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I feel like my shape is about the same as before, just the hanging skin on the front is gone.

I lost very little hair. I barely noticed it, let alone anyone else. a lot of pre-ops and post-ops worry incessantly about hair loss (and loose skin, too). I was one of them. But i think I can speak on behalf of most - if not all - of us who are more than a year out. Hair loss is but a blip on the screen - a minor inconvenience - if we're even affected by it much at all. I'm pretty sure all of us would take the temporary hair loss any day of the week over being morbidly obese again ANY DAY!!

I have a Fitbit charge 5. It's been reliable with my calories in and out as far as weight loss. Been trying the maintenance program the past month. So far so good. It helps with my sleep patterns and tells me how long I am in each of the sleep stages for the night, week, month. Also my heart rate variability, skin temperature...Etc. I like the ecg scan too. The battery lasts a week or more. I also like that I can set goals for steps or whatever. I don't have any other experience with any other watches but I am very happy with this one.

This is so true, I remember reading everyone's successes and for soooo long I just wouldn't reach those goals. It took me much longer than everyone else to hit my losing stride and it worried me to compare my path with everyone else and not see it match. It's been a year and 6 months and I have lost 184 lbs. I still have 52 lbs to lose to hit my goal, the skin has been a new thing to be worried about but I have reached soo many goals Its mind blowing how different I am. Not just physically but as a whole person. Everyone needs to realize your goals and how you reach them is going to be specific to you. It's an amazing journey, strap in, commit and enjoy every phase.

For me it was realizing that if I could have done it on my own I would have at this point. It’s not a lack of knowing what to do or laziness it was a deeper issue. As to why now? I have young kids I felt too exhausted to do anything with. I love to travel and I didn’t fit in a plane seat, full stop. I was tired of feeling like I didn’t want to meet new people or see old friends because of how ashamed I was of how I looked. I was tired of the very real everyday discrimination and judgement morbidly obese people receive. And I knew I would never be happy at 340 lbs. it would be a source of frustration and unhappiness my whole life. Some people are able to be content at any weight and I admire them but that wasn’t me. I felt wrong and miserable in my own skin, and I couldn’t do the physical activities I wanted to take part in.

What has been your experience with going into surgery with a weight of 205lbs or under? My starting weight was 220 but I've lost 15 pounds pre op. I've heard people smaller will not loose any weight. Going into surgery smaller what is the recovery like? (I am doing this surgery because I've tried everything to loose weight and live a better lifestyle)

I do my measurements and weigh in on the 4th of every month. Surgery Date April 18th 2022. Pre op diet weight 317lb. As you can see this month i did not loose much weight. Almost no weight for 3 weeks. Typical stall. It happens. We shall see where we are at next month. Hoping to reach under 200lb

I had a moment as the swelling went down where I was annoyed because I still had two bumps on my sides. Upon further examination I realized this wasn’t fat or skin rolls, it was actually my hip bones sticking out. I had never seen that before and wasn’t aware of the possibility 😅. Post bariatric and/or plastic surgery body changes are weird, y’all.

I agree. And the surgery would remove fat cells as well as loose skin if that was a concern. Plus fat cells don’t make you gain weight & become overweight. We do that to ourselves by overeating & making poor food choices. (It’s a lot of why I said I have to work harder than friends & family who’ve never carried weight - too easy to slide to bad habits again.)

what has changed since you were loosing weight? are you eating poorly now? not exercising? Get back to calorie counting and keep carbs, sugars under a certain level.

I’m mostly confused on the lipo portion of this. Speaking as someone who recently had plastic surgery, I had multiple surgeons I consulted with note that I didn’t need lipo because quite frankly there wasn’t fat to suck out. If you lose enough weight you won’t even be a candidate for liposuction. Having just had all the loose skin removed from my hips up, I am not sure how this would have worked even had I asked for it. I can clearly feel bones and muscles under the surface now especially in my arm and chest.

I'm just over a year out and have maybe 15 more pounds I'd like to lose. My rings are dangerously loose, so my husband bought me some ring sizers and they help. I went in and had my finger sized just out of curiosity, and I've gone from an 8 to a 6.5! That just seems crazy to me. Anyway, I won't get them sized until I stop losing weight as I don't want to have to do it again later.

I was sleeved 12/22/2021. Since starting weight I've only lost 45 lbs. I haven't lost weight in 3 months. I get about 800-1000 calories per day, go to the gym and walk every day. I will say even though I haven't lost weight in 3 months, I feel my clothes are fitting better and I'm buying smaller sizes. I'm a little frustrated as well. I really don't know what the answer is. I just keep doing what I'm supposed to do and hope evidentially I will start loosing again. Good luck to you.

