 Hi YouTube family. Weird topic. I know. Are we going to talk about it? We sure are. I want to tell you guys to start off with that I have been thinking of weight loss surgery for over 10 years. I have battled my weight since I was very young and I battled it through grade school. I was always the heaviest girl there. You know, I wasn't like chubby or anything like that, but everybody else was a pencil. And I always had a lot of meat on my bones. And so I even back then, I remember getting into a size 6x. You know, there's a 6 and then a 6x and then it goes to 7. And thinking I was so fat because I couldn't fit into a 6 anymore. So weight has always been on my mind. And I know that there's no difference after having children of my own. I know that that's not the case just because you're 6x. But one thing that I do want to talk about this for is because as soon as I got married at age 18, I immediately put on 50 pounds. That was a lot of weight. And in a very short time, it was like less than nine months, which was astronomical. And I struggled all through having babies. I was, you know, as I had those babies, I struggled with my weight. And I got up into numbers that I didn't like. And then I would take the weight off and then I would regain it. And then I have another baby and I'd regain more. And my last baby that I had was my daughter. And I did really good during that pregnancy because I'd learned by then, you know, it's my third pregnancy. And I had learned by then that I really needed to be careful about my weight, my eating, how much weight I gained. Because I was heavier starting out with her than I was with my boys. And so I was very careful and I only gained about 15 pounds. But still at the end of that, I was heavier than I'd ever been. So it was still one of those battles and then come around to about, I guess my daughter was about 10 years old. And I lost a bunch of weight on Weight Watchers. I did so good. I lost like 65 pounds and I was so proud of myself. And I kept that weight off for about five years and did so good, but eventually went back up. And then I went through my divorce and, you know, I was at my heaviest after my divorce. And then I went back down. I decided I didn't want to be there. And then I met my husband and we're both foodies. And so we both love to eat together. And it was just something that we did not only for entertainment, but we wanted to find new places to eat and yummy things to eat and just things that we enjoyed. But then it got too far to where I was binging worse than I'd ever binged before. And I am a binge eater. I'm an emotional eater. I'm a binge eater. I'm a sugar addict. Hello, my name's Melissa. I'm a sugar addict. And so what I want to do is I just want to talk to you guys a little bit about this decision I've made about having weight loss surgery. And I didn't come to this lightly. You all know that I had a very scary bout with a wound on the back of my head that was a cyst that opened up, got infected and became necrotic. And I had to have a bunch of it cut out, drained. And then I had to wear an open wound on my head for several months. And I also ended up with MRSA, which as you know is a super bug. It is something that antibiotics have a hard time with. And I had to have IVs for that. Then I've also right after that because my immune system was so far down, I got shingles. And if any of you guys know, it comes from the chicken pox, the virus from the chicken pox, and it's so painful. So I had about three to four months at the beginning of this year, when I literally, I just didn't know how I was going to do it anymore. And you get to that point to where your health becomes so bad that your mind just goes, this isn't worth it. And the pain and in the middle of all that, my stupid fibromyalgia, I say stupid, I shouldn't say it, my lovely fibromyalgia and my trigeminal neuralgia was just absolutely scary. There was days when I was just like, I can't make it to the bathroom and my bathroom is right in my bedroom, you know, I have a bath off my bedroom. And I was just, this is more than I can handle. We have a huge flight of stairs, it's a two level townhouse that we have. And it was hard. I couldn't go downstairs to get my own food. It was just too much. And then after all that, I noticed that my right side, my shoulder, my elbow, my wrist, my hip, my knee and my ankle were really suffering. And I couldn't figure out what in the world is going on. Well, in the period of time, well okay, in the period of time that I had all of those infections and it was on my head, in that period of time, I gained 40 pounds in four months. And I'm now at the heaviest I've ever been in my whole life. And I've said that before in many videos. And I'm just like, how is this ever going to stop? Because I'm so addicted and I'm so out of control because I'm such an emotional eater. How's this ever going to stop? So I decided two things. Number one is that I am going to have bariatric surgery. And I'm going to have it probably within this month. And the other thing is I'm also going to take on a therapist to help me with that, with that emotional part of it. Because not only is it an emotional part, it's like entertainment, it's social, it's all those things. But you know what? Being a food addict, being a sugar addict. We can't stop eating food like somebody can stop smoking a cigarette or stop taking drugs or stop drinking alcohol. We can't stop that because it's our life. But we have to relearn what we're doing. And that's really