terilynne1966

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 can't wait for this summer! I know I will only be a few months in...but I am looking forward to going to a Colorado Rockies game and not feeling squished in the seat. Being on an airplane and not feeling like I have to cross my arms and squeeze my legs together the entire flight. Tank Tops!! Shorts!! Buying clothes somewhere other than Old Navy and Lane Bryant!

Good
Small butt
No longer sweat like a small piggy all year round
Wider selection of clothes to buy
Bad
Sore tailbone from lack of padding on butt
Freezing cold all year round
Wider selection of clothes to buy
The good still outweighs the bad... but lmao at the earlier comment "the ugly... the inside of my thighs" - me too!!!!!

I had second thoughts..
Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to have them until they where wheeling me into the operating room
But I think most people have moments of second guessing going into this. And that's a good thing! It means you are really thinking about this radical move and what brought you here.
I know for me this was my last stop, radical yes but I had literally tried everything else and failed. It was try this or die an early death. So I took my chances on this. I'm happy I did.
I don't know your story..
But I will assume this is your last chance at health too? That you have tried many ways of losing weight before. And could not lose or keep the weight off long term?

I'm sorry but I'm very confused by this post..
Not good, not good at all.... Please people don't do it, and please stop suggesting for other people to do it.
First, this behavior is the first steps of bulemia and getting into the habit of chewing food and spitting it out can lead to a very serious eating disorder. After WLS we are already dealing with changing the way we relate to food, so we want to instill good habits all along the way and avoid the bad ones as much as possible.
Second, there's a biological reason not to do this too. When you smell food and when it enters your mouth and you begin to chew, the body goes into Prep Mode to receive food. Your salivary glands produce saliva, your pancreas produces insulin, your liver produces gastric acid and your brain begins to calculate how much nutrition you're about to receive from the food you eat so it can keep track of it's daily needs/calories --- the body is a well tuned machine and it knows how to deal with food when it knows it's coming. But then you spit out the food. Your body still has excess saliva, insulin, gastric acid and it can't figure out why it didn't get the nutrition it thought it was going to get so the brain accountants go nuts.
Excess insulin in your body causes your appetite to increase so you'll eat more food to soak up all that extra hormone. Excess gastric acid in the stomach -- now released at the Y of your common channel -- can cause indigestion or heartburn or ulcers. And those brain accountants are now doing some creative math to recalculate the nutritional value of food because it thought it was going to get a certain number of calories, but none came, so next time you try to eat that same food the brain thinks you need twice as much to get the same nutrition as it thought it should have gotten last time.
So not only is the whole "chew and spit" habit a training ground for bulemia, it's also a way to tease your body into thinking it's getting food when it really isn't. Bulemia is a very serious illness and not something you want to play around with.
http://www.bariatricpal.com/topic/252757-chewing-food-and-spitting-it-out/?fromsearch=1

It's hard but the reality is a lot of people will not understand because they feel obesity is simply a by-product of low will power. I am in your shoes too. I have never been at a normal weight for my height or age. I was an obese child, teenager, and now I'm an obese adult. I mean, I'm sure we've all had periods in our lives where we were successful with a diet or exercise regime..but it was temporary. I don't look at weight loss surgery as a quick fix or magic bullet. It's simply a tool in order to help people get to their goal.

Oh wow! I could have wrote this post except I haven't had a hip replacement. I avoided telling people because of their reaction. My sister in law was like you just need to walk for exercise and eat better. Didn't she notice that I can barely walk or stand for very long without being in extreme pain? My brother was also appalled that I was going for surgery. I like you tried many diets, weight watchers, Atkins, went to the nutritionist, prescription medication, only to lose about 20-30 lbs. I just decided that I knew my body best and knew that I needed surgery as a starting point for me, I had been thinking about it for a few years. Christmas was tough with my brother and his wife and I had to finally say I don't want to talk with you guys about this if you can't be supportive. It's hard enough trying to prepare both mentally and physically for the surgery without others nattering at you. The surgery is going to be the easy part the life change is gonna take work. I certainly relate to you and I believe WE CAN do it!!!

I have been mobidly obese for the past 19 years. I currently weigh 284 lbs on a good day. I have tried so many diets, pills, programs, etc to lose the weight but all I lose is money and maybe 20 lbs if I'm lucky. I cannot exercise because of my joints and hip replacement because then I'm in bed in pain. I want to scream when someone says you can do it you just need to walk and not eat bad. I want to scream don't you think I have tried to do that the last 20 years!
I know I am a food addict. I know this surgery is a tool and I'm going to have to do work to be successful. I know I will need to spend some years probably in therapy addressing my issues. I know I will have to fight my fat mind long after the weight is gone. I get that its drastic. I feel that's what I need a drastic surgical intervention.
I sometimes just feel that noone can relate to me.

I am from northern MI and had my sleeve surgery 11/21/13 :-)

Well i just weight self yesterday with a total of 42 lbs loss. I am so happy i did this surgery. I went from 330 lbs to 288 lbs. Cant wait til i am no longer in 200' s. But i am not pushing anything. It will all come of in time with good eatting and exercise:)

I'm 8 months out and down 70 pounds. I went from a size 20 to a size 8. I thought I was going to die the first two days. Since then I have thanked God everyday for giving me this gift. It was a magic bullet. I would do it again and again! No regrets. Just keep the faith and don't give up. It will get easier and easier. The point of the surgery was to take away your craving for food and to reduce the amount of your food intake. I drank lots of Decaf ice tea with Splenda and GNC brand of Protein Shakes. And, Water popsicles. I eat anything I want now. Just small portions. And, I'm still losing. You will be fine. Imagine walking into The Gap and pulling on a pair of button fly cords in a size 8 with room to spare. It's all worth it. I promise!

I was sleeved on Nov 18 2013
Prop Weight 305
Surgery Weight 295
Current Weight 264

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