Once your weight stabilises you should be ok to get your rings resized. I had one resized but it turned out to be too early as I continued to loose. Can’t get it any smaller though because of its design (I got it down to a H but it needs to be a F.5 now). I use those clear spiral resizers (got mine from Amazon) as I still have rings, which had been small, I haven’t resized - can get expensive if you have a few to do. Good interim solution to loose rings. As a side note, I recently had a monogram ring made & sent my mum a pxt. She said she liked the ring but went on & on about the loose skin on my hands - as if I didn’t know! Sigh!!

My philosophy is that you don't pick a goal weight -- your goal weight picks you. That probably sounds silly, and it's sort of an exaggeration, but when you're talking about the massive weight loss one gets from weight loss surgery, it's not necessarily practical to target a specific number on the scale. I didn't really have a "goal weight" -- nor did my surgeon -- until I went to my psychological evaluation and the psychiatrist asked me. Even that, I think, was mainly about checking to make sure I had realistic expectations. The number I gave was based on the average/typical weight loss for gastric bypass patients. I think I went with 180 pounds, but I actually ended up around 140. To me, the number on the scale is pretty meaningless. And I say that as someone with an analytical mind, who loves numbers and spreadsheets and graphs. The non-scale victories are far, far more important to your quality of life. First, and foremost are the health goals -- things like getting off of medications, having a healthy blood pressure and blood glucose, etc. Then there are the physical benefits like being able to walk a mile without sweating or a few flights of stairs without getting winded, and not having constant pain in your feet and knees. And of course the social benefits of literally fitting into the world -- flying without a seatbelt extension, sitting in a booth at a restaurant, not having to worry about weight limits on furniture. Finally, being more confident and satisfied with your body/appearance, having more clothing options, and being more accepted by people and society in general (which is really sad, but true). I think if you are fixated on a specific number on the scale, you can lose sight of those important non-scale victories. I'm not saying you shouldn't track your weight (I weigh myself probably more than I should, multiple times per day) or that the scale isn't important to your progress, but you don't know what the number will be when you hit the point that you have lost enough weight to improve your life. That's especially true when you start out at a high weight, because your body will not be the same at 220 pounds (after losing 200+ pounds) as someone who has never been higher than 220 pounds, because your body will have more skin and bigger bones even with the same amount of fat and muscle.

I do every morning after morning pee in my underwear. I log in my computer . I like the fact I can see progress and if do not loose any then I try to do a bit more walking and do not over think it. I do know there will be times when I will stall and then drop again. Think long term and not short term. From 265.5 lbs two week before surgery and 250 day of surgery and today I'm at 242.8 lbs. 11 days after. I'm happy where I am and will continue to travel down my weight loss journey....

There are lots of factors to how quickly someone looses weight. Most importantly, 1/2 a day is 15 lbs a month.. there is NOTHING slow about that. Keep up the good work.

I just think my second stall ended but mine are the same. I gained 1-2 lbs and then stayed there for about 2 weeks and then this week I have lost 5 lbs so far (since Monday, 1lb per day) I usually only weigh myself on Monday's but this week did mid week to see if I was out of my stall. 6 month follow up today and I am still a bit ahead of my weight loss chart the surgeon gave me. My chart says I should loose aprox. 97 lbs in 6 months and as of this morning I have lost 106 lbs in those 6 months!

it is really individual; but honestly 1/2 lb a day sounds great!! there is an average weight loss time period. most people loose a decreasing amount per month for about 18 months. In that time there will be times of both rapid weight loss, steady weight loss and stalls where no weight is lost or it fluctuates up and down within water weight range (8 lbs is a gallon of retained fluid) stick to your program, watch what you eat and get your body moving. build muscle as much as you can.

