JamieLogical

Cheese... that is the best bet. Quest also makes small packs of Protein chips, but they are pricey and I didn't really find them to be all that great.

The Dreaded Week 3 Stall is a real and there is nothing you can/should do about it. As long as you get your Protein, Water, and Vitamins in and are up and walking several times a day, you are doing everything right. You just have to be patient. Put away the scale if it is making you crazy. You should be focusing on healing and following your plan right now. The rate of weight loss should be the least of your worries.

Oh, as for the dry mouth, check out your tongue/throat in a mirror with a flash light. If it has a white coating on it, you might have oral thrush. That can be pretty common if you were given liquid antibiotics post-op.

Um, at a month out your nutritionist already wants you at 4-5 ounces of food at one meal!??! That's nuts! I was at 2 oz. a meal for ages. I am well over 2 years post-op now and I would say 5-6 ounces is my absolute max, depending on the density of what I'm eating.
You should be able to meat your Protein goal even if you can only do 2 oz. at a time. Especially if you can handle your Protein shakes and Greek yogurt. I would say about a month out my day looked something like this:
Breakfast: Protein shake
Morning Snack: string cheese
Lunch: leftovers from a previous dinner or a scrambled egg w/ cheese
Afternoon Snack: Greek yogurt
Dinner: 2oz. of some recipe (like Shelly's baked ricotta, some sort of tuna salad, pulled chicken in sauce, etc.)
Late Snack: Protein Shake
That right there is 90 grams of Protein a day, assuming my Protein Shakes had 20 grams each and my lunch and dinner had about 15 grams.

Has your surgical team expressed any concern over the severity of your restriction? At 3 months out, you will definitely still experience some "relaxing" of the sleeve. So you will be able to eat more probably sometime between 9 and 12 months post-op. It is concerning that you are still struggling to get Water and Protein in, though. Have you experimented with different temperatures and different flavorings for your water? You should definitely not be having severe restriction with liquids this far out. Usually restriction with water is due to internal swelling, but that should be long gone by now.

You should pre-measure your food and eat the amount your surgeon/nutritionist recommends for your current food stage. I was told to eat 2 oz. at a time in the beginning, so I pre-measured my food into these little 2 oz. plastic baby food containers and ate out of those through my puree and soft food stages.
Once you are more healed up, you WILL get "full" signals from your stomach again. It is only in the first month or two post-op, when your nerves are still healing, that you can't rely on accurate signals from your stomach.

Good luck! Hope everything goes super smoothly!

This site has some great recipes for all of the food stages. I HIGHLY recommend the baked ricotta in the puree stage:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=the+world+according+to+eggface

What should I enter as my starting weight? My weight when I first started looking int WLS? My weight prior to my 2-week pre-op diet? My weight the day of surgery?
If I go by my weight the day of surgery, it's pretty accurate. I was two years out in September.

Um, at a month out your nutritionist already wants you at 4-5 ounces of food at one meal!??! That's nuts! I was at 2 oz. a meal for ages. I am well over 2 years post-op now and I would say 5-6 ounces is my absolute max, depending on the density of what I'm eating.
You should be able to meat your Protein goal even if you can only do 2 oz. at a time. Especially if you can handle your Protein shakes and Greek yogurt. I would say about a month out my day looked something like this:
Breakfast: Protein shake
Morning Snack: string cheese
Lunch: leftovers from a previous dinner or a scrambled egg w/ cheese
Afternoon Snack: Greek yogurt
Dinner: 2oz. of some recipe (like Shelly's baked ricotta, some sort of tuna salad, pulled chicken in sauce, etc.)
Late Snack: Protein Shake
That right there is 90 grams of Protein a day, assuming my Protein Shakes had 20 grams each and my lunch and dinner had about 15 grams.

Cheese... that is the best bet. Quest also makes small packs of Protein chips, but they are pricey and I didn't really find them to be all that great.

Weighing is definitely more accurate. Measuring cups measure VOLUME, but most serving sizes are in grams or ounces, which are units of WEIGHT.

Sip, sip, sip. Tiny sips ALL DAY LONG. Aim for 1 oz. every 15 minutes. Two hours is actually about right for an 8 oz. Protein Shake. If you can get in 4 oz. per hour and you are awake 16 hours a day, then you get in your 64 oz. for the day.

