IncredibleShrinkingMan

Everything above is correct re: exercise and maintenance. That said, it is extremely useful, and perhaps ultimately required, to break out of stalls. I have had three since surgery, and liquid Protein and exercise has done the trick for a good month each time. Your body finds a way to stay at a certain weight without burning fat and that's what causes a stall. With exercise, it can't maintain all its functions and fuel exercise without spending the fat. This continues for a little while if you stop exercising, because it takes time for your body to bring your metabolism back down to maintenance level. You will eventually want to vary up your exercise and definitely include some resistance to avoid muscle loss. Eventually, even with exercise, your body will attempt to enter premature maintenance by learning how to be efficient at the same exercise over and over again. I have gotten down from 286 to about 200 with pretty sporadic exercise, but I am having hard time breaking into Onederland on the same basis, so I am not intensifying my exercise schedule in hopes of continuing past this point.

I think the best value out there is the Fitbit Charge HR, quote at $120 from City Sports, or if you don't need heart rate, just the Fitbit Charge at $100. Both of them have steps, floors, calories, and distance, as well as a stopwatch and time of day synced to your phone, all viewable both on the tracker and in the app. The Flex doesn't display these things, but rather just tells you with dots when you are at 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, or have reached your goal. It's getting cheaper, especially on eBay, as the others become more popular, and I've seen them around $25 personally. Good luck with your decision. Sorry I can't advise on TomTom and other competing products.

@@drumking88 I had my sleeve 3 months ago the day after my 31st birthday. I would've qualified when I was 25 but wasn't independent then and faced backlash from my family which, incidentally, is full of doctors and health vigilantes. I had to get to an even more desperate state to convince them it was the right time. I don't believe there is such a thing as too young for this surgery. If a problem is in the making, this should be available to everyone. You shouldn't have to wait until you are severely impacted. It is just denial by the community. There may be such a thing as too old, just due to surgical mortality risks, but nobody in the medical profession seems to put their money where there mouths are with childhood and adolescent obesity. Hopefully a generation from now, at which time experts think the obesity rate in the nation may be near 50%, young people like yourself will no longer feel underage in the bariatric community, as this solution expands its eligibility to where it truly should be, and gets covered by a lot more insurance.

3 months out...and I haven't found anything that I can't have in appetizer-size portions. That may have been true as early as one month out. So, short answer: YES Intelligent answer: There are certain things you really shouldn't have ever again unless you want to be sucked into the blackhole they created in all our lives. I was forced to have rigatoni at a wedding and it was fine, but any carb puts the weight loss in the penalty box for a few days and requires clean eating, perhaps a liquid Protein kick, to restart.

I take a lot of pride (and sometimes obsess over) the things that I can now do as a result of having lost 100 lbs, which dilute the attention I have for the things I have always been able to do and obsess over (FOOD). Those haven't gone away, but they are no longer front and center for me.

Well, I haven't heard of beef and veggies three days after surgery given out by a surgeon as a diet progression plan, but I certainly know of individuals who have done that and have been just fine with no complications. I, myself, went a bit up-tempo of the prescribed diet progression, going for tuna fish on the 6th day after surgery, grilled chicken and meatballs by week 3, and by a month out, I was already eating everything with no problem and in much smaller amounts. This was somewhat necessitated by a pretty active late summer wedding season in which I was forced to have a lot of non-sleeve friendly meals.

Well, if you think about it, it is kind of hard not to have a big one, first, because we all have dreams and hopes, second, because if we don't have a long-term goal, i.e., the result of years and years of efforts, on which all shorter-term projects can be predicated, it is impossible to plan the day-to-day baby steps. Of course, you can still make small, quick turnaround goals and assignments for yourself, but that seems a little disconnected from what is really one big integrated process which involves so much more than weight and looks. I guess if you start this way, see how you do, see what success you can achieve with the short-term goals, you can start to have clearer expectations as to what you will eventually end up with, and determine a sort of "safety," "target," and "reach" set of end numbers. I personally find it hard to do little quick-turn around things if I can't pinpoint exactly what I am working towards by doing them.

I wouldn't try to bring it to a halt unless you are at a point where you are so underweight that your health is suffering. Anything you lose has a chance of coming back, and the longer you lose, the greater the odds of the last few pounds returning. So I'd say you take what you can get in the way of weight loss, and if you are happy where you are, your body will likely help you settle back there once maintenance begins. However, it wants to be heavier than you want, so once you are back there, you will have to be more proactive about shutting down the rebound.

If I get up in the morning and don't see a loss on the scale, I kick something across the room, and then go grab the measuring tape. If I don't see anything there either, I assume it's a stall. But if I do, that's quality weight loss, and the reason it doesn't show on the scale is because a lot of glycogen-associated Water is stored.

I added sausage at the soft foods stage (4 weeks). Oddly I could have poultry and fish, but not red meats, no matter how moist, during purees. I am surprised you aren't at least being allowed turkey sausage.

