My drinking was the result of an undiagnosed anxiety disorder and a fear of failure. I would feel mostly OK for much of the night until, BOOM, I found myself waking up in my bed the next day. I experienced frequent blackouts - which had never happened when I drank before surgery - due to the way my body absorbed the alcohol. Because my body absorbs food and drink differently than the body of someone who has not had this surgery, it also reacted differently to alcohol. A few years ago, I developed a dependency on alcohol, largely fueled by growing anxiety over my job. I continued to invite friends over to experiment with new, healthier dishes.Īnd it seemed to be working: The weight didn’t come back.īut other problems began. I found that I really had been missing out when it came to vegetables - and discovered just how tasty they can be when roasted and seasoned with smoked Spanish paprika, adobo, cumin, turmeric, curry, garam masala, herbes de Provence, harissa, or za’atar, to name a few.Īs my culinary interests grew, I enrolled in the Institute of Integrative Nutrition because I wanted to learn more about maintaining a healthy lifestyle. I embraced my Latinidad and love of international cuisines by buying spices from those cultures and using them in my cooking. Although I had always enjoyed cooking, I had no idea how to cook healthfully - but I was determined to learn. It took at least another year for me to learn some real skills in the kitchen for my new healthy lifestyle. In fact, since then, I’ve introduced all my family members and at least a dozen friends to the wonder of kale. Slowly but surely, I learned to love mushrooms, broccoli, bok choy, and so much more. I began to invite different friends to come to my house and bring vegetables they loved, so we could cook them together. I decided to start by making healthy cooking fun. Growing up in a Latino household, I had seen very few vegetables in my life, and I didn’t really know where to begin. That’s when I set about the difficult task of relearning what I could eat and, most importantly, learning to love vegetables. But I couldn’t continue to have my favorite Cuban foods at home or eat out as often as I did - at least not if I wanted to keep those 100 pounds off in the long term. I was used to eating whatever I wanted - just in smaller doses. After losing those initial 100 pounds by eating very small portions, I knew things had to change. You still have to do the work.”Īnd so I did. It’s a tool that can help you lose and keep the weight off, but it’s only a tool to help you. A week after New Year’s, I was off for my own surgery in a foreign country - excited and terrified at once.Ī year later, I was down 100 pounds and thrilled with my success. The doctor had already performed gastric bypass surgery on several of my parents’ friends, including my childhood best friend’s father, who had weighed over 400 pounds for as long as I’d known him.īolstered by their stories, I agreed. Then, over Thanksgiving, my parents suggested we visit their friend’s doctor in Barranquilla, Colombia. I had learned to cleverly disguise the legs I had been ashamed of since I was 10 years old.īut at 5 feet, 2 inches tall and weighing in at over 230 pounds at my peak, I was squarely in the morbidly obese category.Īfter losing weight through Weight Watchers in college, quickly gaining it back during my first year in the “real world,” and subsequently struggling to lose it again, I was ready to give up. It was mostly evenly distributed, with the most noticeable concentration of excess weight appearing on my butt and very ample (or, as I called them, enormous) thighs, which I hid via dresses that emphasized my smaller waist. I had always carried my weight fairly well, thanks to my Latina curves. I was young and, as friends put it at the time, “didn’t look that big.” I wasn’t necessarily what most people picture when they imagine someone who makes the difficult decision to undergo such a dramatic and potentially life-threatening operation. I had just come out of a gastric bypass operation in which my doctor created a small pouch from my stomach, bypassed a portion of my small intestine, and connected them to each other.Īt 22 years old, I had just undergone weight loss surgery.
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