joatsaint

The scope thing was a piece of cake. The hardest part was waiting my turn in the hospital. They gave me the anesthesia, it felt like I blinked my eyes and it was over. I had a little scratchiness in my throat later, but if I hadn't been watching for the scratchiness, I'd have never noticed.

If I get the math right, you're down 67 lbs in 6 months. That's about where I was at 6 months. I too felt like I wasn't losing fast enough, but I try to remind myself of where I was pre-op - when I wasn't losing any weight and fighting a losing battle to keep from gaining. I tried to be happy that I was losing - at any speed. But it can be a real downer when you see so many dropping 20+ lbs month after month. But I realized: 1. Depending on your surgeon, you may have bigger or smaller stomach than someone else. 2. Fast losers don't always detail what they are doing to lose weight fast. All we see is the weight loss. They may be doing way more than I am willing to do to drop the weight - intense workouts or running marathons for all I know. 3. Everyone's metabolism is different. I take it as a given, that a 30 year old is going to lose weight faster than me (at 47). I've led a sedentary life for years, so my metabolism has slowed accordingly. 4. Diet is going to be the biggest factor in my weight loss. If I eat bad carbs and salt, I am going to hang onto the weight. If I stick to good carbs and Protein, I drop weight faster. So I try to keep a positive outlook and have a long term view of my weight loss. Even if I only lose 1/2 lb a week, that's 24 lbs a year. That's far more than I was losing pre-surgery. Here's to your success.

Hells NO! I didn't have to fight that temptation at all!

Congrats on your success. Just a heads-up. When you hit the 3 week stall, don't let it get you down. Just hang in there, the weight will start falling again.

Sherra O.'s question was mine too, are you taking all your supplements. I start getting tired and weak when I skip my vitamins for too many days in a row.

I've read posts saying they were back at work at 3 days post-op. I was off for 8 days including the weekends before returning to work. I was feeling kinda weak, but not in any pain. I have a desk job and don't really have to move around except to take bathroom breaks.

My doc said it counts. Frozen popsicles count too!

Could be worse, if this were the 80's they'd think you had AIDS.

Welcome to the losers bench.

I've been using Premier Protein chocolate shakes since last year. Never get tired of them.

I don't believe I ever felt full for the 1st few months. I had to eat very carefully. Every bite, there was the chance that my stomach would feel like it was twisting in knots. I was only eating about 3/4 of a can of cream of mushroom Soup per day for weeks. I did start feeling "full" at some point, probably around the 4th month post-op. It really sneaks up on ya! I'll feel nothing at first ... and then, one bite more and I'm topped off. No more days of feeling the good old stretched out stomach full of food. Eating one bite too many is just plain uncomfortable. You will quickly learn to eat slowly and about how much you can eat before that full feeling happens.

When I committed to weight loss surgery, I had thought long and hard about how it would change going out with my friends. We always eat out on Saturdays. I decided that nothing was going to change but my attitude towards food. My 1st restaurant meal post-surgery was just like any other, my friends heaped food on their plates and I heaped 3 or 4 tablespoon sized dollops of food on my plate - I wasn't even able to finish that much! :-P We made jokes about how little I could eat and how much per ounce this meal was costing me ( I paid full price for the buffet ). As far as I'm concerned, I'm there for the company, not the food. P.S. I live in a small town, pop. 10,000. Main street is 2 miles long and there are over 30 fast food restaurants in that stretch of pavement. Food is the only entertainment we have! Every business that has tried to provide entertainment shuts down pretty quick, no customers. Even the Library had to close - some guy checked out the book!

startingoveryetagain, I wish I had an easy answer for you, but the truth is there is always going to be someone at work, in your life or that passes you on the street that going to make negative comments about you. No one is universally liked. There are people that make themselves feel better by disparaging others. If you work hard, you're a suckup. If you lose weight, you are vain or doing it the wrong way. If you don't work hard enough, you're a slacker and aren't pulling your weight around here. If you're working hard enough, then you're doing it wrong. I try to go with the flow, that some one is always going to have a comment about me. So I try to make them all equally unhappy! My motto is: I make everyone happy... sometimes by arriving... sometimes by leaving!

I don't think you are off track. You are going through the dreaded 3 week stall. Losing 13 lbs a week for 2 weeks may have sent your body into starvation mode. Now it has to figure out this new lifestyle of yours. Once it figures out that you're not really starving, it will stop holding onto every calorie. The weight will start coming off if you just stick to your eating and exercise plan. It was a worrisome problem I had to learn to live with. I've gone through 8 or 9 stalls and it took a long time to learn that - as long as I kept doing what was working, it would start working again. The worst thing I could do was to start fiddling with my diet plan.

Thanks for the ideas. chocolate premiere Protein : It was a little too thin for my taste, so I had some old chocolate replacement meal powder and mixed in 1 scoop. Tastes great and is thick enough now.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have 3 weights. My highest weight. My pre-op diet starting weight. And my weight hours after surgery. I think they all count in one way or another.

Congrats on your NSV!

During my soft food stage, I was eating: creamy Peanut Butter, yogurt, cheese, soft scrambled eggs, salsa, refried Beans, cream of mushroom Soup and pureed turkey hamburger meat.

Good luck with surgery. I wasn't nervous when I went in for surgery either, but then again I was in denial!!!

My #1 question for my surgeon was how long was the surgery going to take? I had already researched him online and knew quite a bit, but I'd want to know how many years/surgeries he'd done for the Sleeve. How much pain to expect and when to expect to be released from the hospital. Ask him for a realistic expectation for weight loss too. Also, I'd get to his office early and see if I could get into a conversation with some of his patients coming in for follow up appointments. They were the best source of info for me. They were happy to share their stories. When I went in for my 1st appointment. It was a mixture of 1st visits and post-op patients. We were all up tight cause we all knew why we were there, we were nervous, and didn't know how to talk about it. But we wanted to. Luckily I was able to make a joke about all the pages and pages of paperwork. That got the ball rolling and soon we were all talking.

When I'm in those situations, I try to pick foods that are mostly protein. Say they have breakfast Cloches, I tear off almost all the bread and leave just enough to protect my fingers. Same thing with sandwiches or breakfast burritos. I leave just enough bread to hold things together. If there's no other option than to eat junk, then I eat just a few bites, enough to keep me satisfied, but not full. And I drink lots of coffee or Crystal Light, both tend to fill me up.

To paraphrase a line from, "It's a Wonderful Life" - everytime a person gets a Sleeve, a diet pill Marketer cries.

Even before I started losing a significant amount of weight, I was anxious. I had been overweight for 40 years. I knew how to be fat. Now I had to learn to be thin. I don't know how to be thin!!!!!!! But I'm working on it. Plus, after being overweight for so long, losing weight was a dream I had given up on. So for the longest time, I kept expecting something to go wrong and I'd gain the weight back. It took me many months to embrace the idea that my weight was finally under my control and I was finally at a normal weight. Take it a day at a time and eventually the dream will become reality. Good luck on your weight loss.

That's incredible! Congrats on your success!

I've been overweight since grade school. I can still remember going to Sears to buy Husky jeans. To save money, Mom made my shirts... so I don't know what size I wore. Years ago, I found an old picture of me at 5 or 6 yrs. of age. I was actually thin! But I can't ever remember not being fatter than the rest of the kids.