ouroborous

Severe caloric restriction can reduce or eliminate menses, I know that -- anorexic women (and, I believe, some pro athletes) have this problem frequently. I don't know what effects it might have on menopause; if the amenhorrea is due to reduced estrogen, then I could see severely reduced caloric intake causing menopausal symptoms, too. But: I Am Not An Expert... talk to your doctor

Sure, all body types are different. Plus, generally speaking, limiting carbs (in fact, limiting ANY type of food) tends to limit calories -- which tends to produce weight loss. In fact, caloric deficit is about the only thing we know for sure produces weight loss, so anything that reduces calories tends to produce weight loss (whether it is healthy or durable weight loss is another matter entirely). There is zero proof that extremely low-carb diets are any more safe and effective for durable weight loss than there is for extremely low-fat diets. They both have been fad diets for a long time, they both have adherents who will discount any evidence that the diet might be ineffective or overly simplistic (see: the confirmation bias), and they both have little to no uncontested evidence (large, peer-reviewed, repeatable, randomized, placebo-controlled trials) supporting their long-term, widespread efficacy. They exist primarily due to word-of-mouth in forums like this, not due to scientific consensus. That's why my advice is always: talk to your doctor. If you don't trust your doctor, then you've got a problem, since you just had a major surgery...

Well I'm going back to calorie tracking. Every time I've done that rigorously, I've found some source of "hidden" calories.

This is why I'm always careful to say that "carbs aren't necessarily bad, as long as they're healthy (ie, complex, non-sugary) carbs." People seem to want to lump things like Pasta and ice cream (simple, unhealthy, "bad" carbs) together with things like vegetables, multigrain bread (complex, healthy carbs). They are not at all alike, from both a caloric and glycemic index perspective, and the end result of eating the same amount of calories in different types of carbs will be very different; you can eat 80g/day of simple carbs and gain weight, or 80g/day of complex carbs and lose weight. Same body, same metabolism, different nutrient. This is why I hate the overly-simplistic "carbs are bad" thought virus that floats around just about every weight loss community. It just isn't that simple. I blame the Atkins craze (which has shown tremendous success at helping people lose weight, and not so much success at helping them maintain their weight loss, which is the really important bit).

I don't think you have to wait "a few minutes" after each sip. As long as you're not feeling any discomfort (pain, reflux, etc.) I'd wager that you can sip all you want, and thirst is nature's way of telling us to drink more. Of course, I'd check with your doctor if you have any concerns, but I don't think that throttling Water intake is super important. As long as you're not gulping and not in any discomfort, even at 11 days out I'd bet your doc would be thrilled if you could drink more water. Just out of curiousity, how much water are you getting in per day? You should be tracking it at this point, and it should be from 60-80 oz (says my doc and my nut.)

Eat lots of complex carbs (whole grains, vegetables, some fruit). Be sparing on simple carbs (sugars, refined white flour). Eat a lot of Protein, and eat it first. Drink lots of Water. That, plus keeping your calories down and taking your Vitamins is all you really need to do. Please folks, can we dump the "carbs are bad" mentality? It's just not that simple. If you carb-deprive yourself, you'll end up tired and grumpy. If you protein-deprive yourself, you'll waste your muscles and eventually your brain. And so on -- we need EVERY nutrient, including carbs, especially when we're in deep weight loss. There's actually nothing really wrong with 80g of carbs per day, especially if they're good carbs -- complex, non-sugar, high Fiber carbs -- not junk. Just keep your diet balanced and healthy and your calories down, and you WILL lose weight. Please listen to your nutritionist, not random people on the Internet. Otherwise, why are you paying for her expertise? I've lost >100 lbs following this basic advice, so clearly you don't have to be overly miserly with carbs to lose a great deal of weight.

Post surgical regret about 4-8 weeks out is very, very typical. Stick with it -- it will get better, and before long your biggest regret will be that you didn't have the surgery sooner. Trust me on this; many -- most? -- of us went through this. It gets much, much better.

