OutsideMatchInside

@FluffyChix I eat veggies but not with my protein. I eat my veggies as snacks between meals. I find that veggies make my protein less dense and filling meaning I could eat more. So I will have 4 ounces of protein by itself, and 85 grams of spinach (2 cups) by itself.

2 years later you can barely see mine. I used bio oil and vitamin E on them as directed by my surgeon.

I think it is because you are in Florida more than management level. WLS is definitely covered for ATT employees at all levels in Illinois. WLS is not considered and essential service by the state of Florida, so insurance is less likely to cover it. Plus Florida falls under the old Southern Bell, and they never had as good of benefits as Ameritech.

I was never given a goal by my Surgeon. When we first met, he asked my HS weight, I told him and he said he felt I could get back to that weight. Which I have, but I was never given a set goal. I think having a set WL goal early on is a bad idea. People get obsessed with it and it seems to cause a lot of stress and anxiety. My goals were to lower my blood pressure and reverse my diabetes, which I did early on. Everything else is just a bonus.

I never ate them before surgery at all. I started eating them last year because I needed more of a rotation in my meat choices. I like them because they are always on sale and the fat on them makes them easier to eat then most dense protein. I can eat pork easier than chicken and beef. So I eat it more often.

@sleevedshereen At 5'3 even if you lose weight, you are likely to still be curvy. If you really have boobs, you are going to still have boobs. My boobs are smaller (and not as heavy, thank goodness), but since I am smaller overall, my boobs look huge. I went from a 50DD to a 34F/G currently. Same applies to my hips and ass. They are a lot smaller, but I am curvy and an hourglass, instead of an apple. If you started off an hourglass plus sized, you will probably still be an hourglass, even a healthy BMI.

I'm pretty lazy with my food. I usually buy fresh meat for a day or 2 and work through that package. A day for me will be 4 oz of pork chops 4x a day every 2 hours from noon till 8 pm Black Coffee, as I want Or, 4 ounces of pork chops 6 ounces of Swai Fillet 4 ounces of pork chops 6 ounce of Swai Fillet Black Coffee, as I want This isn't just really a reset, I eat like this most of the time. If I go on vacation or have a lot of dates or something, this is how I eat after. My weight can fulucate 5-10 pounds. Eating like that after a gain, the weight just falls right off. However, I am not as far out as you, and I am keto adapted and I have never had significant regain. Hopefully someone further out than you, who has tackled regain weighs in and offers some advice.

Whenever I go up a little on the scale. Just eating dense protein for a couple days takes it right off. Your Dr is right, shakes are useless and will do nothing for you. Shakes are like water to me. They do nothing saiety or hunger. Try just eating dense protein, something you have to cut with a knife, and see what happens.

I'm late but we have had this thread over and over... Weight loss is almost entirely controlling your food calories. You can erase the calories burned working out for hours in a couple minutes with a bad food choice. Exercise is great for overall health and fitness. Exercise is great for mental health and physical fitness. Everyone should be walking. Walking is easy and low stress. Making sure you walk at least 2 miles a day is an easy way to achieve a decent level of physical fitness. Walking outside in a real environment is better and uses more muscles than walking on a treadmill. You have to know yourself to know if exercise is right for you. When I workout with intense cardio like Zumba (which I love), it triggers stress in my body and my body holds on to fat. It also increases my appetite. So Zumba, even though I like it, isn't worth it for me. I am better off walking 5 miles on a trail. I can lift weights, no stress triggers, no appetite increase, so weight lifting is fine. Intense cardio is just counter productive for me. I read this book several years ago, and then read it after surgery. Pre-op I found the diet choices for my blood type too hard to follow. While I could follow them not, the protein choices are too limited to work for me right now. What I did confirm was what I always thought before, intense exercise is not good for people with my blood type. http://a.co/8aMnFVC I feel like Dr V advice is dead on. I think that waiting to go hard on exercise at 6 months (you should be walking every day from day 1 of surgery), is the best advice. You can eat enough calories to actually support working out. You can drink water fast enough to replenish yourself and not risk dehydration at 6 months. You are healed enough with a daily calorie intake high enough that you can actually get something out of working out. Prior to 6 months, yoga and walking are great to get you ready. I lost all my weight with just walking every day and controlling my diet. I do weights some times, I go to yoga semi-regularly, and I randomly go to crossfit to troll for men. I lost the bulk of my weight in year one just with walking, eating lots of protein and not eating carbs. One of the best things you can do to really be successful post-op is to really know yourself, your strengths and you limitations. It allows you to make better choices and know what to avoid.

Check with your Dr. It will probably help you to have some stomach support if you are going to lifting the baby. A binder, or some moderate high waist shapewear should do the trick.

@SleeveMeAlone214 Pouch reset is just a fad diet. Just eat protein first and protein alone, If you eat dense protein (something that has to be cut with a knife) you will be full for longer, and your body has to burn calories to process that meat. It is a lot better for you than drinking calories. You can't live off a liquid diet forever, you can eat protein forever though, with lots of variety. You can't out exercise a bad diet. You can erase 2 hours in the gym in 2 minutes with a bad food choice.

Just keep losing, eventually your body has to burn the fat, even in the hard places. Just keep going it, comes off. No spot exercising is going to help. Cardio to burn more calories overall will, or just increasing muscle mass to burn more calories

I agree that not everyone is capable of cooking a great meal, but is a pretty basic skill that a lot of people (myself) learn as children. I think learning to cook, is helpful in eating healthy and maintain weight. I can start to finish from stepping into the kitchen be eating in 10 minutes or less. Cooking is not hard or time consuming especially for one person. It is fast and easy. We eat so little food, I feel like meal prep is an important part of a meal, and it adds mindfulness about eating. I like the idea of the services that provide the food and the recipes. I think that is a good way for people to learn cooking skills and new recipes. Meal prep, pre-packaged meals, are a special type to hell to me. No thanks. When I go to a restaurant my food is cooked to order, and what I don't finish, I do not eat. Pre-cooked and shipped food that isn't fresh doesn't appeal to me. Cost really isn't the main factor beyond, just paying for something inferior. It is like buying a super charged Dodge Challenger/Charger, when you can get a BMW or a Benz for the same price. This is the internet, everyone isn't going to agree with you. Don't come here pushing a product or service and expect that everyone is going to jump on board.

