crosswind

Yum. Maybe I'll try that. I'm not much of a cook, though. I'm more of a nuke.

35 days ago I could eat like a horse. I remember not two months ago being able to put away a whole pizza if I was hungry, a huge sub sandwich. Anything you gave me I could finish and the fact that there wasn't anything left to eat was my signal to stop eating. Hahahahahahahaha. It is such an odd new world. I am now an abstemious eater. This morning I poured a normalish looking bowl of Cereal for myself and ate a whopping three mouthfuls before I was done. I left the house, went swimming(yay), went to get my oil checked and then got a car wash because my car looked like it had just returned from Islamabad, Then I had this weird bill that I had to straighten out. It was 3 PM. I had not eaten anything but three swallows of Special K Protein cereal six hours before. I was starving, driving around, thinking I had to get to food at some point and then I realized I could stop *anywhere* to get *anything* to eat. So after my scheduled argument with customer service I went across the street to Jimmy John's and ordered a turkey sub. Now I knew there was no way I could eat even half of it but it seemed like a brilliant option to my hungry, clueless doggy brain. Okay. When I got home I ate the following: Two pinches of turkey and provolone and a tear of bread. The whole damn sandwich was sitting there and I did not want anymore. I ate a small tomato. Done. 4.25 I paid for that thing and it would feed me for a week. I put the rest of it in the fridge with all the the other stuff I've tried to eat this week and could not finish. Imagine making a Lean Cuisine and having it sit through three mealtimes until it was spent. Can you believe that? I can't. I was standing there perusing the rapid acquisitions my fridge was making and then I realized something. I forgot to weigh myself. I've not been weighing myself at home, will not check my weight if it seems like part of a compulsion, and refuse to obsess. But I do jump on when I'm at the club. Before surgery that scale gave me the highest weight so I decided to go with it. I figured it was telling the truth. But I forgot! The health club I go to is full of normal Midwestern people. A lot of them have nordic backgrounds and I think this is why they have this odd custom of running around naked, even the old women. It is a trip. I have always been kind of a modest person and when you're fat, you know, the last thing you're going to do is go bouncing around a locker room without your drawers on. But these women just wander around with nothing on, in all their Midwestern not-so-perfect glory. I know it sounds strange but as I was averting my eyes from a 55 year old female who was not my relative I started to giggle to myself. I have been feeling utterly hideous for at least two years but I look just like everybody else there, pretty much. Suddenly my perspective shifted. I was not the ugliest, fattest human being on the planet. Not that I was looking for other candidates in that locker room but it was a quick hit of reality: I'm just a normal, overweight middle aged person, like these people here. Still can't bring myself to run around in the altogether like these women though. I'm always in my suit or something and demurely step behind a shower curtain for the full monty. One thing I can tell you though is that when you start to feel like you have more control over something as unconscious as your relationship with food, you just have no idea what other little neuroses are going to resolve along with it. So NSV I guess: I forgot to weigh myself and forgot to hate what I look like today. Go Team.

It's most likely gas. Try a gasx strip.

Yo it's Crosswind of the 30 day weight loss diary marathon. I have not been weighing myself but today I went to the POOL ( yay) and swam around ( yay) and then weighed myself (...) scale says: 254. That's a 35 pound loss in roughly a month. I don't feel that much thinner but physically, I do feel better. I can just maneuver around much more easily, bend over, swim better and faster than I did a few weeks ago. My blood pressure is down about ten points and my plantar fascitis/achilles heel thingy is improving. I'm posting this because before, when I had a stomach, I would sift through these boards looking for weight loss updates. I wanted to know: how much weight can you lose in a month? How much in two months? How long til you're thin? From what I can tell a month out won't make you thin but there are other major benefits

Good to know, fyi.

I'm the same way! All I've been able to think about since I got sleeved is all the stuff I want to do now that I either believed I was too fat to do or actually *was* too fat to do. Ride a horse, ride a bike, go on a cruise, do more travelling, go to High School reunions, start doing Pilates again -- alll alllowed after two three or six months. I blew off the surgery emotionally entirely. But now that it's past me, recovery and weight loss both seem like they're going to take FOREVER. Hey remember something for me. When you switch up eating stages, curb that enthusiasm. Seems like every time I moved up a stage I started having problems, but they were my own fault. More Impatience!

