Miriam

I know that different NUTS have different methods. My NUT told me 5 meals a day. I find that I can't do more than 4, and at least at the beginning, I felt really hungry if more than 4 hours elapsed between meals. So I do think you need to listen to what your sleeve tells you, and so long as you're just eating a few bites per meal, I don't think there's anything terrible about that. My only question is how you get all your drinks in if you're eating every couple of hours?

Sorry for the delay in responding - have been traveling and had no time to even get online. Yeah, she was very clear that she was totally against protein shakes - apparently this is what all the bariatric NUTs in the country (I'm currently living outside the U.S.) decided on together, for a bunch of reasons which I absolutely don't agree with and which honestly don't apply to me. (For example, they're afraid that people will get used to drinking shakes rather than eating - let me assure you that that would NEVER be the case with me - I like eating too much!) So I have ignored her advice to an extent, but since I have a really hard time getting down the protein shakes, I don't force myself to drink too much, either. That's probably a mistake. I'll have to discuss this again with her next time I see her, which is in about a month. I am working out - probably not as intensively as some, but I try to do a half hour of combined walking / jogging 4-5 times a week as well as 30-45 minutes of toning 4-5 times a week. I'm losing really well as far as I'm concerned, so I can't complain about that. My energy levels are usually fine, but I do make sure to get in my Multivitamins. Honestly, I have no idea how I'm managing on the number of calories that I'm eating, but I really don't know how I could up it (OK, other than forcing myself to drink more protein shakes, but those fill me up too) - my sleeve just won't let me eat more.

She told me I didn't need to worry about getting protein in at this point, because my body had enough protein stores to last me a while. I'm not too convinced about that, though. Fat? Yeah, plenty in storage - go ahead and take it all! But protein? Not so sure.

Glad to know that I'm not the only one!

Thanks - that's a very sensible way of looking at things!

OK, I never in my life thought that I'd ask this question (I was always a huge volume eater), but here goes: Am I eating enough? I'm currently almost 12 weeks post-op, feeling quite good, losing weight, but I have this nagging feeling that I should be eating more. I have an appointment with my NUT in about 5 weeks, but in the meantime, I was wondering what others' experience has been with this. Until now, I haven't been weighing my food, just estimating how much I could eat and usually ended up leaving some over. Today I prepared what was meant to be two meals for my working hours (I usually eat four meals a day) and decided to weight it - it came out to just over an ounce of chicken for those two meals. Other meals (egg salad, tuna, etc. sometimes with a little bit of veggies or carbs thrown in) are pretty similar in volume. So that means I'm eating around 2 oz. of food (almost all protein) a day. My NUT is against Protein shakes (don't ask) which I'm sort of ignoring, but I can't say I like them very much so I have maybe 1/4 of a cup of Protein shake (5 grams of protein) on my good days. Most days I don't have any protein shake at all. Once in a while (maybe a couple of times a week) I also have a cup or two of pure chicken broth over the course of the day. That's my total food intake. As I said, I'm feeling OK, but feeling a little nervous that I should be eating a little more at this stage. (If I do, I end up throwing it all up.) What do you guys think?

LOVE that line and am definitely stealing it! I'm the same. So far half my face has disappeared, but only one or two of my multiple chins which is VERY sad...

I can't wait for a B cup! (I'm only an inch taller than you - actually half an inch but don't tell anyone...)

I also had terrible constipation a few weeks out of surgery. In the end, the only thing that really helped was a laxative. After that, I found that regular exercise made a big difference.

I told very few people, so when people ask me about what I'm doing to lose weight, I just say that I cut carbs to a minimum (true - as it happens to be, I've cut all food to a minimum!) and am exercising (also true). I think some people will suspect because the weight loss is just a bit too rapid by anyone's standards - and certainly mine - but my policy of keeping it quiet hasn't changed so far. It's really no one's business but mine.

I know how you feel. I've also told only a few people that I'm very close to, and I'm constantly getting admiring comments about my weight loss (it's quite noticeable). Just today someone told me that she found it hard to lose just 10 lbs. and asked me if I had done anything drastic to lose so much weight. Well, I know many consider weight loss surgery drastic, but to me it was the absolutely only solution to my weight issues and therefore sensible, not drasatic. I was able to honestly answer that no, I didn't do anything drastic... but felt guilty nonetheless.

