MississippiQueen

Yes there are people on this forum who regret the surgery, but I'm not one of them! Best thing I ever did.. If I was able to be successful with diet and exercise alone then I wouldn't have ever gotten up to 360 pounds in the first place. The way I feel about it is our stomachs are not MADE for eating three square meals a day plus a few Snacks here and there.... An unsleeved stomach is the size of a FOOTBALL ya know so you can fill up and then not eat for a few days.. Do I really need a stomach the size of a FOOTBALL in a culture where you eat three times a day?????
Been sleeved for three and a half months now and it's going great. I can eat anything I want but choose not to most of the time. The portions are satisfying and I'm losing weight albeit a bit slower than many other sleevers.

Is it something to do with steers and.....oh nevermind.

lol maybe..... just lookin for some real people who arent judgmental know-it-alls who put unsolicited dictionary definitions on the BEGINNER forums. And oh yeah, Im 38 yrs. old, not 12. Ive always been a rebel. #ranting#raving#reallynotabitch

No offense to most veterans on here, but sometimes we newbies would like to converse amongst ourselves. Which is primarily why I go to the forums marked BEGINNERS. Most people on this site are very helpful but some are just plain ol assholes. lol

lol maybe..... just lookin for some real people who arent judgmental know-it-alls who put unsolicited dictionary definitions on the BEGINNER forums. And oh yeah, Im 38 yrs. old, not 12. Ive always been a rebel. #ranting#raving#reallynotabitch

No offense to most veterans on here, but sometimes we newbies would like to converse amongst ourselves. Which is primarily why I go to the forums marked BEGINNERS. Most people on this site are very helpful but some are just plain ol assholes. lol

Surgery November 21st. Down 30 lbs. today!

I have found people forget very easily. I eat lunch at a local Senior Center. Folks are always pushing second helpings & Desserts at me. I always reply, "My tummy can't hold any more!" Most everyone heard I went to the Twin Cities to be Banded several years ago, but I don't want the conversation EVERY DAY. Also elsewhere my family knows it and my son keeps reminding me with every bite. I eat slower with much chewing, and they are done eating in 5 minutes! So they watch & comment. I finally told them to "Zip it Up, I'll take care of me!"
I don't know why I do not feel like conversing about it, but it's my tool & they can get their own tool or read about it on these web sites. I don't want to prove it's GREAT every day, but I would not part with mine for a million bucks!

The thing about torrid love affairs is they never end with a clean break. Sure, you have every reason to think it’s over. You changed your phone number, attended a weekly support group, burned every picture of the two of you together and started dating a healthier, saner person - one your friends actually like. But passionate romances don’t die until the second or third bullet. There’s always at least one steamy reconciliation before the thing is finally stone cold dead.


