forgetmenot

I'll preface the post by pointing out that the last time I discussed dating on this board, the thread took a turn in the disastrous direction (I believe you can dig it up via a search) so I am putting on my full armor gear this time. My experience as a new 30-year old has not been so positive either. I get alot of interest from less-than-average guys in the attractiveness department telling me that I'm beautiful but none from the above-average ones. My conclusion is that the less-than-average guys do not actually mean what they are saying; they just pick out the unattractive girls that they actually have a chance with and hope for a foot in the door by appealing to their low self-esteem. Here is my bottom line about physical attractiveness which might help you think about the issue- I don't have a minimum criteria on attractiveness itself. Having said that, I am seriously committed to making healthy eating and fitness a top priority for the rest of my life. Just as I expect my partner to be compatible along my other priorities (basic values, etc), I put a high premium on the partner being committed to fitness as well. I'd like to think that this is a sensible attitude but unfortunately in practice the guys in my area tend to fall into one two buckets - the body builders who can squat 400 pounds and the serial couch potatoes. So we'll see how it goes.

Thanks for taking time out of your recovery to respond to my question. Hope you get well soon. Can you confirm that everyone there is female? I think sharing a room with a male would be a deal-breaker for me.

I have a Yunmai scale that measures body fat %. I've had the opportunity to compare its measurements against measurements from a DEXA body fat scan on 3 separate occasions a couple months apart. Each time, the Yunmai scale was dead on whereas the Tanita medical-grade scale at my doctor's office (with more bells/whistles, costing >$1000) was quite a bit off most of the time.

I am still losing, albeit at a snail pace. My doctor (not my WLS surgeon, but Dr. Westman the obesity specialist) told me that at my current intake (~1000 calories, <20g. of carbs), I will continue losing until my body naturally figures out its healthy weight and then I will know I've landed at the right place.

I follow a Keto/LCHF plan too so I keep carbs to under 20g. According to some of the books I've perused (The Obesity Code, Good Calories-Bad Calories, etc), protein also raises insulin, just not to the same extent as carbs. My protein intake is around 50-60 g, which is on the low end of what WLS dieticians recommend. I realize that most forum members eat much more protein than that with excellent results so I might not be the best example to follow.

For a self-pay patient, I suggest that you consider BLIS coverage for unexpected and potentially expensive complications. Only certain surgeons would make you eligible for BLIS so it might factor into your decision.

I had the same experience and had to be discharged with a catheter. There is no need to worry, you will be back to your old self in no time.

I was self-pay as well and I am extremely risk-averse. By the time surgery day rolled around I still wasn't completely assured but here are some steps/considerations I took: There is a program called BLIS specifically targeted to self-pay WLS patients to insure against complications, you can google search the company easily. The wrinkle is that you have to purchase through the surgeon directly (and obviously they only offer the insurance to surgeons with low complication rates). If you are still flexible on who to do the surgery with, then you might want to look for a BLIS-enrolled one. In my case, my surgeon tried really hard to come to an agreement with BLIS but he couldn't cut through the red tape. My surgeon told me that the only kind of complication that could bankrupt me were blood clots, which could lead to strokes, etc if they went untreated. Anti-clot medications (and compression sleeves) are a standard part of your post-op dosages but I nagged the doctors to give me the maximum dosage possible. After discharge, I fought through the pain and nausea to move around as much as possible to clear any clots. Again, this is a standard recommendation but the possibility of having to pay for complications out of pocket gave me an extra source of motivation. After my amateur legal sleuthing through my insurance policy documents and other legal documents, I came to the conclusion that your regular insurance has to pay for emergency care even if it's a WLS complication. For example, if you had a leak or blood clot, the cost of stabilizing you in the ER should be picked up by your regular insurance. If the surgeon needed to go back and stitch up a leak or if you had severe GERD that required conversion to bypass, then the costs would be self-pay. However, I figured that, unless the problem was extreme, there should be an usually a less expensive way to address the complication which required more self discipline. The caveat here is that I'm not a lawyer, so please don't interpret this as formal legal advice. In my case, I did have a very minor post-op complication with swelling and water retention. I decided to go to the urgent care clinic instead of the surgeon. I made a judgement call between the surgeon's expertise and the potential costs I would incur for something I didn't think was life-threatening. I predicted that the over worked urgent care clinic is not going to spend the time to formally make a determination on whether my complication was a result of WLS and they have very little incentive to specifically contact the insurance company to connect the dots between the two. Again, I have no inside information on how insurance companies flag charges for complications from non-covered procedures (I wish I did), this was purely conjecture. In the end, my urgent care visit and treatment was paid by insurance just like any other urgent care visit/treatment. Hope this helps and good luck with your surgery.