I've been at basically the same weight -- around 225 -- for six months now. Yes, focus on the positives, I've lost more than 100 lbs, my health is so much better, etc. But I still have this annoying, stubborn belly and body fat that I want to get rid of. At this point, I know it's all mental/vanity, but the problem is that I've been hitting the gym HARD for a while now, and the remaining thin layer of fat is smoothing out all the new muscle I've been packing on and making it harder to see. Some things I've considered: It's muscle! I'd love to believe this, but there's no way I've packed on 5-10 lbs of muscle. A lot of guys CLAIM to put on this much muscle at the drop of a hat, but they're fooling themselves; unless you're 6'8", going to the gym every single day for an hour and pumping HUGE stacks of weight -- and probably on anabolics to boot -- there's simply no way to put on this much muscle in the 2-3 months that I've been lifting weights seriously. It's water weight! Yeah, except that water weight fluctuations don't tend to stick around for six months. I'm snacking too much! This is a possibility, but I don't snack on BAD things, for the most part. It's not candy and sugary treats; it's mostly protein-based, or zero-calorie, or the occasional (re: one a day, max) 90 calorie high-fiber brownie. I know that I need to get back to watching my calories on Livestrong (or whatever), to make sure that I'm not fooling myself about how much I eat, but just from gut feel, it doesn't FEEL like that much. I'm certain that I'm not consuming more than 1500-1800 calories per day, and I'm walking about 2 miles per day (I clocked it... 2.2 miles in 30 minutes, roughly 3.7 mph) and going to the gym twice a week. At this level of consumption/burn, I should STILL be losing weight (doing the calorie math considering my age/height/weight/gender), but I'm not. I guess I know the responses -- track my calories, focus on protein, watch out for grazing, etc. -- and I'm mostly just frustrated, not looking for advice. I knew that the "honeymoon period" with the sleeve wouldn't last forever; I can't effortlessly drop 20 pounds anymore. But I sure hope that my current weight isn't my "forever weight" because it's still about 15 pounds above what I was hoping for! If you click on my weight ticker, I believe it will take you to a graph of my weight over time since the surgery, and you'll see that it fits a nice logarithmic curve. If you project it out, losing another 15 pounds will take me something like 3-4 years. Ack!

The fact that we do not have single-payer is what causes this; the loop between the billers (hospitals, mostly) and insurers causes rates to soar. The fact that for the most part, insurance "just handles it" causes most of us to not notice -- until the first time you need medical care when you're uninsured. Then all of a sudden, a relatively routine medical treatment can bankrupt you (medical costs are still the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, and will be until we fix our crazy patchwork of for-profit, insurance-based medicine). And all of this is because all of the billing and payment goes through a web of middlemen, each extracting their cut. The same situation can be seen in all industries where there is "mandatory" (or effectively mandatory) insurance. Just look at how expensive it is to get bodywork done on your car; this is the same situation where most people never get the sticker shock because if they're insured, insurance "just handles it." Thus there is no popular anger, and no consumer search for competition forcing the prices down (you know, how capitalism is supposed to work, when the politicians watching the henhouse aren't bought and sold by the very people they're regulating). Did you notice that one of the parts of the health care reform law that the insurance companies fought so very hard (and very successfully) to keep out was the simple provision that revoked their anti-trust exemption? In theory, why should they get this exemption -- if we're going to have anti-trust laws, everyone should be governed by them, right? It's only fair play. And yet, for some reason, insurers are allowed to monopolize local markets, with the predictable result that there are very frequently only one or two (colluding) insurers in any given market, and consumers have no real choices... no way to hop to a different insurer when the extortion of Aetna or Cigna or BCBS gets too horrible (of course, the insurers have also colluded to make changing insurance outside of a job change very difficult... they basically game the system any way they can). And if people could see just how much potential salary they're giving up, just so their employers can pay their outrageous insurance premiums, there'd be a revolution. I've seen estimates that say that up to 20-40% of the cost of keeping an employee is benefits, with most of that being health insurance premiums. Just think what you could do with another 20% of your salary in your pocket... Of course, the moral problem with health insurance is that we're effectively making it unavailable to the poor and uninsured (often the same group) with our broken system. Until we stop screaming "socialism! socialism!" and running away whenever someone mentions single-payer medicine, this will just keep getting worse. Single-payer systems aren't perfect by any means, but they are more humane and a LOT more affordable (both to the individual and to the nation) than our current for-greed system. And before someone starts talking about the poor, harassed doctors, that's a red herring. Most of the money in our scam-based system does NOT go to the doctor; most of the money goes to CEO's and stock shareholders in whatever corporations manage to squeeze out the most competition. The doctors these days, after paying off the ridiculous graft malpractice insurance rates, are lucky to get by. Have you noticed how private practices for NON-lucrative specialties (lucrative: plastic surgery, weight loss surgery; non-lucrative: pediatrics) are disappearing? That's why; doctors are NOT getting rich off our current system. If they were, we'd have more medical school graduates and fewer business school graduates; instead, we're getting frighteningly near to a serious "doctor shortage" in the US. No, the only people getting rich are the execs and shareholders of Aetna, Blue Cross, Cigna, and so on. Yes, OP, the system is broken and disgusting, and anybody who's paying attention SHOULD be feeling the same anger you felt when they see just how much of a scam it is, especially when you consider the fact that people are dying because of it.

