JackieBrown

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

When your husband slips his arm around your waist in the store and then starts feeling you up there before saying with a grin, "Man, you have really lost weight!"
(This happened yesterday!)

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

Putting on my wedding dress, zipping it up, and yelling out, "Here comes the bride!" And watching my husband's jaw hit the floor.

Putting on my wedding dress, zipping it up, and yelling out, "Here comes the bride!" And watching my husband's jaw hit the floor.

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

Happy belated birthday!
We're going on 35+ years together, and many guys (not all! I have my eye on you, @Stevehud) have to be told exactly what to do. I've had some major meltdowns in our marriage, but if I gave constructive criticism with detailed notes on What Exactly Is Expected, things got done. Here's my notes:
Don't hint or expect something to get done. They're not mind readers. Assign chores, remind them of important dates until they've got it down, and encourage helpfulness. I've found that my husband likes doing certain things and takes pride in them, so I praise him to the skies every once in a while.
Be specific, but nice: "Could you put the dishes away" is clearer than "Tidy up the kitchen." "Take out the garbage, please" is better than "Is the can beginning to smell?"
Guilting doesn't work well on the men in my life. It must be a woman thing. (*sigh*)
Don't let them get away with whining or getting angry or growling. As someone much wiser than me said in another topic, if you accept a behavior, people won't change. And so, you have to be willing to have some major fights now and then. A doormat is for wiping your feet on. A pissed-off woman is a force to be reckoned with.
If your guy says or does something that gets you mad, say so, but in a way that is not hostile, but helpful. "You know, honey, I'd appreciate it if you didn't monitor my food. I know you mean well, but you're getting on my last nerve."
Anyway, those are my two cents. Sometimes a refurbished husband can turn out to be a gem, so don't give up hope!

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

People who never have been seriously overweight can never understand what it's like. To them, losing 3 pounds is just a matter of willpower and skipping lunch, and so they look at me and think that I am just a) lazy, a slob, or c) overindulgent.
The thing is - and I mean this - so many of the overweight people I know have more willpower than anyone else. They have been on strict diets, monitoring everything they eat or even consider eating, feel guilty if they do eat a bit more, and then beat themselves up continually. We are never happy with ourselves, and we are the reason the diet industry is a multi-billion dollar industry.
But we have been set up to fail.
Diets don't work. We can all agree on that.
We are probably the people who would have survived famines a couple of hundred years ago. Our DNA is programmed to make us survivors. Those skinny folks wouldn't have lasted a week. Starvation is no longer that much of a problem for many of us, but our bodies haven't gotten the update yet, and so we keep socking away that fat reserve.
So I look at it like this: I'm a survivor from a long line of survivors, and I'm proud of that. But now that I do not have to worry about the same things my ancestors did, I can get healthy using new technology. Life is good.

I've been on what amounts to over a month stall, with a loss of only around 3 pounds, but I'm getting smaller, so this extra poundage feels like it's Water weight.
Yesterday I switched over to an all fluids diet, with only a very small dinner, and dropped a pound this morning, so I'm hoping against hope that I can literally flush away this extra weight. I'll let you know if it works!

I lost 31 pounds the 1st month post-op, 7 pounds the 2nd month and 7 pounds the 3rd month after surgery. Imagine all the stressful days in month 2, 3 and een now when I step on the scale and its the same, or God forbid it's 0.3 pounds heavier..... Your body has to adjust to this new life. I wish I had the strength to just weight myself once per week so I wasn't as scale crazy, but I somehow need that daily reminder in order to keep focused.
Just eat correctly, hydrate sufficiently and keep moving. WLS works, but it's just like when we dieted in the past, when your body thinks it's "starving", it starts holding on until it adjusts to the new "normal".

I think this resetting process you guys are referring to seems to work great. The next time I stall for more than a week, I am going to reset back to Liquid Protein for a few days and see what happens.

Totally second what @@mae7365 said. I don't try to turn out the light all the time now, but prance around in my sexy undies.

Totally second what @@mae7365 said. I don't try to turn out the light all the time now, but prance around in my sexy undies.

Totally second what @@mae7365 said. I don't try to turn out the light all the time now, but prance around in my sexy undies.

Female viewpoint - I was pretty sickly the first 4 weeks after surgery so sex was the last thing I wanted to be involved in. But as my weight has dropped and I have this new, thinner body....my husband is having an "affair" with his new wife. And I don't cringe at the thought of being naked. In fact, walking around in my new pretty under garments is just plain FUN!

Let me start off by saying I don't keep pictures of my old "self" so when my mom sent me this picture from thanksgiving I was shocked at how much my face has actually changed in this process. I knew it would but when you do a side by side it's pretty inspiring to keep up the motivation! 60 more lbs to go!!!

@@JamieLogical
We are in the same boat. Same thing as you, upping my exercise and strength training at the end of December to hopefully move things along hasn't really changed the rate I'm losing, although I definitely have toned up some. I am 30 away from my goal, and although I'm hoping to lose it by my year date, I know at the rate I'm losing I may not. I've just made peace with the fact that I may have to work that much harder after to make sure I get there. Slow losers unite!

@@JamieLogical
It may be hard. I would not worry. This is not easy and YES the farther out from surgery weight loss will slow down. Continue to work you're program. This will be a life long process even after goal. This is you're new life style and soooo worth it.
Time frames do not matter. A healthy you does!

I want to believe that too, which is why I haven't been sweating the slow loss. It's just when I did the math in my head this morning and realized I'd be close to a year out for hitting goal that I started to worry, because I've seen SO MANY posts from vets talking about the honeymoon period and how you have to take advantage of it and lose all the weight then, because it gets so much harder after that.

I think where we go wrong is by setting some type of deadline or projected timeframe on our own bodies. This issue follows along the same mindset some have of stalling. I too lose at a slower rate than many, but, I'm also sure that someone looking at my stats would think otherwise. Its all relative, because our journeys are so personal and different. I consciously decided early on that I wouldn't put stipulations on my journey because I don't want to set myself up for failure. I am choosing to believe that my body knows what it's doing and that as long as I follow the plan...things will work out.

When you toss out your last pair of granny panties.

(fingers in ears) Lalalalalala. Can't hear you about the vanity sizing.
But seriously, I have old clothes from the 90's. And it's not the sizing. It must be the Protein. My stomach started flattening this week, and it's like I have some alien body now. Thought I'd always be shaped like the Stay-Puf Marshmallow Man. But those muscles are poking out. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll be ripped!