"I know how it feels to distract others by making them laugh and the whole time crying inside and hope like hell no one can see it. It tears me apart to see you going through this. If you ever need to talk I'm a phone call away or feel free to send me a msg here, either way, please don't let it eat at you for too long...it's a deep dark place you're headed toward and I worry for you." A darling, concerned person named Renee wrote this to me on another thread. I was surprised. I had to think about this; am I headed to a deep dark place? Maybe. The thing is no one has seen the deep dark place I was in before. If you knew all the shit I've been through in the past five years- and I was almost going to say two because those were really the worst -- you'd probably be amazed I was still walking aorund forming words and paying bills. But I don't think it's just me -- I think anyone who is near three hundred pounds, four, or five -- well this is not a happy circumstance for anyone. How cheerful can you be when your appetite turns on itself and starts eating you? Personally, before this surgery I was almost three hundred pounds, on my last marriage, without any family and basically, I think, I was trying to die. Or at least I did not want to *be* here; consciousness was just too tiring and painful. Then I realized it was not going to work. Or at least, not in a timeframe I was really comfortable with. Every single person with an extreme weight problem has a painful story to tell. How their bodies betrayed them or their lives did, or their support system blew up one day when they were seven or eighteen or fifty -- every single one of us has that kind of thing going on and some of us, I guess walk around with waves of pain rolling off our bodies like steam off a radiator. And here's a tip; if you eat enough you can cover that up and redirect peoples' attention to that instead. I guess. I mean I should probably say that every human being has a painful story to tell whether they have an extreme weight problem or not. Overeating might be a way to manage that pain. Maybe. Maybe. As a person pretty much saturated with fat consciousness I've read all these books, heard thousands of metaphysical, psychological dramas. For some reason one day I was thinking about this episode of a very old tv show called the Professor and the Nanny. Ever notice how many Magic Nannies have been on TV? When I was a kid I didn't think too much about it but I watched a lot of TV and so some of these life observations and smalltime miracles kind of stayed in my head and looped into my childhood consciousness. This is what I got instead of math and science and money management. This is the theme song from the Nanny and the Professor: Soft and sweet Wise and wonderful Oooh our mystical, magical nanny. Since the day that nanny came to stay with us Fantastic things keep happening. Is there really magic in the things she does Or is love the only magic thing that nanny brings You know our nanny showed us you can make the impossible happen. Nanny told us have a little faith and lots of love Phoebe Figalilly is a silly name And so many silly things keep happening What is this magic thing about nanny Is it Love? Or is it Magic? Nodnod. Yeah. Anyway one episode the Nanny was upset because she thought she was gaining weight. There was all this light comedy surrounding the Nanny getting fat and then somehow she manages to go on a date and go for a walk in the park and eat some ice cream. And she loses the five pounds or whatevever. And then she winds up the show saying, " I know how you solve a weight problem! Happiness!" or something like this. And I remembered it because I was seven at the tim and the Nanny had demonstrated how to conquer her problem. Ice cream and theme music. This is the kind of metaphysical crap people have been upsetting themselves with for years inside this topic. It's not that i think that unhappiness is better than happiness or that people don't have weight problems rooted in their bad childhoods or traumatic love affairs or whatever, but take someone like Geneen Roth, who brings women on these retreats to teach them how to love God instead of a salami sandwhich. Fat in her opinion is a spiritual flaw. Or its a psychological flaw. So, dutiful and concerned as we are, we go through all this self-excavation, praying fervently, deeply wishing to know what is wrong with us, and we go to the therapist and we pay these fake weight loss priests to help us and at the end of all this, where are we? Fucked up in the head is what I think. Just fucked up, I mean if you spend forty years in a state of severe anxiety over food, eating, and the condition of your body; convinced you have a "problem" that separates you from the rest of humanity; obsessed and freaked out every minute by your relationship to the scale -- how can a person *not* be? So my point here is I have had kind of a shitty life. I am also so totally not the only one. But my decision to get WLS was more a statement that said: "Fine. But I'm not gonna be FAT." I'm not going to buy all that stuff right now, which may be perfectly viable stuff, it's just not practical. If I had to develop true happiness and and complete self-actualization *before* I lost a hundred pounds I'm not sure if it would ever happen.So forget it, my life is terminally screwed, I am 46 and at the end of my third marriage, my kids are grown and out of the house and I have no idea what I';m even still doing here but goddammit I lost 30 pounds this month. To me the decision to do this was a decision to live. It's depressing to be me I guess but then I don't know you, it might also be hideously depressing to be you. But there's one thing I do know if your stuff is as bad as my stuff: you are not suicidal. You're still fighting like hell.

My goodness, thank you Although I have to say for me it every once in a while it would be nice to have a day without Crosswind...

