Nepenthe44

I lift heavy things. The more upset I am, the heavier the things. It's nice to make a lot of noise while doing it too, worth seeking out a place where that's acceptable.

FWIW, my strength also dropped massively after surgery. I was a weightlifter before and when I started back up again it was all I could do not to pass out trying to clean the baby barbell with no weights. But it's slowly getting better and now i'm back up to using the real barbell with tiny weights. Still nowhere near where I was pre-op, but it's an improvement over where I was 2 months ago. Keep at it, and be patient, and your strength will come back.

I bought my first pair of jeans, or any sort of pants that button and zip, since college a month or so ago. I still hate how they look, because all the weight I have left to lose seems to have just melted generally down but it's something. And I'll get to do the jeans shopping again soon, because they're saggy baggy now. Back when I wore jeans last, the style was ultra-low rise with a flared leg. I'm really digging the high-waisted skinny style. It's like a hug from your ankles to your ribs, like those squeezing thundershirts that they put on dogs afraid of thunderstorms.

Nice! Burpees over the bar are... intimidating. I got my first box jump since my last update (to a 10 inch box but there's still skin on my shins so I'm calling it a win), and my first single unders. I also ran during a WOD for the first time yesterday. It sounded like my loose skin was giving me a round of applause.

Even more effective: high salt, high carb meal the night before. Stuff in your pockets, heavy clothes, and your bladder don't weigh much, but just a little change in your fluid balance makes a huge difference. At my highest weight, I could easily swing 10 pounds heavier just by getting a Chinese takeaway .

When you say you have to wait 30-45 minutes, is that because you've tried eating sooner after drinking and it's uncomfortable or because you are following a rule from your program?

I'm also super, super fair skinned. I had a different laparoscopic abdominal surgery about 20 years ago and it took a few years for the scars to fade to pink. About 5 years afterward, they weren't particularly noticeable unless you were looking for them. They've never entirely faded.

How are you measuring calories and carbs? The statement "gerber apple juice, which doesn't have much carbs" is making me a little curious.

TomboyX is the only company that I know that makes the specific style of top that I use, which has heavy compression. I think they're available at Target if you want to try before buying. It's not to prevent sagging, it's to support and reduce the appearance of one's chest and keep it from moving. Compression clothing, including tanks and shirts, is often sold at sporting goods stores. I've not tried any of this type of clothing yet.

Be sure that you're not getting a garment called a binder for your breasts. These are garments usually used by trans men to reduce the appearance of the chest and are made of rigid fabric. They can cause damage to your breasts if they're not worn correctly and they often aren't particularly comfortable. I use a compression top (because binders are expensive and nothing is going to flatten these anyway). They're stretchy and about the same price as a regular bra. None of these types of garments prevent sagging, they just make you more comfortable.

I feel like a lot of practices write their guidelines with the expectation that you, the bariatric patient, are the single dumbest person who has ever walked the earth. If there's even the slightest chance that something could be problematic for anyone, they'll just forbid it for everyone, because you can't be trusted to, like, adapt or think or anything. And maybe they actually had a patient who was the single dumbest person who has ever walked the earth. That person put a piece of chicken in the microwave and let it go for 60 seconds and still choked it down, but then they got a tummy ache. Now no one gets to have warm leftovers. Maybe they had one patient who thought that 'black coffee" meant a triple-caramel venti machiatto. Now no one gets to have no-cal brewed caffeine beans. Maybe they had one patient who guzzled full-sugar Mountain Dew by the bottle post-op. Now you can't have a sip of champagne at your wedding. My dietician told me I can't have soup, because some people have trouble with it. Great, that's terrible for them. I've perfected my soup technique and I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to balloon back into super obesity because I had a cup of chicken noodle, so leave off.

Weightlifters with full-sized stomachs usually take protein supplements, so I don't expect I'll ever be totally through with them. Maybe I'll go on vacations without bringing powders or shakes, but long-term, it's supplements or spending hours of every day slowly digesting chicken. I do envy the guys who can choke down the nasty flavors in a few gulps though. I miss that.

Usually a Crossfit session combines a weightlifting portion that's high weight/low rep, where lifting heavy is the goal, and a "metabolic conditioning" (metcon) portion that's lower weight and high rep, where doing the most work in the least time is the goal. So it's both. For example, yesterday, our weightlifting portion was 5x4 of power snatches up to as heavy as possible. Then the metcon was as many rounds as possible in 12 minutes of 12 pull-ups, 12 med-ball Russian twists, and 12 wall balls.