where I'm at. And I've relearned it over and over again. I got it all up here. But for some reason right here, not much is making it down to this heart. Not that my heart doesn't know better. It's just that at that moment, the heart wants what the heart wants. And lots of people, you know, say that the heart is the seed of the motivation, the figurative heart. I know you guys are knowing that. But the figurative heart and my heart wanted food, my heart wanted donuts, my heart wanted candy and sugar. And that's my big thing. And so I know that this is drastic, but I've been trying for such a long time. This last bout of never being able to get even close to my goal weight in the past, I don't know, probably the past 15 years has just been too much. And I think that my body is finally just truly giving out. And I've noticed that not only is my joints on my right side suffering so much, but my back is too. And any of you that have that kind of chronic pain know that if your back hurts, oh my gosh, you hurt all over like you've got the stinking flu, which is what fibromyalgia is anyway or chronic pain illness is anyway. It's that feeling like you're living in the flu 24 seven. And when you get to the point where you're like, I just can't do this anymore. And I'm spending so much on food that I could easily do something more drastic about it if I wanted to do so. My husband and I, I know that a lot of you saw that I was selling my Mustang. It's actually my son's Mustang. He gave it to me and we decided to sell it because my health is so degraded. And if I don't do something right now, my quality of life as I get older, I'm 51 this year. I turn 51 next month. If I don't do something to get my quality of life up, I'm not going to be around to enjoy my grandkids. I'm not going to be around to enjoy my husband. And I just found him seven years ago. So how can I not stick around for him? So I'm sharing all of this with you guys because I'm about to take a huge journey. And I want to talk to you about it because you are my family and you're my friends and you are my. You're my huge support group. You're my AA meeting without there being alcohol involved. You're my FA meeting, my food anonymous meeting or whatever you want to call it. I love you guys so much. I know that this is a very controversial issue. A lot of people say, well, just diet and exercise. Gosh, if I could list amount of times that I have dieted and exercised and failed and gained all the weight back. And if I had a few dollars for each time, I'd be a millionaire a couple of times over. So haven't come to this decision lightly and just want to share it with you guys. I know that so many of you have reached out to me and said that you deal with so much of the same things. And then a lot of you when I post my want to do better with my weight, whether it's through keto or whatever I talk about at the time. So many of you are saying, we got this. We can do this together because you're going through the same thing. And I don't take that lightly. It might be a better example to you guys, but I don't know how to do that in the situation that I'm in right now. It might be the worst thing I've ever done for myself. But for the first time in a long time, I am doing this for myself because I can't spend my life in the big, dark abyss of being morbidly obese. And I'm actually not even morbidly obese. You know, they have your normal range where you're overweight, where you're obese, where you're morbidly obese. I'm not even in the morbidly obese category. I'm in the super morbidly obese category at this point. That is hard to hear. And I, why I told you about my, my joints. I've been told for the last 10 years that I needed my hip replaced, but I've also been told that if I got the weight off of that hip, that I might be able to live with that hip for an extra five or 10 years without having to have it replaced. And you knew as soon as my knee and my foot and my shoulder started hurting, that I was having the same thing going on where I was going to have to have that replaced, those things replaced because they're just taking a beating with all this weight on them. So I'm going to try. I hope that you guys understand. I know that you all will. I won't be able to get to all of your comments here. I'm going to try. I'll try to answer as many as I can, but please know that this is a really hard subject for me. Um, there's been lots of times when I've been on social media and done different videos and people have said something, you know, and it's hard to hear, you know, about being fat and, you know, just do better. Just get on a diet and exercise and gosh, if you, if you have chronic illness, you want to just smack somebody. It's like somebody saying, walk it off because, you know, nothing looks different about you. You know, just walk it off. You'll be fine. You know, and I just want to smack him with a ball of that and say, walk it off. You know, but anyway, I know you guys are here for the making. I know that you guys are here for that. But for me, the beauty that I need to see in myself needs to come from feeling good too now. So that's what I'm doing. I wanted to share with you guys and that's it for today's video. I love you very, very much. I know that all of you are going through some of the same struggles. I wish you all the very best of mental health to be able to take care of your struggles. And I wish you all good physical health too. Take care of yourselves and I'll see you in my very next video. Love you. Bye.