I Feel Fat...Did I Eat Too Much?

Have you ever been really hungry and made a food run that you regretted later? Let's say you're going out to a restaurant with your significant other, and feeling hungry, you order two appetizers to start. You gobble them down, get your main meal with all the add-ons, and when the waitress asks if you want dessert, you order one of those like a starving Ethiopian boy. And you also had two margaritas, because why the fuck not?

Two hours later, you're at home. You're hungry again. How in the fuck did you get so hungry? You don't know. But you're ready to go out with a spear in hand and slaughter your food hunter/gatherer style if that's what it takes. So you put some chicken wings in the oven and eat those.

You're not hungry anymore. You're extremely full. You probably ate somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 calories in a few hours and you hate yourself. You promise yourself to go to the gym tomorrow and beat yourself up (and you do, because you really want this full feeling to go away).

That feeling that you have, where you feel like you ate too much food and your stomach feels distended, is what I've pretty much been feeling 24/7 as of the past few days. A few bites of cottage cheese, a couple pieces of broccoli, even a few swigs of any liquid are all it takes for me to feel stuffed. I keep asking myself "Did I eat too much? Why am I so full? I feel fat..."

Then I do the math and find that there's no possible way I'm eating more than 900 calories a day. And yet this day is the day I've eaten the most since the surgery.

My surgeon said that after two years, my stomach will finally be able to hold half of what I ate. I think about that as I'm feeling full so easily and it hits me:

I will never be fat again. Sure, I'm still fat now, but that's ending quickly. I'm losing about two pounds every day. I'm down 44 pounds now from my peak at 367. At the end of the first 90 days after surgery (when all restrictions on my eating and exercising will be gone), if I lose just an average of a single pound per day I will have lost 110 pounds. At 257 pounds, I will no longer be fat. Even if I could eat half of what I ate before the surgery, I would still only be able to eat, at best, 2,500 calories a day. If I exercise regularly, that would be more than enough to keep myself svelte, and even if I got lazy and didn't work out (fat chance), I wouldn't be consuming enough to make me fat, just unfit.

There's no going back. Damn, that feels good to know.