The Surgery Worked. I Didn’t.

The morning of December 19, 2023, Melinda and I were late to the hospital.

The schedulers had given me the wrong arrival time, so we found ourselves rushing to pre-dawn Houston at 5:30 AM, hearts pounding, convinced I was about to miss the most important medical appointment of my life. It turned out not to matter. The surgeon was stuck in traffic too. Everyone just sort of arrived eventually, slightly embarrassed, and we got on with it.

I had the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass. Laparoscopic — a handful of small incisions across my belly, no big wound to recover from.

The first thing I remember in recovery was the staff worrying about my blood pressure. It wasn’t coming back up the way they wanted it to. I remember thinking calmly to myself, “Wow… that sucks.” The ran a scan to rule out an internal bleed. There wasn’t one — it was just the anesthesia wearing off in its own time — but for a few minutes there, I got a brief reminder that surgery, even routine surgery, is still surgery.

Once they got me to my room, I walked the halls that same day. The internal pain was minimal. The external incisions barely registered. What hurt most, oddly enough, was my back — apparently the surgical team had to do some work to position a 570-pound man on the table, and my body remembered.

I went home the next day on a liquid diet. Christmas dinner that year was beef bone broth from a mug.

I was fine with it. I couldn’t have handled anything else if I’d wanted to. The early weeks were quiet and uneventful — minimal discomfort, slow progress, the occasional sharp reminder when something I’d ingested caused gas to build up in my newly tiny stomach pouch. That expansion hurt. But it always passed.

Emotionally, I was good. Better than good. I was relieved that I’d finally done it, and excited about what came next.

And what came next was the weight coming off.

I wasn’t weighing myself religiously back then — a habit I’ve since corrected — but I could see it happening. In the mirror, in my clothes, in the way I could walk through a hospital corridor without sounding like I’d just run a marathon. Within about nine months of surgery, I was down to roughly 440 pounds. From over 570 to 440. I was ecstatic.

I should have been paying closer attention.

Because somewhere in that nine months, the bad habits started creeping back. Not the volume — my pouch wouldn’t allow that. But the quality. Processed carbs were easier on the new stomach than dense protein. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches went down without any trouble. Baked goods from Starbucks went down without any trouble. A lot of things that weren’t doing me any favors went down without any trouble.

I justified it. I was still losing weight, after all. Overall caloric intake was lower than it had even been. The scale was still moving in the right direction. Why panic?

And the gym? The gym was sporadic at best. A walk in the neighborhood here. A cardio session there. Almost no resistance training. I was losing weight, but I was losing it the wrong way — without building the muscle and the habits that would let me keep it off long-term.

Then life came at me hard.

I got let go from my job at Mirantis. About a year after surgery, my hunger started to return — not the pouch-defying kind, but the persistent, real kind that surgery had quieted for a while. I was also drinking almost weekly, sometimes more. The Starbucks pastries didn’t slow down. The gym was even more sporadic, then basically non-existent.

I noticed the regain the way most people do — not on a scale, but in a shirt. Things that had fit nicely a few months earlier suddenly didn’t. I knew I was losing ground. I just didn’t know how much.

I stopped weighing myself. That’s how you know it’s bad.

If I’m being honest about that period, I hated myself. That’s why was actually underneath all of it. The drinking, the comfort food, the avoidance of the gym, the avoidance of the scale — those weren’t disconnected behaviors. They were a man trying to soothe a man he was furious with. I was using the same things that had built the weight in the first place to numb out the fact that I was building it back.

In early January of this year, I finally stepped on a scale.

It said I was over 500 pounds.

That number had been a mental checkpoint for me — the line I’d worked so hard to get under and stay under. Seeing it again was devastating. I wasn’t just heavier than I’d been at my low; I was back across a threshold that I had told myself I would never cross again.

I was so angry with myself. And underneath the anger was the embarrassment, and underneath the embarrassment was the truth I’d been avoiding for a year:

The surgery was not a cure for obesity. It never was. It was a tool — an extraordinary, life-changing tool — that created the conditions for weight loss. But the tool only worked if I kept showing up for it. And I had stopped showing up.

That’s the part I hadn’t understood until that moment on the scale.

Something clicked. Not a motivational moment, not a sudden burst of inspiration — more like a quiet, exhausted acceptance. The surgery ha done its job. Now I had to do mine.

That’s the work this site is about. The work that started in January, and is still going. The work I’m still figuring out, one 4 AM gym session at a time.