Some claim carbonated beverages will stretch your sleeve, but after you're past the initial six month healing period, I doubt this sincerely. One thing that IS true is that carbonated beverages are much more acidic than non-carbonated beverages (because of the carbonic acid they produce). Additionally, Diet Coke (and Diet Pepsi and Diet RC, etc. etc.) all have large amounts of other chemicals added (for flavor and as preservatives) that make them even MORE acidic, to the point where I would be concerned about the damage they might do to your incision scar, given repeated consumption. I used to be a HUGE Diet Coke drinker, and now that I'm sleeved I simply cannot drink the stuff because the acidity gives me a severe upset stomach and stomach cramps. That being said, I've seen no studies proven that acidic beverages cause damage. But since there's no NEED to drink carbonated beverages -- there are plenty of refreshing and delicious non-carbonated beverages -- why risk it?

It's extremely common and nothing to worry about. They are a little annoying because they're prickly and get caught on stuff. Talk to your doc about it, but usually what they do is just pull it out with a forceps. If there's a loop left they may have to snip that (they did for me).

I second the "eat meat first" thing. Not only is meat denser (fills you up quicker), but it produces a much better glycemic curve than any breads or sweets. It's a long, slow release of blood sugar, preventing that spike and crash that led so many of us into metabolic syndrome (and eventually diabetes or worse). In short, you will "feel full" longer if you focus on Protein first. All the statistics on weight regain being said, it's very true that losing is the easy part. For the first year or so, you hardly have to do any work to shed 10 pounds, it seems. Past that, it gets harder. I'm not as far along as Tiffykins, but I'm about 17 months out, and I'm definitely at the stage where I have to WORK to lose weight. That means doing SOME kind of fitness activity EVERY day, plus going to the gym to build muscles with resistance training twice a week. And truth be told, I should be doing more -- more cardio, more resistance. Ladies, it's super important that you get enough resistance training, since if you let your muscles atrophy through weight loss and inertia, you'll have to fight even HARDER to avoid regain later. And gents, it's super important that you do cardio and not just pump Iron, since the strongest muscles won't prevent a heart attack, and all of the "metabolic rate" nonsense to the contrary, there's simply no replacement for BURNING calories if you want to lose fat and keep it off. Bottom line is, after about a year (seems to be the average), weight loss and maintenance becomes WORK, if you want to maintain it. There's simply no avoiding that fact. However, unlike pre-sleeve, the hard work can actually, well, WORK... you actually CAN lose the weight and keep it off. You CAN get and keep a body you're proud of. I don't know about you, but for me, pre-sleeve, even those "simple" goals seemed impossible. Now, they seem like a challenge, but possible.

