Feeding Myself
I have often said that if my only path to nourishment was through my own cooking, that I would probably weigh 120 pounds. This has less to do with my physiology and much more to do with my abject inability and disinterest in preparing food. People naturally assume that due to my size, I must be willing to do whatever it takes to enable significant consumption of large quantities of food. Not so at all. What I believe is at work here is a combination of dislike for the culinary arts and a great deal of indifference towards food.
Another thing I have suspected for a long time and accused myself of, is a lack of respect for food. That sounds like a funny thing for someone to lay claim to, but the evidence speaks loudly. Whatever the opposite of a foodie might be, I am it. My version of a careful restaurant selection is to measure its proximity to where I am at the moment. The nearer the venue, the higher its star-rating in my book. As for the menu itself, I am a person prone to stopping at the first item I find edible. Don’t get me wrong, I do have a range of preferences, it’s just that almost any of the things on the list of what I will eat will pretty much do when it’s time to order. The only thing I am less likely to do than linger over my menu is to take foodie photographs of my food to post on social media.
Thirteen years ago, I changed my stars by getting an early version of bariatric surgery. Lapbands had just come into vogue so I got one installed. The surgery, even then, was laparoscopic. It involved installing a tubular noose around the top part of my stomach. That noose was attached to a tube that ran down to a subcutaneous port located near my navel. This all took the form of five small incisions at various spots around my abdomen. It looked like I had been in a bad knife fight and lost. The tube was eventually filled with a saline solution to expand the nooses size and thereby squeeze the stomach opening tighter. It was quite ingenious as far as prosthesis go in that it could be adjusted by a simple syringe through the abdomen into that port, where saline could be added or extracted as necessary to tighten or loosen the noose. Make it too loose and more food gets through than is optimal. Make it too tight and nothing much gets through and your eyes bug out when you try to ingest something.
The theory is quite simple. Some of us don’t have an eating governor built into our systems and we eat too much. This device was intended to give me a governor to better control my eating both in terms of the pace of my eating and the types of things that can get through the noose at all. It may sound severe, but it really isn’t. There are plenty of ways to eat too much and it certainly doesn’t prevent me from eating the wrong sorts of things. It is merely intended as an aid in managing my eating.
The lapband worked great for me. There is an adjustment period when I imagine the stomach that has been girded must adjust to this stricture. It is initially enflamed, but gradually gets used to it. If I eat very spicy food, I can still enflame the stomach opening so that nothing gets through. Otherwise it works as advertised. I had the saline level adjusted a few times in the first year, but generally found the existence of the noose did most of what it was supposed to do, and the saline was largely irrelevant. A few years after I got my lapband, Kim got the surgery as well. She has struggled more with the lapband than I have. It matters a lot to her band’s effectiveness how filled or unfilled her band is. I rarely get a “blockage”, but she has problems with her ingestion almost daily.
When asked what it feels like, I tell people that if feels like when you take too big a swallow of water and gulp it down anyway…only it lasts for twenty minutes instead of fifteen seconds. Both Kim and I get blocked every once in a while, and we both know “the look”. We can be sitting at the dinner table and if we see one another with eyes slightly bugged out, staring out into space, we know the other person is trying to get past a blockage. The good news is that it does eventually pass. It might take a visit to the bathroom to try to throw-up, but that is mostly to dispel the accumulated mucous that gets sent by the body to easy the irritation. Not pleasant, but also not tragic.
When it was revealed that Al Roker, the NBC weatherman, had gotten a lapband, we all watched him lose weight and then regain weight. The band was not that effective for him, so he replaced it with a more severe form of bariatric surgery, something called a “sleeve”, which is basically a surgical reduction of the size of the stomach. That seems to have worked, but Roker can still be seen to vacillate in his weight. All of these methods can be tricked out if your eating habits are particularly bad. With me, I lost about 130 pounds and quickly gained back about twenty of that. I have hovered at a weight about 110 pounds off my all-time high for the last thirteen years. My weight has thus been stabilized by the band, so I consider it a success even though I never got down to my fighting weight. At some point I just determined that the mechanism was good enough to keep me at a livable weight.
I miss meals often without concern. I graze more than sit and eat proper meals. Big greasy burgers and fries no longer hold any interest to me. I watch food commercials for chain restaurants and almost cringe. I like food that is forked rather than bitten. I like to manage the pace and size of my bites since I can anticipate the problems with big mouthfuls of food that are not chewed well enough. This sounds like I pay a lot of attention to my food, but the truth is it all feels more like a chore than anything else.
What all this food ingestion management has done to me is to take a disregard and disrespect for food and hyperbolize it. There are certain things I can and do like to eat, but for the most part, I now eat to live rather than live to eat. That was always my goal, so I guess I have reached food nirvana.