I am 4 months out (but appetite was similar at 3 months). At the dense end of the food spectrum, I can eat exactly 4 bites of steak (works out to 2 ounces). At the other end, I can eat almost a cup of cooked mushy vegetables. I eat alot of tofu because it fills me up the least for the amount of protein but I also tend to over-eat it more. Like a previous poster, I have big swings in appetite usually coinciding with my menstrual cycle.

I am in my late 20s and obesity has mostly prevented me from seriously dating my whole life. I just hit the 29 BMI milestone, 4 months post-surgery, so I am choosing to venture into online dating for the first time. There is a guy I really like who I am meeting for coffee. Obviously he has seen realistic profile pictures, including full-body shots already. I am really tempted to ask him "are you alright with me being ~25 lbs overweight?" but I really should not do that right? How many dates in should I mention the surgery? Do I need to warn him that surgery is a big tool but there might be a chance of regain down the road?

Alright so no part of me holds the view that I'm too good to date someone who is formerly or currently overweight. But since 3 or 4 consecutive members interpreted my words that way, then I should accept all the blame for my lack of eloquence particularly with respect to the last sentence. Just to provide a little bit of context, out of the dozens of encounters I've had so far, the only ones who were interested in getting to know me further were overweight guys and the coffee date guy. A few of the overweight guys even explicitly told me that they prefer someone thinner but couldn't attract them and have to settle with me. A few of them insinuated the same thing and at a speed dating event, the organizer even told me to assume this was true for all interested guys (guess I am not invited back there again). Except for the handful of jerks who explicitly mentioned my weight, I have been pro-actively conversing with all of the interested guys but as expected, most are not going to work out due to preferences over hobbies, smoking/drinking, distance, kids, pets, etc. My concern was that maybe the coffee date guy still has an overweight mindset in the sense that he prefers someone thinner but still considers himself unappealing to those women and has to settle with me. In fact, I should retract that last sentence altogether and replace it with "I wish I had the assurance that this particular guy would still like me regardless of his past weight history". Anyways, hopefully that clarification soothes everyone's anger. If not - apologies in advance.

Thanks everyone! The date went well. The only unexpected wrinkle was that he volunteered the information that he used to be overweight and he talked quite a bit about his exercise/nutrition routine to keep the weight off. On the one hand, it seems great because it would be natural to open up to him about my own struggles at a later time. Having said that, I also wonder if a guy as attractive as him would be interested in me if he didn't used to be overweight. I like him alot but I just feel like I want a shot at guy who has never had weight problems. Anyways, this thread is turning out to be quite a therapy session for me. I appreciate all the words of wisdom from those who have gone through this.