Well, liquids probably won't, as long as they're closer to "clear" liquids. Some of the more "full" liquids MIGHT, but you'd really have to be overdoing it... almost TRYING to sabotage yourself. Bottom line is that before you got to the point where they'd damage you, you'd be in significant discomfort or pain. So if you stop before that point, you should be fine. Some argue that carbonated beverages can stretch your sleeve, but as far as I know about the physics of gases and liquids, that's just really unlikely. Gases (the CO2 from carbonation) are compressible (so the stomach can "squish" them into a smaller space), and just like liquids, it's far more likely that the stomach will squirt them out one of its sphincters before stretching the tough upper stomach tissue. In short, you'll burp or fart before you get to the point of stretching. It's probably still good to avoid carbonated beverages because they tend to be empty calories and very acidic, but I doubt they'd stretch your stomach.

Yeah, the width of my shoes changed a lot. I went from having to wear "extra wide" shoes to just normal size. I gotta say, the ability to wear normal sized shoes, and the fact that my feet really don't hurt anymore... a HUGE improvement!

Remember that post-op care instructions vary from doctor to doctor, so different people will be told different things. From what I know, avoiding alcohol is important for two reasons. First and most important, your stomach is still healing for six months; the scar formation -- which is very important -- around your incision could be compromised if you constantly irritate the lining, and alcohol does exactly that. In fact excess alcohol can actually cause necrosis (tissue death) in the stomach lining. Is that what you want going on when your stomach is still trying to heal from a very traumatic surgery? Also, I've heard that rapid weight loss really taxes your liver, and alcohol can make that worse. Lots of obese people have a condition called hepatosteatosis -- fatty liver -- which is actually a very serious condition which can lead to cirrhosis (scarring) of the liver, or even -- in extreme cases -- death. If your liver is still recovering from this, are you sure that adding alcohol (another liver toxin) to the mix is a good idea? Bottom line, follow your doctor's orders to the letter if you're hoping for the best recovery and good weight loss results. They make those recommendations for a reason

From what I know, it is possible to stretch the sleeve, but not really easy. I was told that the part of the stomach that's cut out -- the fundus -- is the stretchy part. The remainder is roughly the consistency of football leather -- yes, it IS possible over time and with effort, to stretch it a little. But NO, one carbonated beverage or the occasional overly fast meal is NOT going to stretch your sleeve. Most of the "stretching" talk comes from lap band and bypass patients, who DO have a serious problem with stretching their respective "pouches." We sleevers aren't immune to the problem, but it's much less of an issue.

Folks, repeat after me: As long as you are getting enough Water, and enough Vitamin B12, you cannot suffer from malnutrition at a week out from surgery. You could fast completely -- nothing but water -- for a couple of weeks before you'd start to suffer from serious malnutrition (although you'd feel miserable after a week or so). Does this mean you SHOULD do this? No. But a few days with less-than-perfect nutrition is NOT going to hurt you, especially if you (like most of us heavy people) had lots of "reserves" to live off of.

Botox can help with fine movement-based wrinkles; so, crow's feet if they're the "fine line" variety, and not the deep creases that we get as we get older. Of course, the tradeoff is that the way you're "fixing" these wrinkles is basically by paralyzing your face so that you can't move it and make the wrinkles appear; it doesn't actually make the wrinkles go away (nothing will do that short of some kind of deep peel), but it keeps you from showing them. Honestly, I'd just wait if you're young and have fine crow's feet. They'll either resolve on their own if they're truly weight loss-related, or they're just a part of getting older.

With due respect, those symptoms (nausea, dizziness) are not symptoms of a drug allergy. Drug allergies produce itching, hives, and (in bad cases) anaphylaxis -- an inability to breathe, which can be fatal. I'm not sure what your symptoms would represent. It's possible that the omeprazole was causing upset stomach due to blocking too much acid, but usually blocking acid causes the opposite effect (ie, it's the acid that causes the nausea, etc.) Since you mentioned hypoglycemia, I should note that both symptoms (nausea and dizziness) can be caused by hypoglycemia. It's possible that when you resolved the hypoglycemia just happened to coincide with switching the acid blockers. Bottom line is that I'm glad you're feeling better, but you should be careful with the term "drug allergy" since I'm pretty sure this isn't one...

