Machalo

Do stalls happen frequently to people after surgery? I'm thinking it would freak me out.

Me too, @Confidently_Me. I'm also hoping for a Feb date. Ready to get this weight moving and off my frame. Good luck to you!

The weekend was a dieter's nightmare. Eating out most meals and while not big on quantity, it was big on calories and/or salt. i'm back up. Drat and double drat. Now I'm on liquids until the scales go back to where they belong. In good news, I don't have to do the test with the tube down my throat for a day since I've decided on the bypass surgery. Yay! One less test and one less bill. Today I'll get my first walk in at the recreation center in town. I've been procrastinating and need to just go do it. It isn't like it is going to be that hard to do. Just walking around the track, I won't even do the machines this time. Just the walk. I don't know why I keep putting it off. I know I need to get moving, I just don't seem to be able to motivate myself to get out and do it. So I'll stop on the way home and do it before I get home this evening. Even if I have to sweat a bit in my work clothes, it is better than not doing the walk at all. Any advice on self-motivating when you have no self-motivation would be great.

That's very exciting Mikeyy. You are going to rock this week and it will be over before you know it. You're almost there, sweetie. Take good care of you this week. So excited for you!

Progress is progress though. Hooray for you @Billy Bob My psych eval is Nov 4th.

Congratulations and hope your surgery is safe and successful. Wishing you the best!

In today's news. I got my psych appointment scheduled for Nov 4. Not too bad.

@Billy Bob Let us know how the PCP appointment goes. Hopefully they will have some advice on getting your process started again. Wishing you the best!

You'll do just great! I hear you about the vacillation, I'm losing weight on my own by modifying my diet which is super cool. I just don't think I could keep it up long enough to lose the significant amount of weight that I want to lose with the bypass surgery as a kickstarter and tool I can use to succeed. Try to breathe and trust your own process.

Thanks @ms.sss and @krisss. I was wondering about the protein and whether I should up it right now while I'm in the pre-op phase of things. I mean, I still have another 3 months of NUT appointments and my hair used to be luxuriously thick. How I miss it! Of course when I had it I didn't think it was so great. I have curly hair, and the more of it there is, the more each strand wants to do it's own curly thing. And don't even think about when it rains. I looked like a poodle because all my curl went straight to frizz and I afro'd. LOL Oh, the good old days.

Thanks Mike and Lynda. I am a pretty positive person overall, thankfully. I see things with hope in my lenses as it were. Where people see half empty, I see half full. Where people go UGH Monday, I say Make your week great. I'm positive that I'm doing this, and that I will be successful at it. It is just that way for me. It's my last chance, my only option to get better health-wise. I know it's a hard journey, hard doesn't scare me. I'm trying to look for all the positive things while being aware of the negatives because I'm sure my husband will come up with some of those and I need to be prepared to answer them. Anyway, it's FRIDAY! Have a brilliantly awesome weekend everyone!

I'm in Central Virginia, a little town (3,300 pop) called Elkton. It's claim to fame was that Patsy Cline used to live there. Nice thing about Elkton, it can only grow so big. We're surrounded by national and federal forests.

Thank you so much for your comments. I'm pre-op and am worried, that with the addition of the bypass surgery I might go bald. Not that there's anything wrong with that, because I could get some killer wigs, but I'd rather keep my own hair if possible. I'll try adding in the Biotin to my daily pills. Thanks again.

Hmm. Never even thought about that. i'll see what my team says and then decide. Great topic!

So I've been "shedding" hair for a while. Now I wonder if it's because I'm not getting enough protein in my diet. Has anyone had hair grow back once the proper amount of protein is reestablished? It's one of the things I'm most concerned about with the WLS - losing even more hair. Any and all comments and advice are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

So proud of you, @ChubRub !! Way to go! High five!

I love Beachbody on Demand. You can do pretty much any kind of exercise you are looking for, from gentle stretches to hard-core cardio and specific section muscle toning. I intend to use it as my "home gym" both before and after surgery. After, of course, I can walk a lap around the real gym without keeling over.

As everyone has said, vent away. If we can't vent to each other, then what good is the forum? I've been on a liquid diet before, for colonoscopy. It was no fun. Of course, they give you stuff to drink to get you all cleaned out, but still. My butt was sore for several days from all the time spent on the toilet. Sorry TMI. I hope you get through it all right, @Emily Jane. Wishing you the best!

