VSGAnn2014

I'm 19+ months post-op, have lost 100 pounds and am maintaining at 135 pounds (my original goal was 150, and I blew through that). Here's what I ate yesterday: Breakfast: 1/2 cup coffee and 1/2 cup skim milk (homemade skinny latte) GNC Lean shake 25, swiss chocolate Mid-morning: Cheddar cheese - 1 ounce Three seed cracker Smuckers sugar free strawberry jam - 2 T. Lunch: (Ruby Tuesday leftovers from night before) 3 ounces hickory bourbon salmon 1/2 serving brown rice pilaf 1/2 serving grilled zucchini 1 side of hickory bourbon sauce Mid-afternoon snack: Homemade skinny latte Dark chocolate and almond biscotti 3 Sam's Choice lemon cookie thins Cocktail Hour: 1 ounce Glenmorangie scotch Dinner: Stouffers chicken parmesan Romaine lettuce hearts Litehouse chunky blue cheese dressing 1/2 ounce blue cheese crumbles 4 ounces of chardonnay After-dinner snack: 1 square Lindt dark chocolate with sea salt Day's Macronutrients: 1,849 calories 177 carb grams 77 fat grams 94 Protein grams 3,487 mg. sodium (too much - limit is 2,300 - blame this on the Stouffers chicken parm) 19 grams insoluble fiber (too few - need at least 21)

Yes, your liver's full of fat. And as you lose weight, your liver will get "skinnier." BUT ... the reason for the pre-op high-Protein, low-calorie "liver-shrinking" diet is to deplete your liver of glycogen (a form of glucose the body stores there for quick energy) and the approximately 8 pounds of Water your liver needs to store that glucose. If you follow the liver-shrinking diet well, you'll lose at least 8 pounds, which will reduce the liver's size and "slickness" (less water, less slickness) so that the surgical team can move the liver and navigate around it while performing the VSG surgery. If you look at images online of where the stomach and liver are located, you will readily understand the need to shrink the liver pre-op. Because if the liver gets nicked or injured during surgery -- yowzah! An injured liver is one of the forms of surgical complications that can occur and cause you serious problems post-op.

Wow -- it feels like a kidney stone epidemic around here. Good luck to you, young man. I hope your urologist saves and analyzes the stone -- to see what's causing the problem and what (if anything) you need to change in your diet.

What is it about "Eat Protein, eat protein first, then as your stomach heals and you have more capacity eat colored (not white), low-glycemic veggies, and as capacity increases eat small amounts of whole grains" ... do y'all think means: "Eat crackers"? Seriously -- put any cracker in a glass of Water and see how long it takes it to turn to mush. That's how you recognize a slider food. BTW, most crackers are made out of white flour. And you can't get much more "slider food" than white flour. Here's the actual definition of slider food: food that's highly processed during the manufacturing process and doesn't require a lot of digestive time in the stomach before easily sliding on down through the pyloric valve into the intestine, leaving more room in the stomach so you can eat more of them.

So it's the nicotine that causes the problem re stomach ulcers, eh? That means vaping nicotine wouldn't help at all. And that vapers run the same risks as cigarette smokers in developing stomach ulcers. Very good to know this.

SMH

You're afraid of being judged. And you're going to announce your WLS on Facebook? What could possibly go wrong?

To the OP ... Has it occurred to you that you're currently judging yourself in the VERY SAME NEGATIVE WAY those two idiots from your past judged you? Any epiphanies you might like to wring out of that fact?

Please post publicly here your qualifications to conduct such assessment / treatment.

You're a smart cookie -- you realize that you are in a strange little world of over-sensitivity to certain foods. Someone else who wasn't battling your current medical conditions and medications wouldn't have to worry about that and could be incorporating more whole grains, legumes, even breads at this point. But for right now, you sound legitimately like a special snowflake. I hope you get out of this zone soon and can get back to "normal" WLS territory. Best!

Like @@Babbs , at 19 months post-op, some days I'm surprised at how much little or more I can eat. And like @@livvsmum , the more Protein I eat, the less I can eat and the less I crave carbs. Here's another pattern -- the more days in succession I eat a high-protein, un-sugary menu, the harder it is (and yes, I mean *hard*) to eat enough calories to not start losing weight again. There's some peculiar magic about having a sleeve + eating lots of protein. It truly, truly kills my appetite and throws me back to what my appetite was like about 5 months post-op. Strange. And fascinating.

