*swirling red lights and alarm bells*

As you can see from your first letter, you should don your mental asbestos suit now. Prepare for the scorn that gets heaped on extra from strangers on the net to all who are fat and losing it, or on the flip side, admit they might even be attracted to it or okay with it.

Anyway, good for you! :) I hope you enjoy your new body. Keep on being brave and strong, and keep writing.

When I was among the super-obese (also pre-gastric bypass surgery) I had taken my grandmother out to dinner. A normal-weight woman came up to our table and smiled at me.

"Thank you," she said.

I thought maybe I knew her, wasn't sure, so I smiled back and said, "Of course. For what?"

"I was thinking of having dessert," the stranger said. "And then I looked at you and now I won't. So thanks."

And then she turned and walked away.

I have always wondered how pathetic this woman must have been to be so cruel to a stranger just to make herself feel superior. So I wonder, "skinnieminnie," since you are obviously just as cruel as that woman, if you could clue me in on just how pathetic you are? Do you feel any better about yourself now for having trashed someone who has more courage than you ever will have?

After all ... she used her name.

As Sarah noted, you may well see a bunch of letters here from idiots who can't understand someone else's experience and therefore reflexively hate and scorn it.

But why lose the "inner fat girl?" That inner fat girl was just you in a fat body. It's always good to stay in touch with the "you" in you. ;-)

Kudos to you for deciding to do something about your weight. I'm personally not an advocate of the surgery as it strikes me as the easy way out, given that similar results can be achieved with diet and exercise alone.

As a former fat girl myself I see no reason why your bravado has to shrink along with your waistline. I'm the same scrappy girl I was 160lbs ago. Now I'm just healthier and happier.

Keeping the weight off can be a challenge for most of us, but especially for you "post-ops". I'd urge you to rediscover your wayward bravado and channel it towards the creation of the new you, because ultimately if you want to keep losing there will come a time where you need to say goodbye to the fat girl and hello to the healthy girl you are becoming.

Best of luck in the future!

You don't have to lose your bravado along with your stomach.

I was not that different from you - defined on the inside and out by my size. I wasn't obese though - I was anorexic for many years. No matter how much people think this is somehow OK because of the culture's craziness over being thin, it isn't OK when it is you. Being anorexic is not an endless parade of super model experiences. It's not glamorous. It's not even attractive, despite the convention that thin is good. Too thin is not good. Dry, lifeless hair that falls out in hunks, gray skin, eczema that makes scaly patches on your face, chronically chapped lips, MAJOR halitosis, dry skin and extra hair all over your body, walking with a limp because there isn't enough fat on the bottoms of your feet to form a cushion. Bones that show through where bones aren't supposed to show through do not evoke envy and admiration but gasps and disgusted stares and audible, snarky comments from perfect little princesses who, one would think, have never had a real problem in their lives. Real anorexia is ugly. People stare, whisper, say rude things that are cattiness disguised as compassion.

When I gained weight, I noticed a simlar personality transformation. The hard-edged, funny-as-shit angry girl I was inside quieted down. To some extent that has been good - I was walking around with a massive chip on my shoulder, and putting on weight and achieving physical and psychological 'normalcy' made me see how unnecessary and unattractive that chip was. And since my disordered eating created the situations that created the need for Miss Chippy to defend me, it was easy to let it go. But not too far. I simply re-educated her - that strong voice, purged of it's self-absorption and anger over various personal expereiences, has served me well when re-channeled to be my voice for other worthy causes: my personal rights in relationships and work, of course, but also to help friends who are having difficulties, people facing injustice and cruelty (like the letter writer detailinig the asshat who snarkily thanked her for saving her from eating dessert - I would have made that bitch wish she'd ordered a *thousand* desserts and kept her mouth shut).

You ARE that inner voice, it just needs a new mantra - there is no more need for the 'best defense if a good offense' approach to people and life. But that doesn't mean that your toughness can't still serve you, and others, well. That voice helped shape you; you can honor the you in you by keeping it as the only and very worthwhile remnant of your old shape.

First of all, there's really nothing meaty, fascinating, well-written, or interesting about this article -- it is little more than a competent blog post. Its reads like a support group confessional and is about as penetratingly insightful and compelling to the public at large. Extremely obese woman gets gastric bypass surgery and feels her attitude and opinion about herself change . . . where's the story here? Where's the interest? What's the point? How does this connect to the universal?

Who is this supposed to appeal to outside of OTHER morbidly obese or formerly morbdily obese women? Regardless of the subject matter, why is THIS particular article deserving of being published on a major web magazine? What about the writing is at all compelling or even, as I sad, better-rendered than your average blog post? Is this just a form of affirmative action where Salon graciously publishes a mundane, banal article because it represents a misunderstood or maligned demographic?

Lastly, someone in the editoral staff HAS to realize how bizarre and self-parodying an effect this article achieves when the writer speaks about her newly fit, drastically redesigned, smaller "normal" body, and laments the loss of her "righteous fat girl" self . . . only for the late reveal that the author still weights 400 lbs! Still very very "righteously" obese. The last second revelation of the author's weight comes off more as a punchline than anything else and severely underscores how badly constructed and thought-out this article is.