I started my bariatric journey absolutely sure that I was going to do the DS. (We had friends who had done it - as in the whole family, parents and kids - and were thrilled with the results, and that's what even got me to consider bariatric surgery.) But my surgeon (pretty much the only one in my area who had experience with DS and could accept my insurance) refused to allow me to do DS - said it was too extreme for someone with my BMI (around 40 at the time), and offered me the choice of either band or sleeve. I knew that lots of people were unhappy with the band, so decided to go with the sleeve. Truthfully, now I'm so happy that I did that and not DS. My weight loss is going really well, and the idea of having to swallow all those pills (I can't even get in my multivitamin every day) - ugh! Despite certain issues with my sleeve (very restrictive, quite a bit of throwing up), I still LOVE it.

Hey, are we twins or what? Those are my problem areas too! I really love callanetics (not a misspelling), and find the abs exercises terrific - not so intense that I can't do them (a major problem with a lot of abs exercises since my core is so weak) but I definitely do feel the workout. For me, the progress isn't as fast as with some other body parts, but that's no surprise because those were the parts that always responded to any exercise faster, while my pooch is ... I'm sure you know what I mean. But it does work, at least for me.

I don't know if I could eat that much even with slow grazing - my sleeve just doesn't have the capacity at the moment. Oh, and I really don't have that much patience :-) But I know that eventually I will be able to get more in and I do NOT want to get back into the habit of grazing for when that happens. If it works for you, though, that's great.

Sounds like that works well for you, but I definitely don't want to get into the habit of eating and drinking together (among other things, I find that having to separate the two has reduced my grazing to almost zero). I also pack by volume - and I pack VERY little. The problem is that my sleeve capacity can change from one meal to the next (my NUT assured me that this was normal) so I can't necessarily eat one day what I ate the day before. That's part of what gets me into trouble with overeating - I'm so sure I should be able to eat this teeny tiny piece, but sometimes I just can't, regardless of what I can eat at other times. For example, on Friday I cooked myself an egg and made egg salad. (I'm not in the mushy phase but I love egg salad, so why not?) I was able to eat literally about 1/6 (if that much) of that single egg salad. When I showed what was left to my family, they couldn't believe I'd even begun to eat it, and they've seen how little I can eat. The next day, I easily polished off the rest of the salad in one sitting. (Truth to tell I was long overdue for a meal so my sleeve was emptier than usual, but still... those extremes make it really hard to always plan for exact volume.)

So glad to hear that I'm not the only slow learner around here :-) I still tend to overeat way more than I should (by overeat I mean one or two bites more than I should, but that's already enough to make me miserable for hours and hours) and always ask myself the same thing: Why can't I learn from previous mistakes? Am really trying to work on that - any suggestions, anybody?

I felt that way at the two-week mark, too. Actually, I still do from time to time (now exactly 2.5 months out), but pretty rarely. I just had a moment of that today when I opened the fridge to pull out my teeny-tiny supper, but I got over it really fast. And believe me that I was always a food lover as well - and could eat it in tremendous quantities, too. But there's actually something really liberating about not being hungry or eating all the time - it will take time, but I believe that it'll come to you, too. Right now, I think that the feelings that you're experiencing are pretty normal.

Well, I had one or two thoughts of "why did I do this to myself?" in the first couple of days post-op, when I was feeling pretty lousy (nauseous, in pain, etc.) but since I had read beforehand that this was pretty normal, I managed to get over them quite quickly. Since then - NO WAY! I love, love, love my sleeve! Now I'm not going to say that I haven't had any issues as a result of the surgery. I sometimes end up with food stuck in my sleeve if I eat too fast or too much (I really try to eat according to the new rules, but sometimes slip up) and then end up throwing it up so I don't stay uncomfortable for hours and hours. I have a hard time swallowing large vitamin pills. It's not always easy to get in enough protein and liquids. But these are all minor issues compared to the big one (no pun intended), which is, obviously, my weight. That makes me happy enough to easily ignore all the minor issues I have to deal with - especially knowing that this is weight that I will hopefully never put on again.