What kind of sicko programs thrusters and shoulders to overhead in the same WOD!? (I know exactly what kind.) But that's not too bad of a drop-off. My diet is probably a little aggressive. After a few Very Bad days with poor recovery (a light pushing and pulling workout shouldn't lead to painful T. Rex arms for 5 days), I'm seeing the wisdom of adding a little carb in for recovery. I'm going to try having some bean-based foods or Greek yogurt after my workouts for a while and see if that helps any. I lost 130 pre-surgery. My goal was 50% of my excess weight lost pre-surgery, which I didn't quite make due to food funerals. However, I gained an inch of height, which alters the math enough so that I think I'll count it. Weirdly, my core strength doesn't seem to have been really affected. Sit-ups are still my friend and planks even more so with less weight hanging off my torso. I can do a real plank now! My limbs though... they're tired and sad.

Yes. This exactly. This is exactly how to explain it. I've been back for a few weeks and I just feel... bad... when I'm moving. I'm not particularly tired afterward, but as soon as I'm moving it feels like I've got a single glycogen molecule to share amongst every muscle in my body... which probably isn't that inaccurate. I spend a lot more time mid-WOD staring at the barbell and just contemplating my life choices than I used to. Not that I'm using a barbell, because I've had to take my weight essentially down to zero, less than a third of what I was lifting before. PVC-filled-with-sand, very light dumbbells and the cutest little baby kettlebell are what I'm using. Are you still working with actual weight @Lipman?

13 months from the first educational session. 9 months between initial surgeon's consult and surgery. But they lost my paperwork twice and there were several other bureaucratic delays that slowed the timeline dramatically.

Freeze-dried fruits instead of dried fruits might do you well. Freeze dried strawberries have a nice crunchy texture, but there's nothing to them but air. No added sugar like regular dried fruit, which is basically candy.

My family is big on eating out so I started going to restaurants again at 3 weeks. At 5 weeks, we went to our usual Mexican restaurant which doesn't have soup, so I ordered a shrimp cocktail with steamed or boiled shrimp in a tomato sauce. I brought my food scale and ate ~1.75 oz of shrimp, which was 4 medium, without the chunky part of the sauce. Ended up having that for another 4-5 meals. I just took it slow and chewed really well. When a server asks if that's all I'm having, I say yes. If they asked if I liked it, I say I loved it, which is always true because anything that's not a protein shake tastes amazing to me. They don't want or require an explanation. Their concerns are a) did I miss some of this person's order and b) is there something wrong with the food.

My dad's Easter lamb chops with asparagus and mashed potatoes. He didn't do so well and they were so raw they were practically frolicking and bleating. Gross. All of my "last meals"--and I had several, including overnight travel to a city I used to live in to go to some of my favorite restaurants--ended up pretty disappointing, which is to be expected. Food is almost* never as amazing as I remember it, which was a good reminder pre-surgery. There's not actually that much to miss. *Michelin-star restaurant meals being the only exception. That's as amazing as I remember it.

I've been going on 3 hour hikes since 10 days post-op. That said, I've had very little trouble with fluid intake. (I can't chug a liter of water in one go like before, but that's more of a weird party trick than a positive lifestyle choice.) I also live in a cold temperate climate and wasn't out in the summer sun. I had thought of using a CamelBak type thing to be constantly drinking fluids, but it turned out not to be necessary.

No. That's nuts. You have a BMI of 86, you could be eating half a pound of cashews for lunch and you'd still lose weight. Not as fast as you are now, but at a good clip. That being said, the macro spread (ratio of fats, carbohydrates, and protein) of cashews isn't great. If you're only getting 700 calories a day, you need to be prioritizing protein and nuts aren't really a protein food. They're mostly fat. Again, eating them will not stop you from losing weight, but you need protein to ensure that the mass you're losing trends toward fat mass and not lean mass. Depending on what you're eating throughout the rest of the day, you might want to switch the cashews for a protein-dense food most days.

I have now lost more than my max squat weight and it stuns me that I was able to get out of bed at my heaviest.

Does your "big" arm appear larger than the other one on visual examination? If not, I'd chalk it up to measuring inconsistencies between arms, especially if you're doing the measurement on your own. I don't have help, so I only measure my non-dominant arm and don't put any stock in the number because, unlike with a waist, there's no easily found measurement point. Am I supposed to pull the tape taught around my batwings or just let it drape loosely like my skin does. 🤷‍♂️ "Losing" that many inches in your non-dominant arm doesn't sound like an actual loss of tissue; it sounds like measuring at a different point than you did the last time.

Yeah, the staging guidelines are essentially arbitrary. My "patient's bible" says 10 days of full liquids, but the physician's assistant told me to advance to purees after my one-week appointment.