I thought the same thing. I'm really so focused on liquid and calories and nutrition, plus I have an ear infection and I'm on my second round of antibiotics ( yes, careful reader, I am careful in the pool and use earplugs for an airtight head cabin) , plus I am really still unbelievably f**king bummed at my ex-husband so I decided not to pay much attention to the scale. Bottom line: Something's got to be rearranging itself in there. It's good to be lighter but I'm sure I'll slow down eventually. We all do. But after this month I do suddenly have hope that I will see 170 again in this lifetime. So there's that!

Absolutely Roseib.

Congratulations Oregon Daisy! Your posts have been among the ones that made me take the plunge and go to Mexicali. No going back now .

. I don't know, cmsumom. I stopped weighing myself a while ago. Too dreary. I'll update the board when I do.

A planarian was the first live animal we were ever allowed to fully destroy in seventh grade science class. Planaria are flat worms with heads that look like arrows pointing to either a spelling mistake or a sale price. I have no idea why the world of secondary education is so taken with with these things. I never understood it. I had to learn all about this damn thing in seventh grade and then I had to cut it in half for no reason I could really fathom. How is cutting a worm in half educational? You know if you're at my house you can get in big trouble for that? Once the boys in the neighborhood put somebody's new Stretch Monster on the railroad tracks and oh man did they ever get in trouble. I tell you, school for me always seemed to present more mysteries than it cleared up. Sure enough though, when I went to visit my son's seventh grade class, there they were with the planaria again. Cutting worms in half in seventh grade is not just part of compulsory education, it is a little known *institution* upon which any preteen may ponder, Actually I remember the central lesson about planaria. Planaria are unlike many other species because of their capacity to regenerate, If you cut a planarian in half, you don't havce one dead planarian, you have two, living planarians, both equally clueless. This is supposedly what made it so fun to cut them in half. It would regrow a head but you know just because you can cut something in half and make it grow another head doesn't mean you *should*. I was thinking today about my stomach and how I am starting to respond to the fact that I barely have one anymore. Now why, you might ask, would this be associated with a flatworm I was forced to mutilate in seventh grade? Because I have a weird mind, that's why. What i'm doing here is adapting. We're amazing machines. It's fascinating to realize that the fact is you never needed all that much of that organ to begin with and there are people all over walking around entirely without one. The body has no intention whatsoever of allowing a detail like a missing stomach to interfere with its consumption of nutrients and oxygen and warmth and sex and sleep. Nope. Like a planarian or a lizard regrowing a tail. It's just going to find another route to town. Today is one month and I am getting tired of counting the days. That's clue number one. The first few weeks just dragged on and on interminably: I think day eighteen was the worst for that; a month out seemed like a train scheduled to arrive at the end of the world. Now I'm more interested in what I'm having for dinner, which today turned out to be a Taco Bell bean burrito -- or at least the inside of one. Being quite capable of inhaling one of these things accidently before, it was pretty stunning to open one up and realize all this time I was being sold two teaspoons of Beans inside a tortilla with the circumference of a basketball. But eating is getting easier and that means life is getting easier. I had oatmeal for Breakfast with milk which tasted like a krispy kreme doughnut to me. I had cottage cheese and more oatmeal for dinner ( hey man, it's got seven grams of Protein in it) and day by day my diet is getting more varied and something more like what an actual person would eat. Somehow when that happens something eases up and instead of obsessing and checking your temperature every five minutes and wondering if that last swallow of Soup was in fact the cause of your demise..it all starts to feel more and more like you. One month. Not dead, since March 29, 2011.

Dr. A sleever, Mexicali Mexico, March 29. I paid 8750 but I also flew first class for 2K; you could probably get much cheaper tickets than that to San Diego. Can't say enough good things about the guy. I still write their office like every day with ridiculous questions and they don't seem to mind. I can't even remember how I got started with them but I think I called the number on this site. http://www.mexicolapband.com/contactus.php

Congratulations! I would give that last ten pounds another year. The last ten are always very *slow* to come off.

I'm not sure if this is a "learning" thing -- it's too subterranean for that. Between a real live doctor's warning that your stomach could explode if you eat incorrectly and Mr Tantrum ready to stab you from the inside the minute you screw up, you just stop putting your hand on the stove without really remembering why you don't do that anymore. Some things about recovering from surgery are hard but they get easier so fast how you used to do it becomes a blur. Meggie, I remember those balloons. I did this religiously because my surgeon told me to do it. The key I think in this whole situation is, you know, for once, do what they tell you. No improvising, just do the things. It's funny how I was willing to take the advice of like, Valerie Bertinelli about all this when I could have talked to a bariatric surgeon the whole time .

