I want to start off by saying to all the newbies that I may have not posted to yet, WELCOME to RR! I havent been ignoring you, Ive been a touch busy though, my son is starting school shortly and have been having meetings and training so the staff can look after him and his medical needs.

I also want to thank each and every one of the members on here. As some or most of you know, I lost my way through a whole barrel load of issues and was truly lost for 2 years. Throughout that time I regained about 50lbs and have been a miserable mess.
Coming back here was the single most important thing I have done in quite a while. This place is Home. It is support and it is supporting. I have been working hard to lose this weight again, and FINALLY it is starting to show. 2 people today have mentioned it (Ive been a bit quiet on talking about it for fear of jinxing myself..lol). It felt quite good, I definitely have to relearn how to take a compliment, which when I was getting down to goal, I had the gracious thank-you down pat (Newbies, believe me when I say this, you will prob get sick to death for a while of having you losing weight being brought to attention in front of half a Mall every other day by folk who havent seen you for a week or 2...lol).

I know I can sometimes... get a little, just a bit, full of righteousness, gung-ho, round up a Posse and take out the bad guy/gal about the people on here who get given blatant rudeness and disrespect, but you know what? Every single person on here deserves respect. Some may have arrived thinking this might be an easier road to take, but quickly found out that it is not the case.
I really LOVE how country delt to her "kids". I love that. I am still smiling to myself that she stood up for herself and her choices and also her respect not only as a fellow human being, but as their Mother.
Wls not only changes our physical appearance but also our attitudes towards how we get treated and have allowed people to treat us. A common thing to do when big is to not draw any unecessary attention to ourselves by "rocking the boat", so we tend to get trapped in a situation where we get treated shabbily by others, most often friends and family and everytime we have tried to speak up, we get "punished" for it, so in the end, we just take it and get stomach ulcers from the anger and stress......
After WLS (or even just making the decision to have wls), we think, "Hang on, I have been through Major surgery, I work hard everyday to make sure I stay healthy and not dump just looking at a bit of choccie, where do they get off treating me like this?" And so we lay down the law to the offender, and they either a: apologise and learn from what you have said, or b: try to punish you by verbally attacking you with things like "you have changed", "you arent the person I used to know, you are mean etc etc now"... Actually, no, we have just hitched up our girly pants and found to our horror that we have been sitting on our self respect and that no, we do not like to be called names or treated like some horrid bit of dog poop on the bottom of someones shoe...

Maybe I should of put this as a blog....

As I said at the start, I want to say Thank-you to you all, for helping me either directly or indirectly to pick up those girly pants, brush off my poor squished self-respect, feed it a protein shake or 2, get its butt on the treadmill and stop thinking its pouch is ruined...

Its a long, tough road we travel, some are rockier than others, you get banged up a little along the way sometimes, but a few bumbs and bruises add character, and apparently scars are cool..lol or is that just for guys? haha either way, Ive embraced the bumps and bruises and guess what?

Life Is Not Over. I get a another chance to live it and to live it properly having learned a huge lesson or 10 along the way this past 24mths. My success is right there waiting for me and I will be damned if anyone is ever going to take that away from me again.

Best wishes

__________________
Leelee
Your Attitude determines Your Altitude