Hello fellow travelers. Thank you for reading this. I'm gonna apologize now that some of its content maybe not only hard to hear but may in fact be inflammatory.

Lets get down to business. For those of you who are pre op, presurgery, pre everything... for those of you who are thinking about this journey this is not a joke. You won't, following surgery, beable to continue to eat the way you do right now and expect to not have consequences. You may still lose weight but you will be putting your very life at risk. Whatever diet the insurance or doctor has you do, if you find yourself breaking the rules then you should seriously consider declining to have surgery and save yourself from potential disaster.

Post surgical complications can for a majority of cases be traced back to the patient who chooses to not follow the most basic post op instructions. The clear liquid phase, full liquid phase, pureed phase, and subsequent phases are all designed to allow your new stomach and intestines to HEAL. You may still feel hungry, and you will be tempted because your mouth hasn't changed one bit. You'll be tempted to pick up some random peice of food and try to chew it real well just 2 or 3 weeks out from surgery and find that you feel miserable or if you are lucky you will vomit but for the unlucky folks it will cause incision leakage which requires more surgery and is a long recovery.

This is not a joke, this is not the easy way out. This is not going to fix you. You are the only one that can make a change. I know many of you who are reading this have convinced yourself that you won't let the above happen to you. But then you struggle and cheat on your pre op diet. You cannot do that. Stick with the program, listen to sound advice. Countless WLS vets exist on this site, use their wisdom, their expertise as a guide.

Let me tell you what we don't need around here, whiners. We don't need people to be whining about how hard their pre op diet is. We that are post op already know. It's not that we don't want to be supportive, but you are complaining about the wrong thing. The pre op diet is about allowing your head to change it's ideas about food. You won't be able to comfort yourself with food anymore. The pre op diet gives you an opportunity to find other coping methods. Go see a psychologist if you need to but don't whine on the forum about how you are struggling or even worse how you've cheated.

We also don't need scale watchers around here. Nothing is more irritating than that competitive nagging that comes with someone complaining that it's been a week since their scale dropped. Even more frustrating is hearing that they fixed it by following the program... lets stop abusing the forums. Stick with the program, period. You will have all the tools you need.

If you have a serious concern about your health, pain, or complications you need to be talking to your doctor about it. No one on this site is a doctor and even if they are they aren't in a position to give you any real medical advise. In fact medical advise given by a professional on this site that you follow and it causes complications can put them at risk for being sued for malpractice. It's not fair to put others in that position. That's why you pay your doctor.

Here's what we need to hear around here, tells us how you are succeeding. Tell us what you have found that helps, that works or that didn't work. This should be a positive place. And here's the even more important thing... you need to listen to that sound advice.

I can verify that following surgery you are not going to want to get out of bed because the gas pain is really awful. Write yourself a poster and have it by your bedside to remind you to WALK. You have to get out of pain, you need to work through it because they can't give you pain meds for the gas. Pain meds don't work on that kind of pain. You have to walk it out. Belch, burp, cough, allow yourself to vomit up that air. The nausea you feel when you first wake up is just trapped air, go ahead and allow yourself to throw up. It will not hurt you. Actually its not like normal vomiting anyway. But it will relieve huge pockets of air. Walk, Walk, Walk, Walk, Walk... then when you get home you'll need to continue to walk. I have a small courtyard in front of my apartment that I do laps around. My neighbors look at me strange but I don't care about them. I'm in pain relieving mode. Did I happen to mention that you should WALK???

So far I'm lucky to have had a fantastic experience with this journey. I look forward to the future although it seems so much more foreign now that it did pre op because the scale is really moving. I think somewhere in my head I thought perhaps I'll be the one that won't lose weight this way. I'm pleased to report that is not the case.

I'm happy to be on this journey with you and even tolerate some pre op jitters. Thank you for reading. I hope I didn't completely offend you. This culture is amazing, the people here are amazingly supportive and apparently have tolerated a ton of nonsense for a long time. Bless them for doing so. Perhaps we can change things a little.