I am self pay too, had mine in Mexico. Had 2nd thoughts literally until the day I was flying out because I am on lower end of BMI and had lost 8 lbs in 2 week pre-op so thought I could just do it myself but then I reminded myself that I've lost and gained the same 70-80 lbs many times over so I went for it. I had a super easy recovery (100x better then I was expecting) and now I'm 5 weeks post and down a total of 27 lbs and so far no regrets.
Sent from my iPhone using the BariatricPal App

It's not your surgeon's decision. It's yours. Certainly, your surgeon should have an opinion and advice to offer, but ultimately you get to make the choice. Is there any reason to believe your surgeon would strongly push you towards bypass over sleeve?

You will still be able to eat in social settings. Once you are through the post-op food stages and all healed up, you will be able to eat anything. Just in smaller quantities. The main requirement will simply be Protein. Every party/function/dinner/gathering I have been to post-op has had SOME sort of protein choice available. I've been to Holiday parties, Super Bowl parties, cookouts, happy hours.... I have managed to find something to eat at every single one of those.

Rapid weight loss wreaks havoc on your hormones. Hormones are stored in fat and as the fat breaks down, those hormones are released back into your blood. So it is common to experience irregular and heavier periods as well as increased fertility. I think you should call your surgeon and your OB/GYN. It may be that you need to get on some form of birth control that will lessen the severity of your periods or eliminate them altogether.

The gas pain is the number one complaint of most WLS patients in the early days. As much as you don't want to, walking really will help get rid of it faster. So get up and walk around as much as you can stand to.

@@Spiceyfrog For some reason, your mention of driving reminded me of a funny thing that happened after my Tummy Tuck. I came home from Mexico two weeks post-op and my mom was going to come up and help take care of me some, since my husband had to work. Well, it turned out that my mom ended up having to have a hernia repair right around the same time as my TT, so she still came up to visit, but was in no shape to actually take care of me. It was hilarious. She was allowed to drive, but we both had lifting restrictions. So one day she took me to the grocery store and we had to have the cashier pack each bag very light so we could carry them one at a time. And we realized that we couldn't buy a gallon of milk, because neither of us was allowed to lift it. It was such a ridiculous situation.

Good luck! I think you are right to take charge and be pushy if necessary.

Actually, the main reason the scale stops moving or you see a gain immediately after you start a new, intense exercise routine is waster retention. Sore muscles store Water to heal. It's true that muscle weighs more than fat and gaining muscle will slow your weight loss overall, it doesn't happen immediately. That's just Water retention.
Anyway, in the long run, it is SOOOOO worth the slow down in weight loss. You have to remember that this isn't a race. There is no reason you need to lose all the weight RIGHT NOW. I did intense cardio and strength training through all of my weight loss phase. It meant I lost more slowly than a lot of my peers. But by the time I reached goal, I had GAINED seven pounds of muscle. And my metabolism is great. I see people on these forums posting that they gain if they eat more than 1000 calories a day in maintenance. Whereas, I can safely eat 1900-2000 on non-cardio days and 2400-2600 on cardio days and not gain.
If you lose quickly without keeping Protein up and exercising, you lose a lot of muscle along with that fat. It will mess with your metabolism and you will end up skinny, but not healthy. You are doing the right thing by stepping up your exercise. The scale might slow down, but in the end, you will NOT regret it!

Just posted this in another thread this morning:
It's important to remind yourself that you made the decision to have surgery when you were in a logical/rational state of mind. Last-minute jitters are common, but they are emotional and irrational. Don't let them deter you from following through on a decision that you made after a LONG period of research and reflection.

Just posted this in another thread this morning:
It's important to remind yourself that you made the decision to have surgery when you were in a logical/rational state of mind. Last-minute jitters are common, but they are emotional and irrational. Don't let them deter you from following through on a decision that you made after a LONG period of research and reflection.

Just posted this in another thread this morning:
It's important to remind yourself that you made the decision to have surgery when you were in a logical/rational state of mind. Last-minute jitters are common, but they are emotional and irrational. Don't let them deter you from following through on a decision that you made after a LONG period of research and reflection.

The gas pain is the number one complaint of most WLS patients in the early days. As much as you don't want to, walking really will help get rid of it faster. So get up and walk around as much as you can stand to.

Just posted this in another thread this morning:
It's important to remind yourself that you made the decision to have surgery when you were in a logical/rational state of mind. Last-minute jitters are common, but they are emotional and irrational. Don't let them deter you from following through on a decision that you made after a LONG period of research and reflection.