It seems strange Dr. A's office told you three meals a day and no snacking. I have an email from Gaby from about a week ago saying I should be eating 5 or 6 small meals a day. Maybe you should write or call to clarify. I write to them all the time, practically bomb their email box. They might have some good advice for you.

Please call your doctor. I don't want to scare you but you could have, or come down with, pneumonia. It's too early out to self-treat for something like that. Do it now.

Oh Indy what a drag! Even without the sleeve I've never even *entered* maggianos; it just seemed like there was a hulking carb monster inside the doorway who'd been waiting to meet me my whole life. Maggianos, out to dinner, lasagna, with people you don't know very well...holy macaroni talk about a trial by fire! I don't think I would have survived that without a belly ache the next day either. Sorry that happened to you, you know Italian restaurants have been trying to kill us all for many years. I had a similar thing happen to me the first day of mushies -- I made and ate way too much food and felt completely sick all night long. I felt okay the next day though and made a point of being careful and backing off. I'm glad you shared Dr. A's advice. I'll remember it if I'm ever the victim of a lasagna bomb.

ybnormal, I am sorry for the pain and loss in your life just like I'm hella sorry for mine. My point is really that the vsg is a great surgery for weight loss but it sucks for dead relatives, rotten financial decisions, lost romantic opportunities, homelessness and unfortunate decor. All it does is stop you from eating too much. I think, though, everbody kind of wants to tell the story of how they got fat. "The story of how I got fat, " is always just a f**king abysmal story. It's a true story, but it's *awful* -- usually -- unless there is a pregnancy involved or you're from one of those African tribes that pay many many goats for a really chunky bride. Now I could tell you my story which involves a dying relative, career detonation and being wrongfully chased across the US by the FBI ( no, really) but personally -- and I don't mean this to make your story irrelevant -- or *anyone's* -- but I am not sure if it's relevant to the problem of being overweight. It might have contributed to the story of how you got fat, But it might not be helpful at all in getting rid of the problem. I wonder sometimes if that's part of the issue here. I mean is your life *really* so bad that you gained a hundred pounds or could you have actually had a very shitty life or a very marvelous, Oprah-type life and gotten fat anyway? What I'm trying to say is that I suspect attaching "the story" to being overweight is an unhealthy practice emotionally. It takes all your failings, losses, miseries, bad decisions, abuses, and karmic unfairness and slaps them on your thighs. That's a lot of misery for one pair of thighs to manage, you know? The truth of the matter is that none of those things are in fact on your thighs; what's there is thousands of excess calories. Our surgeons are not treating General Life Suckitude, they are treating a medical problem: obesity. If we all go on afterwards to win the Nobel prize or learn to resurrect lost relatives, well then, rejoice therefore, But it's not really within the scope of treatment here. I should also say that recovery from surgery tends to be a sort of introspective, Proustian period wherein lots of drugs are draining from your system and your internal organs are learning to operate on an alternate channel. This can really take a toll on your emotions. I'm reading people here who leapt out of bed and started doing the Safety Dance but mostly, I'm reading people like me who are already evincing co-morbidities, who have been comforting themselves with carb overloads for a fair number of years, who do not feel all that f**king well thanks because they just had majory surgery. They don't usually sound so thrilled with life frankly until a bit later. So my other point is, I don't think I am personally any more challenged or melancholic than anybody else. My life is not *particularly* shitty. One problem I had is going to clear up over the next year, who knows what's going to come up next but the vsg is not going to help it. The good news is this is the internet and my toes are safe .

It doesn't happen every day but it does happen, say -- every *other* day. I wake up in the morning and I feel sick, like my insides are trying to eat each other or maybe morning sickness. Not enough to expel anything out either end but..queasy and allover kinda bad. I checked my temp and it was 98.8 this morning, but it was 98.1 last night. That concerned me a little because it's supposed to be the other way around. Funny thing is I felt fine yesterday -- the day before that I felt crappy in the morning. I take my PPI immediately after a glass of Water and then have another one right after and sort of try to walk it off -- most days it goes away. I did not sleep well at all last night and really didn't get to sleep about six am which puts me at five hours -- I don't know, maybe that has something to do with it? Also TTTOM should be starting like any minute now. Anyway -- anybody else feel like this in the morning or does it sound like a Bad Sign?