I just came back from a 10 day trip to Paris and went to Barcelona a number of years ago before surgery. I think you won't have too many problems in Barcelona if you stick to tapas scene. It was quite a bit of struggle to stick with the post-op diet in Paris. This was mainly because I packed the day with copious amounts of sightseeing so I rarely had time to stop to eat. The only quick bite/street food options were crepes and sandwiches. I brought along a few packets of jerky and that helped somewhat. Also, the steak portions are quite big (the most common steak entrecote is about 8-10oz) and are almost always paired with fries or mashed potatoes. In the end, the limited food options made me give into temptation more than I liked to and more than I do at home. I ate one crepe during the trip, which you can ask for in buckwheat at all the crepe restaurants and some street stands. I also averaged maybe half a dozen fries daily and had foie gras almost every day. Foie gras has alot of protein but is also fat-heavy. The flip side is that the amount of walking/climbing I did overcame the extra calories, I came home about 5 lbs lighter. Paris is wonderful in terms of public transit options but I would walk from the Bastille to Notre Dame to the Arcde Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower. Climbing up the Arc de Triomphe works out to about 30 stories and the observation deck at Eiffel Tower works out to be even higher. The latter has an added bonus because if you can climb on your own to the first tier, you can instantly take an elevator the rest of the way up while the rest of the tourists line up for hours to go up the elevators from the ground. The Loire Valley is beautiful but I assume you are going to go easy on the wine tasting. Hope you find this helpful and most of all, you have fun!

New poster here. My SW was 207 lbs and 6 weeks out, I’m only down to 192 lbs and haven’t experienced any NSV’s like smaller clothing, etc. It goes without saying that I’ve been following the surgeon/nutritionist recommendations for fluids (10 cups/day), Protein (75 g), calories (currently in the 600 range) and exercise (5k brisk walk 6x a week, weight training 2x a week). Purely looking at these results, I guess my self-pay VSG might turn out to be a failure. What I thought might be interesting share is that I am lucky enough to have access to state-of-art instruments that take body composition. These measurements show that over the post-op period, I gained 15 lbs of Fluid and 2lbs of lean mass (hopefully some of which is muscle). If you crunch through the math, I have lost in excess of 32 lbs of body fat. So I guess the #1 takeaway from my experience is that if you are experiencing weight gain and/or a stall, it’s worthwhile to invest in a body composition measurement device. I understand that a decent quality one can be purchased on Amazon for ~60 which might not be 100% accurate in an absolute sense but will suffice for tracking your own progression. After a battery of tests and doctor’s visits, we’ve ruled out the usual medical causes for Water retention like kidney disease, too much sodium, protein deficiency, hormones, etc. I understand from reading bodybuilding forums that exercise itself can cause water retention but I don’t think it’s clear cut that I should stop exercising, since working out can also relieve water retention. The final diagnosis I got was “idiopathic edema” which essentially means that my water retention is a random occurrence for which there is no physiological explanation. When all is said and done, here is the reality that I’m trying to come to terms with. There are a couple ways to do the math but here’s one example – even a highly athletic woman my height carries 20 pounds of body fat, which is “only” 35-40lbs less than my current fat mass. However, I am overweight by 60lbs relative to a 25bmi, and much more than that if you use an alternate formula for an ideal weight. So the arithmetic says that I am carrying around at least 20lbs of excess water, which I have come to learn is a different beast from excess fat. We know that losing a pound of fat requires creating a certain amount of caloric deficit but at this point there is nothing more I can do to get rid of the water weight. The doctor prescribed a water pill but it’s probably not a long-term solution and any water I lose might come back once I go off the medication. I fully intend to use the VSG tool to lose that extra 35-40lbs of fat but at that point, I might still be officially classified as overweight/obese even though the surgery did everything that it was supposed to do. ­­­­Before committing to the surgery, I had scoured through this message board to mentally prepare myself for all the bad scenarios that could come up but this was not an outcome that I was able to mentally prepare for. Hopefully other members out there find my story useful.

Thanks for all the encouragement! It means alot to me. Berry78 - Yes we observed major swelling in the face/arms/legs. I declined a Water pill at first but the doctor pointed out that my blood pressure was too high and hemoglobin too low as a result of the extra water, where even before the surgery my BP was always normal. The water pill is very low dose and is the same one that get prescribed for hypertension so I figured I have no choice. I will see whether I can tolerate the pill, maybe cut back on exercise slightly and see how it goes.