Drink Water. Dehydration will lead to fine wrinkles and "crepe paper skin" in even the youngest of us. And moisturize. And be patient; some of these changes will improve with time, and others... well, you'll be so happy to lose a lot of weight that you'll put up with the little things.

You are probably carb deprived; I went through this exact same thing, and my nutritionist gave me the same advice -- make sure to eat more (healthy) carbs with your meals. Everyone around here is so rabidly anti-carb that it's easy to forget, but carbohydrates are a necessary part of your diet. Just make sure to eat healthy, complex carbs (fruits, vegetables, milk products, etc.), not sugary carbs (sugar, refined white flour products, etc.) Introduce them slowly (to avoid the potential of carb dumping), and ramp them up till your energy improves. It will produce a dramatic, rapid turnaround in your energy level. Edit: oh, also, make sure you are drinking enough Water. We have so many nutrient needs to juggle that it's easy to forget about plain old water!

Yeah, the emotional/psychological stuff is really important. I really don't like all of the addiction/recovery language, but the fact is that many of us ate to soothe our emotions rather than to fuel our bodies. Ultimately, you have to find out what's going on in your mind that's leading you to self-destruct like this, and figure out how to fix it. Makes it sound simple, and it's NOT, but... it's what you have to do if you want to be healthy. For me, I've long had problems with depression and anxiety, and I often soothed both through food. I've been learning other, healthier ways of coping with depression (and also anxiety, since the two go hand in hand), and the good news is that most of those coping mechanisms are also good for my general health -- exercise, healthy sleep schedule, avoid excess caffeine and alcohol and carbs, etc. I get the double benefit of a healthier, more balanced, happy mind, as well as a happy sleeve that works with me to keep my weight down! Good luck, and congratulations on your progress so far!

The study that feedyoureye posted concludes this: Parsing that out, it means that yes, SOME people do regain weight. But EWL -- excess weight lost -- was still >50% at over 5 years. This means that for MOST people, MOST of the time, MOST of the weight will stay off. Realistically, most of us will probably drop quickly, then plateau, then stay at low weight for a while, perhaps with a long slow drop to a "real" low weight. Then, most of us -- again, speaking statistically -- will probably regain 10-30 pounds over a long period, because that's just how the curve seems to be shaped. A lot of that is genetics, a lot is age. If you look at the weight curves of NON sleevers over the same time span, you'll see about the same curve! So, statistically speaking, the sleeve IS durable weight loss, compared to ANY other method of weight loss that is current known. This doesn't mean that you'll never regain any of it; you likely WILL regain a little from your absolute low (if you think about what "absolute low" means, you'll realize that that means there's nowhere to go but up, since that's your ABSOLUTE low). And of course, if you sabotage yourself, you can regain quite a bit. But with the durable ghrelin loss, and with the determination to work WITH the sleeve instead of sabotaging it, yes, you can lose the weight and keep almost all of it off.

To be honest, if you can't abstain from drinking for a month or two in order to recover from a major surgery (and don't let anyone fool you, VSG IS a major surgery), you may have more serious problems than obesity. You're just asking for problems -- serious, life-threatening medical problems -- by drinking this soon out from surgery. If you manage to dodge the bullet, well... you're lucky. But if you keep drinking and, you know, develop a staple-line leak because you've irritated your incision, or ruin your liver because you've stressed it out too much, well... you really have nobody to blame but yourself. However, as Tiff said, it seems like your mind is made up, so this is all probably just a waste of keystrokes...

http://www.scienceda...10811100939.htm Since Barrett's (and its related concern, esophageal cancer) is a concern for sleevers, this is promising. ...