Almost Gastric Bypass--Part one.

Ice Queen, of Fat Like Me, is a friend of mine from another board. When she gave me the URL of her blog, I began reading. On her blog roll was a place called Almost Gastric Bypass, written and edited by Allan Klein. http://almostgastricbypass2.blogspot.com/

Reading his entry of that day led me to older posts, which in turn made me read all the way back to the blog's beginnings. Then I read blogs on his blog roll. I was hooked, and that's how I got started with my little blog.

Allan's entry today piqued my thoughts, so I'm writing about it. Oh, I also want to give you some idea of his personality, but you'll do much better just to read his writing. He's extremely smart, as well as clever; wickedly funny; can rant like a Hyde Park speaker; generous to a fault; gentle as a kitten and as biting as a goose; loyal to an extreme, perhaps, but someone a friend could forever count on . . . I could go on. He's been called a lot of things besides those, primarily the word "bully," due to his no-nonsense, no bullshit, way of seeing things. He brooks no lies nor denial. I like this guy, and think it would be quite something to know him in real life.

Today is almost precisely one year since he began a low-calorie diet. He weighed somewhere around 480 when he started, and has lost 180 pounds this year. Yes, you read that right--nearly 200 pounds in one year. Breathtaking, isn't it? The diet comes from medical professionals with whom he works closely, and is the old standard: move more, eat less. He has many readers, but about 50 people (many dropped out) are following the plan with him in a major Challenge.

He has always insisted that he blogs for himself, and himself alone. However, he's a natural leader who inspires trust and motivates others to lose weight. All of the people are obese--many are morbidly so--but they're losing weight by leaps and bounds alongside him. It's magnificent to watch. He's done more for more people in this past year than most of us will do for others in a lifetime. The diet plan is literally saving lives.

He uses the metaphor of cancer to describe his morbid obesity. He says he has fat cancer. He watched his wife go through a cancer cure and knows what treatment entails. He knows he'll never be "normal"--that he'll always have to carefully self-monitor his food intake--and will never be able just to eat when hungry. That's because in his case, hunger can mean anything, rather than purely physical hunger. The signals got mixed up somewhere along the line (my vote is primarily genetic, with a very large dose of environment/behavior thrown in). He's willing to do that in order to live. He's in his mid-40s. At that age, and 200 pounds ago, he probably didn't have much longer to live.

Okay. That is a light overview of what he and AGB are about. The next entry will be a riff on his post today.