I think paying for leftovers is insane. Paying through the nose for leftovers is even worse. Premade food are just left overs. I eat for less than $5 a day and I eat about a pound of meat a day. $11 is $15 a meal is 2 to 3 days worth of food for me.

This is the internet and I can only go by your posts and your posts don't really express a clear motivation for success. Good luck

I was too afraid of dying to getting sick to really test my sleeve early on. I live alone far away from friends and family so I had surgery alone and recovered alone. I am pretty happy that I was so afraid, because by the time I introduced other foods. I had so much success with my weight loss, I wasn't willing to risk it for food. Just because you can tolerate foods, doesn't mean you should try them. You really need to get handle on your cravings because by the time you are 6 months you will be able to eat larger amounts of the foods you shouldn't be eating. At the 2 year mark I could easily eat 3-4000 calories a day if all I did was sit in the house and munch all day. Large pizza, family size bag of chips, unlimited cookies. All of that. In a day if all I did was eating. Nothing is going to stop you from eating bad foods but you.

Pork rinds and stuff are good for coating real protein to fry/bkae/air fry but just as snacks? They are a waste. I don't think fried foods are forbidden foods at all. You just can't make them a part of your daily diet. Too hard to accurately track the calories.

What @Berry78 said. The last pounds are the hardest for everyone. I am at a point where my body is comfortable and it makes sense to me, this was my HS weight. I haven't really felt like putting in the effort to lose the rest, because I know it is going to be serious tracking, calorie cutting, and I'll have to work out a lot more. Are you tracking your food?

It is really a personal choice. You have to live with the surgery no one else not the Dr, not us.

@Maya321 Try broth with unflavored protein powder. Also did your Dr give you nausea medicine?

I'm 5'6, they recorded me as 5'5" at the Dr office for surgery but I am 5'6, but I use 5'5 here. Anyway.. Before I lost any weight, when I started I just wanted to be a 16/18. I thought that would be obtainable and easy to maintain. A 12 looks good on me, if I want to be really "curvy", but I actually like being smaller. A 12 doesn't feel as good as 8/10. I think 12 will be my top out size, I never want to be larger than that. Period. Still a 12 feels fat to me now, It is way too close to plus size, and I never ever want to be plus sized again. While I am still young, 8 seems like a great size. Most women are not an 8 or below so you have a lot options when shopping for clothes and hitting clearance. Size 10 is just an annoying in between size. It is so hard to find 10s anywhere, worse than 12s. 8 seems to be a golden size for finding stuff. Right now I wear 10 or 8 depending on the brand. I am hoping to be a 6 at some point after skin surgery. It might not ever happen because of my hips and my boobs, but a girl can dream. I am shooting to be a small 8 (as in an 8 everywhere) or a 6 by next summer before skin surgery. We'll see if I can pull it off. I am not that dedicated to be a 6 pre-plastics but it is nice to have a goal. I have already hit and surpassed most of my goals, so that is my stretch goal. Well now I know why everything at Land's End fits me terrible (except the Kayaks LOL). They hate hourglass figures. I never looked at the size chart, just tried clothes on and was disappointed. My waist is 29 or 30 inches most days.

I don't think the lack of air flow caused the UTI. If anything you would get a yeast infection. UTIs just happen,

When your weight stabilizes it tightens up. I had more loose skin at the 230-210 range than I do now.

@DaphneZ When I got around the 6 month mark, and was healed, I started working with a sports medicine program at a local University. This helped me set my marcos based on RMR testing and a DEXA scan. I set my calories based on my RMR and my protein goals based on my lean mass. The lean mass of a person that has been morbidly obese for a length of time is different from most people. Our bodies have to adapt to carry the weight so we have more lean mass, since we have more lean mass we also burn more calories. Keeping that lean mass is important because it allows you to burn more calories and keep your RMR higher, which makes maintenance easier, you have more calories to play with. My first visit to the clinic let me know that my RMR was above what most calculators would have it at, and that my lean mass was much higher. I used that information to set my protein goal, my goal is 120g a day, which is less than 1g per 1 pounds of lean mass, but 120 is about the max I can do most days, sometimes I exceed it and hit 130, I try to never be under 100. This has allowed me to keep almost all of my lean mass, without doing weights and keep my RMR higher and look leaner that most women my height/weight. I used the RMR information to set my calories. It is hard for me to hit my calorie goal, and I don't really pay a lot of attention to calories. It is hard to get that many calories in just because by having my protein goal so high, there is little room for other food/calories and that automatically keeps my calories low. I try to eat between 1400 and 1800 calories a day on an average day. I can't function on less than 1200, I get dizzy spells etc. I eat over 2000 maybe a couple days a week (really active days). I only pay attnetion to calories just so I don't go under, going over isn't really a concern. I don't have any hunger so if I get busy and occupied I will completely forget to eat, which is a problem. I can easily go 24 hours without eating.

I eat Salads alone for this reason, because even with protein, they are sliders, they will take a decent amount of protein that will provide some fullness and add so much moisture to it that it is barely filling, and I am hungry again in an hour. A whole bag of baby spinach is like 40 calories, so it being a slider isn't an issue, but I have to be really careful when eating out and having salad with other things. It would make it super easy to over eat.