You're right. I didn't have an issue with not being able to eat those calories, I just had some weird idea that since I started at 500 and I had lost thirty pounds I should stay at 500. I've been allowing about 7-800 now. That's plenty negative. And with that and a couple of gummy Vitamins a day and two prilosecs, I'm getting some mojo back here.

Today on my toddle through the cyberverse for some reason I came across a picture of Camryn Manheim. For people from other countries or people who don't give a rats ass what celebrities are doing, Camryn was once a "token" fat actress who was unapologetically fat in all her television roles. She has very long hair and is not bad looking, and once actually wrote a book entitled: "Wake up, I'm fat!" Well, Camryn is looking faboo these days. She must have lost 130 pounds at least and she attributes this, at the age of 50 ( !!!!!!!) to how much time she spends with her little boy of late, running around and riding bikes and walking their dog Flapjack whatever it is called. She says that the weight just dropped off in this healthy effortless fashion through the fulfilling miracle of childrearing. Buying it? Not me. I think she had weight loss surgery, is what I think. It's none of my business and I don't care particularly what internal organs people get rid of or keep. It is, if this is case -- the lying. I would not even care if Camryn was lying -- my question is why would *anybody* lie about it? What's the mechanism of shame and secrecy that would keep a person from admitting that instead of following the US Dietary Guidelines Ensuring Almost Certain Disease and doing 700 useless squat thrusts a day they went to the doctor and got serious medical assistance? Pondering this, I went on a tour of recent weight loss news and comments. Mo'Nique, whom I will adore for the rest of my natural life for going to a women's prison and doing a standup act called " I could have been your cellmate!" is rumored to have had a gastric bypass and the comments on that article are still smoldering with cybernapalm. I learned that WLS is "Deadly" and"Dangerous" and someone else said it was "plastic surgery" and for that reason somehow utterly despicable. It's confounding. I mean nobody is going to die from a boob job but then again nobody is going to cure their heart disease, diabetes and back, knee and hip problems in an afternoon getting one either. Obesity is a medical problem but there are no doctors who can treat for it except surgeons. And here's the other thing -- if you're overweight, I hate to break it to you but *people know this*. It's not like you're keeping it from anyone. It's not like some well-marketed pant-cut is somehow making a hundred extra pounds of you invisible. So why the buried body treatment? Why don't me and Camryn want to tell anybody what really happened? For years I heard that one could easily drop all one's excess weight with a combination of diet and exercise. Except it's not true and there are studies to back this up. Medically? The only treatment our massive modern labyrinth can offer is this. I've had the same problem for twenty years and finally I took it. Can't do nothing. Gotta do something. I still don't want to tell anybody I haven't told already but you know, eventually I think I will. It's not like you can hide the fact you actually look like a different person entirely, either. Anyway. I keep wanting to write one day forward. I want day 24 to be day 25, I wanted day 18 to be day 19 and so forth. I want out of the woods. I want my stomach to calm down and stop acting like a crabby badger. I want restriction without feeling like the contents of the fridge are trying to murder me. But I had better energy today, got out to the park for a walk and noticed just operating the whole apparatus of my body seemed easier. My Cereal did not go down but a chocolate Protein shake pepped me up and for dinner I got potato au gratin Soup and ate too much of it again. But this time it was in a cup and very liquid, so there was no sense that my organs in protest were actually trying to *leave*. I know I'm thinner but I feel like I'm getting that deflated look people get at the front end of WLS. Ah well. It's not like the thirty pounds I was just carrying didn' make me look fat.

TOM came today. Also I'm not sleeping enough: I fell asleep oneish this morning and was up at 7:30 this morning, feeling like the contents of my blender. I was wondering when the beastly part of the month was going to rear and charge. I'm tired and crampy and my fuse is very short. The sky is doing its imitation of concrete. Add this to an extremely annoying phone call from my ex and you've got the whole divx download of Day 27. This leads me to want to fill this whole space with an entire encyclopedia about my ex but I won't. It all sucks but it's all just as normal and crummy as it was before my sleeve. All the regular crappy things about my life are still operating perpetually to wreck my good will and pleasing comportment. In sleeve news, though, I got some reassurance from Dr. A headquarters that mild pain and morning nausea are also completely normal. What they said was that I was making enough stomach acid for a whole stomach as opposed to a thin slice of one and recommended that I take two prilosecs a day instead of one, and that worked well enough. On the other hand I had all kinds of other morning unpleasantness. And in other news....sigh. My computer's power source just died. This is the end of the road for this one I think so if there is no post here on Day 28 don't assume I have expired. I'll be at Best Buy spending too much money. As usual