The new normal

Not sure how to start. I will be 59 this month and I have been obese (over 200 lbs and only 5'8" tall) since about 6 months after I got out of the service in July of 1985. For years my motto was "If you eat right, exercise daily and take real good care of yourself...you die anyway". I thought that was working well for me.

About nine or ten years ago I suddenly found out I had type 2 diabetes. (I have had High Blood Pressure (HBP) since I've been about 30.) Time for a lifestyle change, and so my wife and I started referring to the way thing are now as 'the new normal'. I lost some weight but then slowly started putting it back on, still going along 'fat, dumb and happy'. Got my weight back up to around 260 but my health started getting worse. Various pains, Blood Glucose (BG) increasingly hard to control and HBP also hard to control. Went to the ER one day about 4 years ago with pain in the left side of my abdomen and some chest pains. Chest pains turned out to be nothing. They did a CT Scan to check for diverticulitis. The result was no diverticulitis but the Doc told me they did find a rather large tumor on my pancreas. Bad news. The ER Doc told me it was almost certainly cancer of the pancreas. I checked and found out that pancreatic cancer has a survival rate of 5% so I tried to start to get my affairs in order (as they say) because I was fully convinced I was about to die. Fast forward to my surgery in November of 2009. The surgeon I had had told us the type of tumor I had was probably NOT cancer and the surgery to remove it would take about 4 hours. The next day I was told the surgery actually took 9 hours. My surgeon said he came within a hair of closing me up and telling us there was nothing he could do. Recovery was very slow complicated by a gall bladder infection but on the plus side I lost about 60 lbs. I don't recommend that as a weight loss method.

Starting in February 2010 and for the next almost 3 years I slowly gained back up to about 240. I cared less and less about my job, my family, just about everything. Turns out I was suffering from depression. Apparently, depression is not uncommon when I have a life threatening health event and then don't die. In October of last year I started being treated for it and in late January of this year my wife, grown daughter and I started on MFP. I decided 'fat, dumb and happy' wasn't the way I wanted the new normal to be. MFP was my wife's idea actually.

Fast forward to today. My starting weight was officially 237.6 At weigh-in yesterday my weight was 210.6. :happy: I set my goals in ten pound steps. Current goal is 210, then 200, then 190 and so on. Ultimate goal less than 180. My NSV's have been many. Most of which my wife won't let me talk about to people I'm not married to. A couple I can mention, new clothes, new outlook, new energy level. Welcome to the new normal.

As of today my wife is my only MFP friend. Feel free to add me if you want.

Sorry this is so long but when you get to be my age an awful lot has happened to you.