Leaderboard

1. Wore a minidress for the first time in my life 2. It is a size 4!!!!! 3. No spanx 4. No thigh chafing!

I applied and was hired as a high school teacher for this fall! I'm three months post-op and am very nervous about shopping for new clothes when the time comes. Also, my department eats lunch together, so I'm wondering how that will work out. I have to move to another state for this job, so I'll be alone for about 9 months before my family joins me. I'm so excited, scared, nervous, and happy!

Happy Thursday! Nothing much to update on, I'm just writing to keep up the habit. I've been plugging away at food/protein/water goals. Going grocery shopping tomorrow, so next week I'll be (slowly) introducing new foods to my sleeve. I still feel a good amount of fatigue which currently is my biggest frustration. There are people who reported feeling their energy come back by now, and while I have had a steady increase, I still get fatigued pretty quickly. Fingers crossed that I'll turn a corner soon!

We all know that getting plenty of sleep is important to normal functioning and health. And sleep deprivation has been associated with an increased risk of obesity in both animals and humans — it results in hyperphagia (increased appetite) and weight gain. Dr. Hee-Jin IM of the Korea University Anam Hospital in Seoul, Republic of Korea and colleagues focused on the amount of weekend sleep extension (catch-up sleep) that approximately 2200 adults reported getting on a regular basis. The BMIs of the weekend catch up sleepers were significantly lower than that of the folks who did not catch up on weekends — 22.8 vs 23.1 respectively, after controlling for age, gender, average sleep duration, and other demographic factors. http://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/19/catch-sleep-keeps-one-trim-11445

Well done!

I was sleeved on June 1, and my first restaurant experience was Father's Day. My family was amazing! I ordered a plate, and my sweet family let me eat from theirs. It worked great! I had some sweet potato and applesauce. Yummy! 🤤 I will tell you that my doctor gave me a medical restriction card that allows me to order from the kids menu at any restaurant. You might want to check into that. Just keep swimming!

Agreed 100% with @Introversion. I weighed quite a bit more than you when I had surgery and I lost 45 lbs in 2 months, so I think you are doing fantastic.

So today while I was watching this female Asian longhorned beetle oviposite her egg I was thinking about the science behind WLS. How many experiments aka..clinical trials have been done, are still being done, and will be done in the future to help doctors figure out the complex mysteries of this disease we call obesity. It blows my mind to even try to think of all the variables involved in the design of these trials. My research focuses on this beetle, a much simpler organism, and yet it can take days of thought and reading current published research to determine the variables that need to be considered and controlled during a planned experiment. Sometimes we even design pre-experiments just to figure out whether something is going to effect something else before we run the main experiment. All of this thinking has made me realize how little we really know. Why has my diabetes gone into remission after surgery? This surgery has done what following a low carb diet alone could not do, normalize my blood sugars minus any medications. I haven't had time to read all of the published literature on this subject, but I would like to. My mind is trained to looked for patterns in data so of course this is the way I am approaching my journey after this surgery. I am logging everything I eat, drink, and my exercise. I will export the data to excel and graph it to see if I can figure out how my body works now in relation to theses things and weight loss. I know for some people, maybe most, this is not something they would want to do. It may seem excessive and time consuming, but I hope to learn something that will be useful to me during the maintenance phase. I am increasingly more convinced that low carb is going to be the best diet for me to follow long term. I just don't see any reason to test the waters when I am doing so well right now. I have zero cravings for sugar, bread, rice, pasta... my energy levels are good, my bs are excellent, and I am losing weight. These are my musings for today, 5 weeks post-op.

I wish you good luck and many blessings in your journey. My best advice is to start working on changing your relationship with food now. Figure out what your issues are and do whatever you need to do to start addressing them. Because you are going to Mexico for your surgery you will need to do this largely on your own. I also had my surgery in Mexico and I scheduled it 2months out so I would have time to do research and get myself mentally prepared. Stick with the plan your doctor gives you and ask questions on this forum or through whatever support system your doctor has set up for you. I went through Bariactric Pal and Dr. Illan and they have a Facebook page for patients and we have lifetime support with the nutritionist.

Since you are at the beginning of this process, I would recommend three things. 1. Take a good before photograph of yourself, so that you have something to compare to after surgery. Many times we are blind to our obesity. We do not see ourselves. Therefore when the weight begins to drop off rather dramatically, we question if this is really happening. Photographs are a good visualization of our success. Many people carry a before and after photo with them, just to remind themselves of their success. 2. Walk 30 minutes each day, every day until surgery (or equivalent exercise). Walking helps the recovery process go smoothly and minimized the pain levels from surgery. 3. Wean yourself from caffeine and carbonated beverages now. After I gave up my 6 diet coke a day habit, I suffered from a week of severe withdrawal syndrome consisting of severe headaches and body aches. I was miserable. You don't want to combine the effects of caffeine withdrawal with the effects of surgery.