Thanks so much @Healthy_life2

My journey starts all the way back to my pre-teen years. I was a chubby little girl. At about 8-9, my Mom put me on my first diet. At 15, I took weight loss shots every week for two years. During High School I stopped eating and dropped weight and grew so that helped. By 17 and graduation, I was at a comfortable 125-130. I maintained it for the next 10 years by smoking and not eating. I didn't eat healthfully, but darn if I didn't eat slowly and chew my food to death. Fast forward those ten years and I was 27, in one abusive relationship after the other, and became an exercise addict. I still didn't eat healthfully. but I ate so little that it didn't really matter what I ate. Forward another two years and I was 29 and getting married to my true love. I still had very bad eating habits, and now I was faced with having to eat regular meals at regular times. ACK! I gained weight almost instantly, and it's been compounding for the last 26 years. I tried SlimFast, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Adkins, Mediterranean, and pretty much everything else. If I did lose some weight on them, I gained it all right back once I went off of them, plus more. I became a yo-yo dieter. The only thing that worked for me again was to stop eating. I could do a fast for about a day but by the second day my husband was on me to eat. Not that he didn't want a healthy wife, but I think he was afraid that I might turn out to have an eating disorder that was dangerous. At 36 I moved to where we live now, kind of out in the country, with cities not too far away. Once I worked for the university I started to look into finishing my bachelor's degree. Which I did. In 2008, when I was 44. At that point I was so heavy that I couldn't stand myself and started looking into weight loss surgery. Husband and I both went in, listened to the seminar, got our first appointment out of the way, talked with the surgeon, talked with the insurance guy ... and never went back. Insurance was nigh unto impossible to get cleared back then. The hoops you had to jump through were prohibitive, so I dropped it. For then. I scheduled to do the seminar again in 2015 or so, and again the insurance hoops discouraged me. Plus other people discouraged me. So I stopped. Now, I'm at my highest weight ever. I have GERD, sleep apnea, kidney problems, HBP, low thyroid, and joint pains. All from the excess weight. So I went back (3rd time's the charm, right?) and started the process over again. I've had my initial visit and labs done, I have scheduled the next 4 NUT appointments (thru Jan) and then the post-NUT assessment with the surgeon in January. Between this time and that, I need to get my psych clearance and have an ultrasound of my stomach done. Both are now scheduled. Now, I wait. It seems like it is taking forEVER, yet I only had my first appointment on the 8th. Not even 10 days yet and it feels like MONTHS have passed. I've started cutting things from my diet -- all my bad habits. The first to go in October are candies, cookies, fast food, and chips. i'm already down 7 pounds. Next month, I limit soda intake, and cut portions down to 2 cups per meal. November, I cut soda intake in half, cut my portions down to 1.5 cups per meal. December I go off the soda, drop my intake to 1 cup per meal and increase number of meals per day to 5. January, I'm hoping to be drinking my water, and be at the point where I'm at 1/2 cup of food per meal and 5 meals per day. Hopefully I'll be able to have surgery in February depending on my surgeon's schedule, and my insurance to clear. They have lightened up on their requirements so I'm more hopeful that I'll be approved. As far as who knows, my husband knows I went to my first appointment and that it is my goal to have bypass surgery. He's not super excited about it. In fact, I haven't been able to share any of my excitement or goal setting or anything with him. He is disabled and his health is frail, so he's been having his own issues. So, I bring my enthusiasm and my questions and my hyperactivity here to BariatricPal. You all have taught me so much already. Thank you. I'd love to make some great friends here, and I think I will. If you'd like to make friends, send me a message or reply, or just feel free to add me. I'd love to start a conversation with other like minded folks, who are excited, learning a lot, questioning a lot, and are just generally addicted to this site. LOL. Seriously, though. I'd love to hear your story too. Cheers, Mac

My husband is on some meds that make him constipated all the time. He uses Colace to keep things "moving" I hope you find something that works well for you @LadyVS

Oh! I'm so sorry that happened to you @LadyVS! I would have been super annoyed too. I mean, you've probably already taken those days off of work and had everything arranged, and now you have to postpone everything by an entire month. OMGosh! Working for surgeons myself, I see the doctors saying let's do surgery in a few days, when they in actuality have no room for the case according to their already booked schedule. The surgery has to be put out to when the surgeon has an open OR time, which could be several weeks later. BUT, our nurses and schedulers call the patient to let them know. Your physician's office dropped the ball for sure in your case. You should have to hear that when you're already on the liquid diet. I mean, are you now supposed to go back to a normal diet and have to start the liquids all over again in a couple of weeks? That doesn't seem right.

Love seeing all these responses, I guess it will depend on who the doctor is as to what kind of testing they do to see if you're mentally ready for the surgery. I know some of the triggers not to say, like 'I had an eating disorder back when ...' or 'I've thrown up after eating' or anything else that can be classified as an eating disorder or severe depression or thoughts of harming yourself. Answer as "vanilla" as you can. I'm so sorry @Billy Bob that you had that experience. I agree you should call the doctor back and continue to ask questions until someone tells you what you need to do next in order to get your clearance. It may be some counseling or therapy or something easy like that for a few months that will bring on your clearance. Don't give up.

So glad to hear that your surgery was successful and that you're home and on the mend. Thanks for posting to let us know. Keep us updated on how your journey continues now that you are post-op.

Thanks for the update, Mike. I had heard about the no caffeine rule, but your surgeon said it was okay. That is great if you are a caffeine addict, like me. I don't drink coffee or tea, but I do have my diet soda to give me a boost of caffeine in the mornings to get me going. I'm wondering how I'm going to change that up without having the caffeine. Maybe it won't be so bad after all. I guess it will depend on what my surgeon says and what my body will tolerate. I've heard or read, I can't remember which at this point, that you need to try different things once surgery is over because your palate will have changed and different things will taste better or worse. So happy for you that you are so close to your surgery! Way to go! I know you've got what it takes to make it through the entire process to reach your goals. Just take it one step at a time and try not to rush your body. HAHA! Look at me sounding like I know anything. I do have faith in you though, Mike, so hang in there.