You seem to have a really cynical outlook on all of this. I, too, am a scientist by profession, and I've always been a bit of a pessimist, but I think sometimes, it's worth giving people the benefit of the doubt. It looks like you don't think your bariatric team has your best interests at heart. I know you've been burned before, and I also know what it's like to be constantly judged as stupid, lazy, noncompliant, untrustworthy, unworthy, etc. because of my weight, so I can understand your feelings about this, but don't forget that these are people who have devoted their careers to providing weight loss surgery. I'm not saying that they all genuinely care about alleviating the plight of the obese, or that they're sympathetic toward those of us in a position of needing this surgery, but I doubt there are very many medical professionals in the bariatric surgery field who are out to punish and criticize fat patients just for fun (or out of personal dislike of fat people). If for no other reason than their own self-interest, chances are that they want patients to succeed with weight loss surgery, and they are probably doing what they believe will contribute to their patients' success. Another thing to keep in mind is that sometimes people can be right for the wrong reasons. I've run into this in my own job, where someone has told me something that didn't seem to make sense, and I (as someone like you with an inquisitive mind) have gone looking for the real story, only to find that what I was told was correct, even though the reasoning was not. In this case, your dietitian might be giving you good direction even if she doesn't actually understand what she's talking about. Just because that dietitian (or even the whole bariatric team) doesn't know or understand the reasoning behind the rules, it doesn't necessarily mean that the rules are incorrect or arbitrary. Finally, if you hang around this forum for long enough, you will see that many patients want and need a lot of hand-holding. Some people would rather be given strict but arbitrary rules than loose guidelines. People are constantly on here posting questions like, "I had surgery X days ago; can I eat Y?" And honestly, considering that, I can't blame surgeons at all for wanting to make things as black and white as possible so they don't have to spend all their time answering these incredibly specific questions, tailored to each individual patient. Most patients are not medical researchers, and many want definitive instructions from their doctors. Many people would be paralyzed with indecision if they were told, "Some studies say X and others say Y; you figure it out." Ultimately, it's up to you to decide how closely to follow your surgeon's directions, and if you do your own research and believe you have found a better way, you can make that decision. But I would venture to say that you will likely have a better experience if you have a mindset of working WITH your bariatric surgery team instead of taking an adversarial approach.

Valid, very valid! My entire family is obese, immediate and extended. Literally every single person... I have fault it my entire life and never remember seeing the "100's" on the scale. I am 6ft tall so I don't know if I ever will but I would like to see 199 just once so I can say I officially weighed under 200 lbs. I just posted about this earlier today. haha Obviously I didn't go from toddler weight to over 200 lbs but I guess I was over 200 once I was at the age to weigh myself and remember. Regardless, I have struggled with loosing and gaining over 100 lbs multiple times through my life. That is what brought me to surgery. I hope it helps me maintain my weight loss this time.

I was sleeved 12-22-2021 I am down 61 pounds and only 6 pounds from my goal weight set by my surgeon. I would like to loose another 30-40 pounds to get back to my high school weight. My reward is I got to go back raw vegan again and I have energy like I am a teenager- I am 53. When I get to where I feel good in a swimsuit - I still have fat on my thighs and hips - My hubby and I will be going on vacation somewhere there is a beach. Id like to go to Hawaii. Starting weight 227 Current weight 166 Surgery date 12-22-2021

im so sorry youre sick. I did miralax earlier this week and didnt loose anything

That does feel really unfair. Is there no way it could be considered skin removal primarily to treat your medical condition and, if so, could the surgeon call it something else? I'm sorry I don't know anything about how insurance works. I'm so sorry you've been left with this after all your hard work. Absolutely amazing loss.

I have lost over 200 pounds. WLS was excluded from our insurance when I had it done, so I paid out of pocket, which I had to dip into my 401k to do. As is the case with most people who have lost a lot of weight , I have tons of loose skin. I'm cool with most of it, except my pannus, because it's uncomfortable, out of proportion to my body causing my clothes not to fit right, and I have rashes and always have to use powder. Panniculectomy is normally covered under the insurance we have so I saw a surgeon and was pretty excited at the thought of possibly having this large amount of lower stomach removed. I was prepared to hear that I didn't qualify or whatever.I was prepared to may maybe have to repeal a rejection. I was NOT prepared to hear that it was EXCLUDED from our plan. Now of course, I should have checked myself, but I didn't even think to since often times this surgery is medically necessary. I stupidly assumed it wouldn't be excluded. Stupid me. I am so angry and bummed about this. I feel like I've done all this work just to be left with this bowling ball hanging from my body, and since I wiped out half my 401 it's not like I can pay out of pocket again. I'm not asking for a total body makeover or even for my body to look good (it does not lol). I'm 51 years old and my most attractive days are far behind me. I was never in this for looks. I just wanted to have my life back and feel good and be active and have a chance to live longer. I just want this discomfort removed and I don't think that's too much to ask. I have a skin condition called hydradenitis supparativa that really can't be fixed except by removing the affected area and under my stomach is where it's the worst. I'm tired of living with this awful skin condition. I've had it for like 30 years now, but it became much worse as my pannus grew. I'm scared to death I'll gain all my weight back and I know people who do skin removal have a better chance of not gaining it back. I'm just so frustrated and angry and probably rambling about this but I had to vent. I'm feeling sorry for my self too and thinking how unfair things are which I know, as my mother always told me, life is not fair. But that doesn't mean I should have to be ok with that! Anyway. Thanks for letting me vent. My husband, always the optimist, did make me feel somewhat better but I knew people here would also understand. Sent from my Pixel 5a using BariatricPal mobile app