Renagade

I have a Migraine from trying to decode this

I have a Migraine from trying to decode this

I have a Migraine from trying to decode this

Well lucky for me, I am a "3rd Party Hand" I sit in an air conditioned, pressurized box all day surrounded by computer. I dont have to deal with daily strenous activity. Just the heavy bag off the chopper, and then climbing stairs with just my computer bag.

The onlne charts and calculators are a gross (very gross...) approximation at best. The 65% suggestion that they supply probably comes from their overall OH community, which given the relative popularity of the different procedures, will include a lot of band patients who averag 40-50%EWL, which brings down the average quite a bit. The other mainstream procedures - RNY, VSG and DS have averages in the 75-90% range; 80% is a good planning number for the VSG, and 100% is quite do-able even with 200lb to lose.
Another point to consider is the basis for establishing one's goal weight - BMI, while having good validity for population studies, is a poor indicator of an individual's health. One can be a normal BMI (20-25, though most docs use 24 or 25 as their basis for their EWL figures) and still be overly fat if one's lean muscle mass is too low, and conversly, one can be very lean, fit and healthy and be "overweight" on the BMI chart. I set my goal to be in the mid teens on body fat %, which is on the lean side of normal for men, but that leaves me at just under an overweight 27 BMI - a normal BMI for me would be excessively skinny and I would have to lose too much lean muscle mass to attain that number. Not good. So, don't worry too much about the numbers at this point, but rest assured that you can attain a healthy weight with the VSG.
Goal setting the way I did it does involve a bit of a moving target as we do tend to lose some muscle mass as we lose weight (we don't have all that fat to heft around anymore,) and no matter how much strength training we may do as we go through our weightloss, some musclulature is going to get lost as things redistribute. My original scale weight goal was 200lb based upon the gross assumption of losing only fat was readjusted down to 190 as my overall weight went down and my body comp shifted some. I've been maintaining 185-190 since January.
Hunger post-op is something of a variable - some will experience little or no hunger while others will still have hunger. Our body's feedback systems for telling us that we are hungry get disturbed by the surgery (beyond the loss of the grehlin hormone production from the sleeve) so some may experience some phantom or head hunger for a while - I would sometimes get hungry shortly after a filling meal (and it doesn't take much to get filled up) but I knew that I wasn't really hungry. But that passes (if it happens at all to you,) and now my hunger is pretty much normal - I get hungry at meal time, if I am distracted and busy at that time, it will pass even if I skip the meal (which then means that I need to catch up to meet my nutrition and calorie goals for the day.) It is not unusual for me to have a snack or something without being particularly hungry for it, but I need to do six meal/snacks a day to get what I need (though I could easily get the 2000 calories per day that I need in three meals if I have mostly junk!) I maintain a healthy, balanced diet that fuels a fairly active lifestyle (swimming, hiking, chasing the puppy, racing cars, etc.) with minimal supplementation and no particular symptoms of deprivation (the weakness and light-headedness that you mention) nor did I experience any of that during the loss phase (at least after the initial couple weeks of surgical recovery.
As to whether the VSG is the right choice, that is a personal decision and is dependant upon many factors. If you have regain concerns from your past history (who here doesn't?) the VSG by all accounts is similar in that regard to the RNY; the duodenal switch is the only one of the mainstream procedures that offers demonstrably better regain resistance over the other WLS. Whether that is worth the added supplemention discipline is a personal matter, but it is something that is worth having on the radar. My wife is 7+ years out on a DS, lost 200lb to normal weight and has maintained that so far, despite many of the classic emotional/psych issues that often accompany morbid obesity.
We all have doubts going into this, but the vast majority of us ultimately find it to be a worthwhile journey with the positives far outweighing (so to speak,) the negatives.