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 😬

It went well! I’m home now and I was able to sleep in my bed. I managed to get in half of a protein shake this morning, i was only able to get 3oz in yesterday at the hospital. You’ll do great!

Thank you! ❤️

I was prescribed topamax in 2008 when I when I was being treated for severe post partum depression. I was put on zoloft and I ended up gaining like 16 pounds in a month on it and after almost losing my mind over that, my psychiatrist agreed that I was ‘too heavy for a young lady’ (🙄) and put me on the topamax because weight loss was a side effect. I ended up having every side effect except weight loss. I do know that in the last few years they have created a weight loss drug called Qsymia which is topmirate with phentermine.

I watched this! Originally, when the Biggest Loser was on I watched seasons 6 and 7 I think because those seasons coincided with me losing weight after having my son and losing weight after I had him. I feel like netflix could have done better this because I think this particular show has impacted us more as a society than we think. Unfortunately, I’m finding a lot of the netflix produced documentaries are leaving me wanting more. I spent half of my adult life as a member of Weight Watchers and via their social media platform Connect, I have seen the ramifications of this show. One of the most glaring ones is that the huge losses of the weigh ins on that show messed up everyone’s expectations of weight loss. I would see people posting on there ‘I’m disappointed and frustrated because I only lost 2 pounds this week. I don’t think this is working.’ I would try to make it a point to tell these people ‘Hey that’s awesome and normal! This isn’t The Biggest Loser, losing 20 pounds a week isn’t something that really happens’ I also tried to go on a deep dive after I was done watching this show to see how many former cast members ended up with bariatric surgery at some point afterwards. I was only able to find three. I know the one lady they interviewed said that she was on a GLP-1 and the Cahill guy who lost the most weight in show history said that he would never take one because Jillian Michaels said they were bad. 🙄

Is Saxenda still available? It was my stepping stone to Wegovy and honestly I liked it much much than Wegovy. I thought it worked better for me and I preferred the pen and the daily injection over the wegovy pen and doing it once a week. I was only able to get my hands on one box and it was impossible to get. It got to the point where it could have went generic but I don’t think anyone decided to run with that.

So my surgery is September 4th and I realize that pain is a very personal thing and that one person’s 10 on a pain scale could be a 2 to someone else. I’m worried that I’m not worried enough about post operative pain. So to put it into perspective…I’ve had three c-sections. After the third on they let me go home a day early and the day after my discharge I was up cooking dinner because I had two toddlers and my husband, god bless him, made dinner the night I came home and we didn’t eat until 9:30pm, if you ever had toddlers you understand how problematic eating that late is. So with my older two babies, they sent me home with a prescription for percocet that I never filled because I was able to manage with sporadic motrin, with my third they asked me what pain meds I wanted and when I told them that I’ve never taken anything but motrin the response I got was that nobody was going to give me a medal for refusing pain meds. The only issue I had was I slept on my couch for a week after having each child because I couldn’t do the stairs post surgery, I wasn’t told to avoid stairs I just didn’t feel like I could do them. So my question for those of you who have had weight loss surgery and stairs in your house. We were you able to do the stairs post surgery?

The only ‘pre operative diet’ I have for my program is they gave me a sheet for their ERAS program which is not a program based on Taylor Swift (😆) but it’s Enhanced Recovery After Surgery and it’s a sheet that tells you to add certain things to your daily eating and to add 30 min of exercise starting one week before surgery. The day before surgery to eat lightly and to add gatorade or powerade during the day and to stop food after midnight and to drink clear fluids up to 3 hours before surgery. I told my therapist I was worried about eating leading up to surgery and she told me to focus on adding that stuff to my diet and to be kind to myself and try not to obsess.

I had to self report my weight twice a month for the dietician. I actually haven’t met in person with anyone in my program yet and I won’t until my surgery date on September 4th. In the grand scheme of things I’m using the scale on surgery day as my ‘Before’ weight.

thats this week!! congrats!!

I’ll count it! Thanks so much!❤️