You’ll run into your ex at the store and go a little weak at the knees, or you’ll send a gushing e-mail on a lonely Friday night, or you’ll decide that avoidance is childish and the grownup thing to do is at least be friends. Before you know it, you’re right back where you were, and after the initial exhilaration dies you realize your mistake. Nothing’s really changed and you’ve wasted time and emotion yet again on someone who isn’t and never will be good for you.
An unhealthy relationship with food is eerily similar.
You may be stunned to learn that you’re so in love with the simple act of eating. One of the most common things bariatric surgeons hear on follow-up visits is, “I never realized what a relationship I had with food”. You thought your weight problem was from ignorance over what to eat, or faulty childhood messaging, or not making time to care for yourself, or your grandmother’s genes. That may be where it started, but that’s not what kept it going.
After surgery, you figure out the truth. You’ve been embedded in a romance as sticky and hard to leave as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s on-again-off-again love affair.
Just like lovers in a doomed romance, you’ll be tempted to drift back into your old relationship with food. And it’ll sneak up on you when you’re most vulnerable, right when you think you’ve got the whole thing whipped.
Here’s what happens. Your surgery gave you a massive head start. It forced you to change your eating habits, it did away with your hunger pangs and allowed you to drop weight at breathtaking speed. You got positive reinforcement from the immediate success of your new behavior and from the fact that you just flat out felt better. Every week contains a little drama in the form of unaccustomed praise, changed relationships, different activities, and new clothes.
But the excitement will wane. Life will settle down, just like someone who’s had a thrilling engagement with lots of gifts, a fabulous wedding, an extended honeymoon, and the first couple of scary post-marriage fights and rapturous make-up sessions, but now has to get used to day-to-day married life with the spouse who leaves a trail of potato chips in his wake and the mother-in-law who calls three times a day. In other words, life will become normal, and, at times, even mundane.
Even more sobering, your body will adapt over time. You’ll be able to undo the straitjacket put on your system by the surgery.
For those who had a gastric bypass or vertical sleeve operation, two things come into play that will test your resolve. First, you’ll get hungry again. Even though the surgery bypassed ghrelin, the hunger hormone, other hormones will ramp up to fill the void, and most patients will start feeling hungry again, anywhere from six to twenty-four months after the surgery.
Second, your new stomach will adjust and toughen up, just like babies’ feet callous as they learn to walk. It will expand a bit, and its cells will change to create more and thicker mucus which cushions the food you ingest, making it easier to eat bigger quantities and varieties of food.
If you had the gastric bypass surgery, a third issue will come into play. The dumping syndrome that’s kept you from eating sugar will disappear in most patients. So the piece of cake that would have made you violently ill six months ago won’t cause a problem now.
For lap band patients, two issues can lure you back into your old lifestyle. First, you’ve figured out how to cheat, and you’re familiar enough with the band that you’re no longer worried about hurting yourself if you thwart its restriction. You can drink high calorie milk shakes or put your favorite food in a blender and eat as much as you want.
Second, you rely on the lap band to limit your food intake like a surgical shock collar rather than taking control of your own behavior, creating a negative reinforcement method of diet control that starts to grate on you. You have your surgeon decrease the saline in your lap band for special occasions, like Thanksgiving, and then put in enough saline “to make me throw up” when you want to lose more weight instead of taking the steering wheel and driving your own eating and exercise plan. Over time, you’ll begin to resent the choke hold the band has over your body and you’ll grow tired of the twice-monthly maintenance visits to your doctor.
That’s why the first six months after your operation should be treated like a sprint, wringing every benefit you can from the surgery while you’ve got all its mechanical and behavioral benefits going for you – the compliments, the falling scale numbers, the lack of appetite, and the physical inability to eat too much. This time won’t last forever, and those six months will be the best shot most people ever get at losing their excess weight.
You’ll learn to listen to your body to tell you when you need food. You’ll figure out what it feels like when your glucose is low, which means you need energy and should put some fuel in your tank. You’ll be able to tell the difference between real hunger versus head hunger, between needing energy and just mindlessly following an eating habit, between desiring food versus needing food.
There is no finish line. There is no moment when you can say, okay, I’ve won that battle and I can forget about it. Like a recovering alcoholic has to pay attention to what he drinks for the rest of his life, you’ve got to be vigilant about diet and exercise for the rest of yours.
But, you say, that sounds depressing. Surely life wasn’t meant to be quite so restrictive. That’s just too hard.
Actually, it’s not. It’s just conducting yourself in a fashion that’s consistent with your goals, something you’ve been doing your entire life with your job, your marriage, your family, and your friends.
Think about it.
The things you’re proudest of in life are the things that have required the greatest work and sacrifice - your education, your children, your marriage, your career. Maintaining a healthy weight is no different and it’s something you should pat yourself on the back every day for doing.
You’ve tasted what life is like without the suffocating excess weight. Your new habits are far less restrictive than the physical, social and emotional limitations your old weight burdened you with.
It’s time to kick your dysfunctional romance with food out of your life forever.

I get hungry... But being further out I can eat more and it stays with me longer.. I DO still have head hunger! My mouth wants food from the moment I wake up until I go to bed somedays..
So I still fight that..
But hunger.. I know the sleeve takes that "away" for some. But my question is to the ones that get pissed when they feel some hunger (not you earth) sometimes. They say "I was told I would never feel hungry again" "I've been bamboozled"

Isn't hungry natural? Your body feels hunger for a reason it needs to be fueled.. To think that you would never get this natural sensation is a bit odd, right?
Or am I talking out my azz again?

Butter mentioned this, but I would like to emphasize: hunger does not go away for everyone with the sleeve. Mine not only didn't go away, but came back stronger than before. I am very hungry about every two hours or so. I do get filled up very quickly because of the sleeve of course, but the hunger is there before eating, SO THERE. So don't believe that just because you get the sleeve, you will never feel very hungry. It depends on the person.

