My surgery is tomor­row, and yes­ter­day I spent the day run­ning errands, but ended with a nice din­ner out to Mac­a­roni Grill with the hub­ster and our two boys.

I had the Mush­room Ravi­oli (it made me think of Bella in Twi­light.). I’ve been on a semi-liquid diet for the past two weeks prepar­ing for my surgery and after I ate I felt so full, uncom­fort­ably so. It made me think about how much we really eat. I’ve never been a big eater — don’t roll your eyes at me, I’m seri­ous. My prob­lem lays in the types of foods I ate. I enjoyed my rice and beans, dairy, and bread a lit­tle to much, didn’t really exer­cise all that often and with my DNA that leans towards the chunky side I wasn’t help­ing. On Mon­day that’s all going to change. I sat there and prob­a­bly for the first time in my life really thought about what I was eat­ing. Stud­ied it, savored it. I’m not one of those peo­ple who are con­stantly think­ing about their next meal, believe it or not my life didn’t revolve around food and I hope that doesn’t change with this surgery.

I think it’s a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion with regards to peo­ple who are fat that we all love to eat, and eat all the time. Granted, that is true for some over­weight indi­vid­u­als but not all. I really enjoyed my ravi­oli tonight — not because it was the last time I’d be eat­ing any­thing solid for a while, but because it was the last time in my entire life that I would be able to eat such a large portion.

From now on, I’m going to look at food, pay atten­tion to what I con­sume with regards to how it is going to make me health­ier, stronger, and sus­tain my body. It is also going to be impor­tant that my fam­ily eat health­fully too. I do not want my chil­dren to grow up with poor eat­ing habits and find them­selves in my posi­tion. I’m in no way say­ing that I was taught to eat unhealthy because that’s not entirely true. My mother (who also has had this surgery) served us healthy meals, the prob­lem was that along with all that healthy food was a lot of junk. Can­dies, ice cream, cook­ies that sort of thing. I grew up enjoy­ing those foods along side my fruits and veg­gies. Which resulted in unhealthy habits. I see it in myself, and my siblings.

I’m sad to say that my lit­tle guy Mo has devel­oped a super sized sweet tooth and it’s all my fault. I’ve indulged it, we buy him candy and keep it in the house so that he has some a few times a week. For­tu­nately for him that’s all going to end. Candy is going to become a treat, for desert instead of hav­ing ice cream he’s going to have fruit, or home made sorbets.

He under­stands the dif­fer­ence between foods that are good for him and those that are not. I feel like I’ve failed when he chooses the unhealthy foods over the ones that would be kinder to his body. Maybe I’m being unfair because he is a child and wouldn’t you pre­fer a choco­late sun­dae to yogurt and fruit if you were in his posi­tion? I am not going to let that guilt fol­low me around like an alba­tross around my neck. I’m let­ting it go and start­ing fresh.

It is my goal that one year from now that for every pound I loose my fam­ily and I gain a new healthy habit, so that on the eve of the one year anniver­sary of my surgery my fam­ily and I can make a list of all our great healthy habits and find that the good out way the bad.

Here’s my list of habits we’re going to gain:

Exer­cise daily and like it.
Eat healthy meals pre­pared at home more.
Eat smaller por­tions (that’s a no brainier for me — but might be harder for my hus­band)
Foods like ice cream, cook­ies, cake are con­sumed on spe­cial occa­sions or at places like Cold Stone and aren’t brought into the home.