Damn! Another awesome post. Thanks to the OP who started this thread.

God! That is awesome. Especially the part about "I have also put me first instead of my friends ...." Too many so-called friendships are really not healthy for any party. They're like bad marriages -- or marriages of convenience. You can't have a great life when you're busy living a mediocre one. Again, awesome!

My experience was ... just be consistent (don't change what you've done to lose weight thus far) and be patient. Doesn't matter if you lose 2 pounds or even 1 pound a month. I lost 19 pounds pre-op, and the following numbers are my monthly weight losses in the 19 months post-op: -10.4 -11.8 -9.2 -10.4 -6.8 -5.0 -6.2 -4.4 -3.8 (reached goal this month) -1.8 -2.6 -0.6 -1.2 -1.0 -1.6 -2.0 -1.4 +2.0 -2.0

Preach, @@Babbs !

If you're still losing 8-10 pounds a month, you're going to find you can't just "put on the brakes" and stop losing. Stopping that freight train takes a few miles. FYI, I have weighed 135 pounds (133 - 138) for 6+ months now. I have to work at it sometimes to stay above 135. It's not as easy or even as fun as that sounds like it would be. Just sayin'.

No, our basic personalities don't change. However, how we behave and respond to the world around us can indeed change -- subtly or a lot; in the short-term or the long-term. At least, I certainly hope so! If people couldn't change, they couldn't grow, recover, mature, repair their lives, have dreams and reach them. (You weren't hoping you'd remain the same, were you?)

You keep using that word "impossible." I don't think it means what you think it means.

Things like this are why!

Uh ... if your avatar is a recent photo of you, you are really attractive. I think you may have some other issues -- dysmorphic ones. Seriously! That's not to say that we each don't have things we'd like to improve / fix / disguise / highlight about our appearances. That's why Spanx and makeup were invented. But seriously -- your written description of your face and your photograph do NOT coincide.

Those of us who have traveled the divorce road before know these things to be true: 1. If it's hard, you have to do it anyway. 2. You can be miserable for a long time or a really long time or a shorter time. How you feel and how long you feel that way are completely your choice. 3. He's no longer your best friend. Really. I mean that. I'm not kidding. Stop imagining that's true. It's not. 4. If you find yourself thinking about him / the marriage / the girlfriend all the time and being miserable, (although I've said this before I'll say it again) get out of bed, get dressed, leave the house, get a job. In other words, get a life. In fact, do that anyway. 5. Focus on your personal growth -- and that includes being a compliant WLS patient. How's that going? 6. Exercise a lot. Make yourself physically tired. This will help a lot to break obsessive ruminations about him / the marriage / the girlfriend. 7. If you can't make progress on your own, find a good therapist who can help you make progress.

Jamie, I'm so proud of you!

I know you're going to go ahead and do this. But it's about as opposite to WLS post-op nutritional programs as you can get: drinking your calories, not eating animal Protein, delaying learning how to live by eating "real food," etc. But you go ahead and do what you want to do.

I freakin' LOVE this thread! P.S. Could we do one next on scotch?

@@HanSolo1977 ... hang in there. And congrats on relosing the small amount of weight you'd regained. The rest of this is just a comment on nutritionists and dietitians and the advice available to WLS patients. I realize nutritionists and dietitians must be a varied group. But I haven't yet met anyone in those lines of work who's ever been overweight, much less obese. Maybe what they learn about nutrition helps them not to gain weight. Or maybe their fascination with being naturally slim draws them into this line of work. Based on my interactions with three NUTs (and having another one who's a close family member), I know that their levels of empathy for WLS patients can vary considerably. It's not like the basic nutritional information related to WLS is rocket science. Because it's not. Macronutrients aren't complicated. But after being on WLS message boards for longer than two years, it's abundantly clear to me that everyone's body doesn't respond exactly the same to food. Some of us lose fast, some don't. Some are carb-tolerant, others aren't. Some maintain easily on 2,000 calories a day, others at the same size regain if they eat more than 1,200 cals/day. And these maintenance differences don't seem related to how much they exercise, their ages, etc. What's that about? I truly wish there was more good science done in the fields of nutrition and dietetics that helped us understand what accounts for individual differences. It seems to me that, for now, those who want to be very successful long-term have to perform science on themselves to fine-tune their own long-term nutritional programs. That doesn't mean the basic principles should be ignored. But it means that there's not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all program for everybody.