Great thread. I've been sleeved 18 months. Never vomited, never dumped, was hypoglycemic before being sleeved due to very poor diet but no more. Yes, somewhere in the 6-9 month period there is a noticeable increase in eating capacity. Perfectly normal and nothing to be alarmed about. The capacity is still no where near what it was. I'd say it's closer to the low side of a normal person....but without the option to go crazy and pig out like normal people can do. That's because our sleeves don't stretch like a normal stomach. They are much less elastic.
As has been said, the sleeve is permanent....but I view that as a good thing. There is no reason I would want it reversed. Stomach cancer? I'm far more likely to die of obesity without the sleeve than stomach cancer with the sleeve. I'm glad it's forever. I can't back out and go back to being fat. I could eat around it...but any WLS can be eaten around.
The reduction in ghrelin is highly touted with the sleeve...supposedly eliminating hunger. Don't believe it. It varies. It seems the typical sleever has hunger greatly reduced, but it gradually increases.....but to a much more manageable level than presurgery. But even if it does come back, it takes much less food to be satiated than before, so it's nothing to be feared.

I've always thought about this in two ways.
1) I can stay morbidly obese. Develop Diabetes, congestive heart failure, kidney trouble, everything else that's run in my family and linked to diabetes, and die a slow, decaying, miserable painful death while living a life of "what might have beens" and false hopes, barely making it, barely surviving and barely able to move when I get older.
2) I can take my 1 in 500 or whatever risk, and get my life to be on track with what I want it to be. After trying every diet known to man, and working my ass off in the gym, I know I have a choice. Live an adventurous fun crazy life, or die slowly.

Interesting. I bet that those of us who gained weight primarily for emotional reasons are the ones who have the hardest time taking it off. We also seem to be the primary ones who can't succeed without a big boost like WLS. And we are most successful when we are obsessive about researching and managing ourselves post-WLS. I hope there are more studies and scholarship about these issues in the future now that some of the stigma seems to be easing.

Surgery November 21st. Down 30 lbs. today!

Hmm interesting. I wonder why, after losing 72 lbs my smile lines have gotten deeper and more numerous. I'm waaaaay too young for Botox

No offense to most veterans on here, but sometimes we newbies would like to converse amongst ourselves. Which is primarily why I go to the forums marked BEGINNERS. Most people on this site are very helpful but some are just plain ol assholes. lol

Congrats! awesome job! I agree with you about "everything in moderation". I eat bad foods sometimes but the difference being SMALL amounts & not an entire bag of Cookies or crackers. I've stayed away from ice cream & milkshakes. But if I want a slice of pumpkin pie, I have it now (instead of two slices).

Thank you all for your support - I wish each and every one of you who have not had the surgery a very successful one - don't be afraid, the best is yet to come. For those of you who have had your surgery, you did it! CONGRATS! The best is yet to come for you as well - we are all living proof that it works and there is a light at the end of the tunnel

What a difference a year can make - here I am at Christmas 2012 and after Christmas 2013! Thank you all for the support and for the ones who doubted when I said "I eat everything in moderation" - well - judge for yourself whether or not that taco bell taco hurt me at all LOL! I've been doing wonderful post surgery and consider my surgery a real success - ready to ring in the new year and loving my new life! 1/29 will be my official one year - Merry Christmas everyone and I encourage you all to take the journey - you won't regret it. Love to all-

So I'm almost one month post-op and I'm sitting here reading all these posts about people losing their hair and it's making me pretty sad. After many years of bad nutrition, my own hair has just started growing back in healthier and thicker which is something I was thrilled about because I've had to deal with thin, sad hair for a long time. Now, to hear that I may be losing all my progress (on my hair, at least) is more than a little disappointing. I KNOW it's ultimately a small price to pay for my health, but my hair is still so thin that it's sounding like I might go bald. Did any of you wear wigs or extensions, or did it ever get that bad? Or does this ALWAYS happen to everyone? I would like some reassuring information, but I understand if I don't get it, haha.

I'm just proud to announce I haven't had coffee or Diet Coke since I started my pre-op diet, and I don't really crave them. I never would've thought I could just quit both of them cold turkey!

What if there was a Mississippi Girls room??

how do I delete this thread? I feel like Im in elementary school & Im standing in the corner.

No offense to most veterans on here, but sometimes we newbies would like to converse amongst ourselves. Which is primarily why I go to the forums marked BEGINNERS. Most people on this site are very helpful but some are just plain ol assholes. lol