Good luck with your surgery! Be prepared for a tough first week or two or even longer (sorry if I'm scaring you - I know that some people sail through it - but I certainly wasn't one of them!), but it DOES get better, and when it does, it's great. Now almost 10 weeks post-op and I seriously cannot believe how amazingly my body has changed in such a short time. And I love the fact that I'm so not into food (most of the time - every so often I find myself looking at recipe after recipe that I know I can't even eat...), at least at the moment. I can't even regret not doing the sleeve earlier since I wasn't at a high enough BMI for my insurance to approve it till recently, but I can certainly say that I don't regret my decision to do it whatsoever!

Well, another post above says that maybe we shouldn't set very ambitious goals (e.g., 115 lbs.) so I'm a little embarrassed to even mention my goal, which is more ambitious than that (approx. 105 lbs.). But see, I know that even when I was 115 lbs. (way back at the beginning of high school, but the same height that I am now - 5'2"), I was more than a bit pudgy, even though I was only a size 8 or so. At 140 lbs. or so, I was a size 12, but I have videos and pictures from that time and believe me that I was very noticeably overweight. So maybe now my ambitious goal makes more sense. Having said that, I know two things which I think are very important for everyone to keep in mind: 1) Even if I never get down beyond 140, I will still be very happy, because it's a heck of a lot better than I ever could have done without the sleeve. (With the most intense diet that I was ever on, I got down to around 155, but only managed to maintain that for a month or so before beginning to regain all the weight plus more). So 105 is certainly not a "make or break" goal for me, just something for me to aim at. 2) I am aware that my weight loss this time around (combined with the exercise I'm doing) is giving my body a very different shape compared to previous weight loss attempts. I seem to be losing more of my stomach (yay! As an apple-shape that's especially imortant.), etc. So I might find out that when I hit 140 or 130 I'm a much smaller size than I anticipated being at that weight. So again, this goal is not carved in stone. In general, that final weight goal is the only sleeve goal I have that I've expressed in weight. All my other goals are size related (When I go on summer vacation I'll be a size 14-16, when I travel in the winter I'll be a size 6-8, etc.). I find that to be much more useful (and pleasurable!) than weight goals. But when I get to size 6-8, my brain stops working - I literally cannot picture myself that size, let alone smaller. So that's where the weight goal comes into play.

Love it! Can't wait to get there as well - in the meantime I'm still plowing through all the clothes I've put into storage over the years. I'm currently in this weird in between size (there are some clothes I have in two sizes - the bigger is way too big and the smaller is still too small) but hey, as long as I'm getting smaller, that should be my biggest complaint!

Thanks for sharing - very inspirational! And I do empathize with you on the throwing up - I have issues with that as well. I can't wait to be at the stage that you're at, but even now, throwing up and all, the journey is quite amazing.

Very similar stats to yours - I'm about 5'2", started off at 230 and size 22/24. Eight weeks later - am down to a size 18 and what's amazing to me, things that totally didn't fit one week fit great the next - the changes are so constant that there's no way to predict exactly what will fit next and when. But here's what's interesting - Cheri started off with similar height / weight stats but a much smaller size and took longer to go down one size (despite an impressive weight loss) - and I'm sure that every other person has their own individual story which will somewhat differ from the next person's story, so just be assured that you WILL be thinner three months out, but by how much? Only your body can tell! Best of luck with the surgery and everything that comes afterwards, Miriam

Hey, I really like your idea of keeping a weight in the car for arm exercises! I think I'll do the same - thanks for that!

I do indoor / treadmill walking and other exercise while watching The Biggest Loser (there's a great site with lots of shows including Biggest Loser Australia) - only watch while exercising, so if I want to know what happens next, I've got to exercise! I also have to add that my energy levels have gone up tremendously since I started exercising about 5 or 6 weeks post-op and I feel a difference even if I've missed only one day of exercise. So that is an addiitonal motivator for me to keep on track with my exercise program.