UrsulasShadow

What were you told prior to surgery about life after surgery that was not entirely true or was not the entire story?
Although I feel that my Dr's seminar was very informative as well as this message board, there are many aspects of my new life I was not prepared for. I was not prepared for how easily eating something that doesn't agree with me can take me out with such intense pain for hours. How feeling full is now in my chest not in my belly. How incredibly important it is to stay hydrated.

What do you wish you had fully understood prior to surgery that you did not and what do you believe would have put you in the best possible position to succeed after surgery?
As I stated before, the Doctor was very informative and I am extremely happy that I choose to have the surgery. And it has been stated here many times but I still to this day have a hard time wrapping my head round it. NEITHER THIS SURGERY NOR THE WEIGHT LOSS WILL MAKE YOU LIFE BETTER!!!!! OMG I cannot stress it enough and am still struggling with it. Now I am just a much thinner me but struggling with poor eating habits and all my other vices that I have had for decades. It didn't improve my marriage, my parenting skills or my relationship with others. It is a weight loss tool and that is all it is. You still have to do the hard work.

What information, if any, was missing in the lead-up to your surgery that gave you unreasonable expectations or that led to disappointment in the months or years since surgery?
None that I can think of.

I'll be subscribing to this thread. Thank you for bringing this up. I am pre surgery but I have an interesting prospective. I have been feeling a bit like an imposter my entire process for getting qualified for surgery. This, WLS, is supposed to be the like the last house on the block. We were supposed to have tried and failed miserably at the weight loss thing and never had any long term success at losing weight, but this has not been my exact story.
In 2005, I lost 140# without surgery. I discovered that I have a sensitivity to gluten and sugar and I stopped eating junk food. I didn't exercise but the weight literally fell off my body. I was lighter than I had been my entire adult life. I went from 320# to180# in about 8 months probably averaging about the same clip as a bypass patient I'm imagining. I had some feelings of euphoria, but mostly I felt like a live electrical wire. My comfy fat, my safe place to hide from the world was suddenly gone and I felt as if I was practically electrocuted if I would even brush by furniture too hard. I had trouble sleeping with the new sensations of my knees, ankles and toes rubbing together aching for their familiar cushion and I felt horribly uncomfortable if anything including clothes touched my newly discovered clavicles. I cried at random and inconvenient intervals. I stayed at this low weight for a VERY short time and hovered comfortably at 200 for many many years.
I was never prepared for and have never heard ppl taking about how to just be and reside in a body, newly formed and considerably smaller. How do we really listen and hear and feel in a body with new sensations and dimensions? How do we become like the normies I call them, those people who never ever gain weight while we constantly were ballooning up and dieting down the scale?
What were/are we to do with our one life outside of food? I know I have the tendency to want the newer, sexier, more interesting route to any destination, like success with even WLS can't just be about plain old (following the prescribed) diet and exercise, can it? I'm still wondering if the surgery is just the newest thing for me. I switched my surgical consideration from sleeve to bypass for this very reason. Because if I'm going to do it, I need to go old school. With me it had to be vegan, raw, paleo and Crossfit. Zero to sixty. Never just walking, always training for the half.
What happens when the proverbial dust settles and it's not about the food anymore and the weight is lost? When the life I thought weight loss or this surgery would fix is still going forward unchanged? Sitting in this empty space with myself without support and resources or a clue is what made maintenance so elusive and probably so for most people who've lost massive amounts of weight with or without surgery and gained it back. Will having had a glimpse of being thin for a while make me a better bariatric patient, more compliant? Perhaps, or maybe not but at this stage in the game I can't take anything for granted but these are the questions that are clearer in hindsight and that I need to formulate a plan for now on this side of surgery.