kellsbells0182

Welcome! I was also on a GLP-1 and my insurance stopped paying for it. I figured that would cover surgery and couldn’t change their minds after I got it done. It was definitely something I had thought about over the years, but I didn’t think I needed it, I thought I could do it myself, but it turns out the older I got, the harder that was getting. I tell everyone that I would do it again tomorrow if I had to.

I’m excited for you! I’m sure you’ll do great! ❤️

Hi there! Just checking in with you….did you jump through all your pre-op hoops? Do you have a surgery date yet?

After my surgery I leaned in to walking. I want to say I started walking my neighborhood shortly after my surgery. My surgery was on a Thursday, I came home Friday, and I was walking the neighborhood by Sunday. Granted, I was not walking far or fast. Before my surgery at the weight I was I was able to walk about three miles in an hour and I live in a hilly neighborhood and two days after surgery I was only able to do a block but within a month I was walking further. Today I can easily do an hour on the treadmill at the gym and I told my husband that for funsies I want to go to the local outdoor track and just see how much I can walk before I get bored. 5 months after surgery I went back to my childhood love of figure skating. That’s my effortless exercise, a half hour of skating goes by in a flash for me. I recently started weight training not necessarily because I wanted look/get lean, but more for skating and mostly because I was struggling to start our lawnmower and I didn’t want to look like a weakling in front of my neighbors 😆 I’ve actually found that using AI (I use Gemini) is extremely helpful in creating a weight lifting routine. I have just gone in and I asked it to create me a routine using the gym machines and that I wanted it to be focused on helping my skating. I just print it out and bring it with me to the gym.

I have been very open about the fact that I have had surgery and I would go back and do it again tomorrow if I had the opportunity, I feel that is a way to normalize it and to beat the stigma. Honestly, I have had a really good experience with that. I had one woman at the gym who I think thought I was trying to discount my own progress by saying that I had surgery and she told me that didn’t matter, I looked great and to keep up the good work. I’m always ready to tell folks that it’s a full-time job being a bariatric patient and that I’m not just sitting around watching my stories and eating chocolates and losing weight. I’m sure to let anyone know that I have to show up every day, be mindful about what I eat, and be extremely deliberate about my activity. I know when I first decided on surgery I believed that I would be eating my dinner out of medicine cups for the rest of life so I can kind of understand where someone who has never struggled with their weight or someone who just has a bad attitude about the whole thing might not understand what it all entails.

Me again! I realize that I am the last person to post to this thread but surgery was September 4 and as of Saturday I’m down 72 pounds and in February I went back to my childhood hobby of figure skating. The picture of me not in a metallica shirt is from yesterday before my freestyle session.

Welcome! I’m a mom of three and I chose surgery when my insurance decided that nobody really needs weight loss meds, and at that point I had lost about 35 pounds with the help of GLP-1’s. I’m not a single mom or a ‘heavy hitter’ as you say but my weight had been an ongoing issue in my life, I would lose and then I would gain it (I had lost 50 pounds after having each of my older kids only to get pregnant again) and after my third child, I never saw my pre-pregnancy weight again and she will be 13 this May. Like you, I have a lot coming down the pike with my kids that I need to be in front row for. My mom didn’t make it out of her 40’s (she was diagnosed with cancer when I was a teenager) and all of my adult milestones were celebrated without her and my life has suffered for it. Here I was at 42, bigger than she ever was and I have three kids which means 3 times the graduations, 3 times the weddings (if they want that!), 3 times everything and I need to be there for all of that. I had VSG on September 4, 2025. The first couple weeks were a little rough but nothing I couldn’t handle. Today, I am down 60 pounds and I recently got back into my childhood hobby of figure skating which I never in my wildest dreams ever thought would be possible. Honestly, given the opportunity to do it again, I would a million times over.

YES! So I’m five and half months Post Op and I went back to figure skating last week after a 27 year hiatus. I fell on my butt and my tailbone has been sore since! I’ve been quoting Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite for the last week ‘Grandma took a little spill at the sand dunes……broke her coccyx’ 😆

The first pic with the metallica shirt was taken 9/3/2025 the night before my VSG….the plaid skirt picture was taken 12/16/25 and I have lost roughly 50 pounds between the two!

I’m only two months out, but I did my share of lurking on reddit and in here for 9 months before my surgery and never did I ever read anything about Keto Rash, until I was two weeks post op and ended up with it on my back! Edited to add….this is a bit of a positive but I’ve only heard of the opposite. Nobody talks about how incredible some things taste after surgery. I’ve only heard about how folks have lost the taste for some things and admittedly, I have had some of that. But last last week I had some cake donut and it was incredible as was the tiny cup of ice cream I ate and some of the white cheddar cheese I bought at Aldi. Maybe this is because some of this was taken for granted?

My first 10 days I struggled with protein shakes

I bought a set of espresso spoons from Marshalls and I’ve even using them a ton with my warm up food when I was on liquids for VSG and now that I’m on purées I’m using them a lot.

So tonight I was able to finish my protein shake by dumping it into a large tumbler with a cup of decaf from mcdonald’s. I havent done many of the other protein sources because i’ve been so focused on trying to get the shakes in. A warm up food is defined by my program as yogurt, protein pudding, or unsweetened applesauce.I think they prefer you eat no more than 2tbsp and I have done well with the 1tbsp. I did fine with pudding and the yogurt, I haven’t done applesauce, the dieticians implied that the applesauce is a last resort.

Did anyone have issues with getting protein shakes in? I swear I can’t get in more than a couple small sips before it foams up in my stomach and causes distress. I can do the clear proteins fine in fact I’m loving my clear protein. I get two tablespoons of a ‘warm up food’ per day and I don’t have issues with it at all. I have many different brands and so far they all been not so great. I’m managing to get one in per day because it takes me so long to drink it.

Just an update here in case anyone happens upon this in the future and has the same questions as me. I slept in my bed the night I was discharged and then the next three nights. I started sleeping on my couch because it started to hurt getting out of bed from being flat. I plan on sleeping on the couch until whatever bug my husband has clears up because I dont want to be coughing and sneezing at this stage of healing 😬