highest ever weight and remained my highest weight until I was 26 years old.                     Left is me at my heaviest in high school, and right me me at my lightest right before I graduated High school. Before I graduated from High school I lost 100lbs, it wasn’t in the healthiest of ways. I looked at food differently like it was my worst enemy and I didn’t eat nearly enough. I was in the weight room for hours at a time, and looking back that was the strongest I have ever been in my life… But I wasn’t healthy in the process. I was obsessed with the number on the scale going down. I didn't gain the freshman 1...