Sleeved August 6 (originally scheduled July 30). I can completely identify, and here are some examples: I am eating more than my share of barbecue and other heavy meats, probably in place of the bread I can't eat anymore. I am going to bad places compulsively, even though I bring almost everything home and never get to about half of it. I am drinking Diet Coke at an increasing rate...even when it makes my sleeve feel awful. I am occasionally forgetting the Vitamins, especially when feeling irritable as a result of lack of nourishment. I am occasionally eating out of boredom, although that is now quickly satisfied. I think it is a valid point that this is only a tool, however, I think there are some built-in assumptions that very little about your brain will actually change, and that this is a way to handcuff, rather than change, the damaging aspects of our psychological makeup. I feel that in general, very little has changed about my tastes, and almost nothing has changed about my food OCD. I feel that as long as we don't force the exact same lifestyle as before through the sleeve, it will be an effective and worthwhile investment.

Unreasonable expectations are the ultimate downfall of so many bariatric patients. This author is fortunate that all the misconceptions did not ultimately sabotage her weight loss success. I also agree that the non-scale struggles, such as relationships, are minimized, and that the NSV's are often overemphasized in support groups, blogs, and in other places. At the end of the day, if weight is the only thing that changes, it is still a great thing to have had done, but people need to be prepared for the fact that, just as with the weight loss itself, if the patient doesn't make a conscious effort to change the game, it is perfectly foreseeable that nothing else will change.

How did they go? Good luck, I always feel for people that are going through pre-op in the 4th quarter of the year. That means reining things in through Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. That will help you develop extreme willpower. My pre-op was in the summer, when light eating is the way to go anyhow.

Ran my first 5K in 17 years over the weekend...and headed for more Went on the Superman ride at Six Flags (Maryland), which was local coaster still precluding me based on size I think about work at work, instead of food, and think about [insert activity here] while doing [insert activity here], instead of food. Yes, I think about food when eating food, and I actually didn't before, which was a problem. People actually sit in the seat next to me on the Metro instead of assuming there isn't room for the both of us. Interestingly, I haven't had the experience of the poster directly above...nobody who didn't want to be friends before wants to be friends now, but in the event they do, my response will be exactly as it is described in the above post.

Forever if you have the discipline to stick to that, which is great. Otherwise, I would say that if you hit an unexpected stall or experience any regain, it might be time to check quantities again.

I will post official start and goal on Monday, but it will be something like 198 to start on 11/9 and 178 as goal by NYE.

People often discover willpower and fortitude when embarking on pre-op, as opposed to diets in the past, as surgery is nigh and psychologically they are already in an entirely new place living a new life. I think you need to trust that you can do it. Nobody said the adjustment would be easy, but I believe you are discounting the fact that the more you do something, the less steep a climb it appears to be. Our heads are in our way, and our heads are what got us here, not our bodies. I got on the treadmill yesterday thinking I was going to collapse after running a mile and ended up running a 5K because it felt so good. And I am still obese. Temporary suspension of disbelief can very well become permanent, and should.

Congratulations folks. I can't wait until I reach this point.

Don't let administrative incompetence undo years of mental preparation you have invested in this, not to mention your pre-op, whichever variety you were asked to do (did they properly manage this part? if not, it would give me pause as well).

What has your exercise pattern been like? It is of co-equal importance as diet. Has your surgeon expressed any concern at your post-op visits or provided any insight into what's going on? That said, 30 lbs is not trivial...that's more than most of us could do with any permanence prior to surgery. Unless I'm missing something, it also doesn't seem like you've lost and regained at any point since surgery, which is a very good thing, so while you may still be slow through the journey, setbacks have not occurred, nor have their metabolism-damaging effects. To lift your mood a bit, even though I don't think you should be thinking this quite yet, there is always the possibility of a re-sleeve or a conversion to bypass. But it is worth it to make sure there isn't something fundamentally wrong with the surgery or with your dietary approach before heading this way.

Welcome to the other side. You've earned this!

I did not do liquids, as he didn't ask me to. I lost 20 lbs in the two weeks of pre-op, but I cheated like there was no tomorrow (and if you think about it, that was reality). I had pizza four times, Italian sausage twice, clam chowder once, Belgian fries with all the dippings twice, and fell for Chipotle once. The rest of the time I had high-Fiber Cereal with greek yogurt, or else some extremely lean meat. I was sure to workout like hell while this occurred, because exercising was a lot easier for me than staying under 1000 calories a day (which was the requirement...and by the way, that is still hard now three months out, but I am losing weight just fine). There were no problems with my liver, and I was 286 (44 BMI) at my final pre-op appointment. Instances of cancellation are rare and occur in extreme cases (hundreds of pounds heavier than you or me), so I would take this day to relax and get in the zone...you've done it, and psychologically, you should be on the other side already. Congratulations.

This sounds like it may be at your drain site...this heals much more slowly than all the other incisions and generally doesn't have any visual indication. Yes, coughing was absolutely painful for a week, and the nurses told me that it helped to press a pillow over my abdomen to lessen the impact...didn't really help. The pain is indeed quite sharp, but trust me, it passes.

That's very typical. I was ruminating about my last supper at the Brazilian steakhouse at about 6 days, in addition to a whole host of other things, like cheesesteaks and pizza. That still happens, but all I have to do is take a few bites of Protein (or in your case a protein drink) and all cravings are gone. I hope that will be your experience too.

DC/Northern Virginia