I started LCing in Jan 2002. My start weight was 377 lb and my goal was 177 lb. For five months I did really good and got down to 325 lb. Then one bowl of ice cream that I got talked into derailed the whole works. It was at this point that I finally truly believed in the concept of sugar addiction and discovered that I am very much addicted to sugar. For the next nearly twelve years it was an ongoing battle of restart LC and then get derailed by one thing or another. Most rebounds, of course, left me at a higher weight than before. At one point I was 408 lb. My most successful attempt was in early 2009 when I got down to 304 lb, when a business trip derailed me and I ended up at about 387 lb.

In 2005 I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes. Sometimes I could control it and sometimes I couldn't. My determination and willpower couldn't overcome the sugar addiction long enough. In April 2013 I ended up on insulin, but that left me in a Catch-22. If I took enough insulin in the morning to match the sugar/carbs that I was consuming, then I HAD to consume that much in order to avoid a crash, but if I consumed what I knew what the right dose for being a good boy, then if I wasn't a good boy my sugars would be unacceptably high. Since I couldn't be a good boy reliably enough, my A1c ended up at 12.4, which is about what it was when I was first diagnosed. Something drastic had to be done.

A bit before that I had heard that gastric bypass surgery had a high rate of effectively curing Type II diabetes overnight -- literally. I did some research and discovered that this was, amazingly, true. So I went to see a bariatric surgeon and ended up deciding that this was my best bet if I wanted to avoid the serious diabetic complications that I was setting myself up for. To be honest, the weight loss potential was seen as a nice side benefit and had it not been for the diabetes path I was on I'm pretty sure I would have never considered it and continued trying to find the willpower to tackle things with LC alone.

I finally got all of the preliminaries done and had the surgery on March 9th of this year. While I wasn't one of the folks that got off all their diabetic meds the next day (and I have met several that did) my insulin was down 90% the next day. It has been three months since the surgery and now I am only on 2000mg of metformin a day and my sugars are in the 100 mg/dl range. Furthermore, I have gone from 333 lb the day before the surgery to 269 lb this morning -- 108 lb lost from my original LC start and 92 lb to go to my original (and still current) goal. Despite some post-surgical complications that made the first roughly four weeks pretty miserable, I am in very good shape now with more energy that I had before and am, thus far, in rock solid control of my eating and, particularly, my sugar addiction.

I'm hoping -- and with some confidence -- to make my 177 lb goal by my 50th birthday on Jan 26, 2015. I only have to average 12 lb/mo between now and then and over the last three months I've averaged 21 lb/mo, so it seems fairly reasonable.