I've worked with a therapist for many years to overcome my binge eating issues and now finally feel I'm ready to move forward with WLS. If all goes according to plan I'll have my gastric sleeve by the end of this year. However, I've noticed that my eating has gotten much worse over the last month or so and I'm terrified that all the work I've done with my therapist is unraveling. Is "the last supper" syndrome pretty common for folks before their surgery? I'm trying to figure out if it's this or if something else is going on.

Thanks for any and all feedback!

Yes it's quite common. I did it and one of my in laws did it as well. Get it out of your system. Once you have the surgery, you can't do that anymore.

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Are you tracking your food? I found that planning out my food choices and actually writing them down ahead of time kept me on track and accountable.

It's pretty common. I didn't go overboard (means: didn't gain weight) but I ate everything I wanted to eat in the time before surgery.

It's the same mindset of those times you told yourself that the next day you will start a diet. You wake up absolutely starving!! Just your mind saying NOOOOO, I want all the good, delicious, bad for me food!!

It's indeed "famine brain" - the thought of "I will never be able to have this or that" is very powerful.

I do think it is pretty common. The sad part is, most people will be able to eat the foods they love again in the future. You might just find you no longer love them and that is ok because they did not help your situation anyway.

For example, Ice cream and Spagetti were my two favorite things. I thought it would never be able to live without them.

On the night before i started my liquid diet we went to Buca's for dinner and i got my fill of spagetti. I never craved it again after that. I have in fact tried it again and i literally could care less if i ever eat it again.

Now that was a food that was my favorite ever since i was a little girl. I would always look for it on a menu and of course coming from an Italian family we had it once or twice weekly. Now....i really could care less.

Ice Cream. It was my vice. I loved it and I still do but everytime i eat it i end up rolled up in a ball with my gut in horrible pain. I believe it is the fact that it is so cold and has lactose. Mostly the cold thing......I cannot eat it at all and since it has made me feel like crap so many times, it is best just to stay the heck away from it.

I have found fresh fruits to be so much more fulfilling for me and you get the nutritional benefit from it.

You will get past it...if you think that food is just there for energy and no longer the thing i live for.

Best of luck to you!

I had chick fil a the day before I went on liquids. Which of course I can eat now, grilled chicken and such. Other than that, I didn't really have a food funeral or last meal.

I do think it is pretty common. The sad part is, most people will be able to eat the foods they love again in the future.

I don't think that this is "the sad part". It's not sad being able to eat the foods you like, on the contrary. It's nice to be able to eat the foods you like. What didn't help our situation wasn't "the food" - it was how much we ate of it.

I wish I would have known before surgery that there would be almost no food I'm not able to eat. Would have prevented "famine brain" maybe.

I've worked with a therapist for many years to overcome my binge eating issues and now finally feel I'm ready to move forward with WLS. If all goes according to plan I'll have my gastric sleeve by the end of this year. However, I've noticed that my eating has gotten much worse over the last month or so and I'm terrified that all the work I've done with my therapist is unraveling. Is "the last supper" syndrome pretty common for folks before their surgery? I'm trying to figure out if it's this or if something else is going on.

Thanks for any and all feedback!

I've been doing it all weekend. Will have a sleeve in two weeks. Starting diet probably in a day or two.

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However, I've noticed that my eating has gotten much worse over the last month or so and I'm terrified that all the work I've done with my therapist is unraveling.

I think this is a very important observation. You will most likely always be prone to go back to food in times of stress, more or less. Hopefully less. Maybe you still need some more time to further cement the new coping mechanisms. Hell, even "normal eaters" do rely on food for solace now and then. It's not as pathologic as one might think.

Therapy is not the "cure it all" 100% solution. Some might like to sell it as such, but it's not. Look at the success rates of therapies regarding eating disorders and relapse rates. It's just sad. Therapy is certainly useful when it comes to overeating issues but I think its power is overestimated quite a bit sometimes.

@@summerset

I respectfully disagree. For me, it was what I ate, not how much of it. I literally weighed 315lbs at my heaviest and I did not overeat. I was told by 3 doctors that I was malnourished and that it is very very common in morbidly obese patients.

In fact, my family and friends never understood how I could possibly be so heavy given what I ate.

My diet was heavy in Pasta, rice, crackers, sweets, etc.......I ate very little Protein.

Also, I am currently in Maintenance and I can honestly tell you it is all about what you eat now too. If i stick to a few ounces of protein, fresh veggies and fruits I maintain. If my diet falters (and, I cannot eat much), I begin to gain again.

If i go back to protein, veggies, fruits I lose or maintain.

There are a ton of posts on this site about going back to old eating behaviors...it will impact your ability to lose and maintain after the honeymoon.

I definitely had "last supper" syndrome. Happily, I cannot binge now even if I want to.

It's not as bad as I thought it would be. There are times when I wish I could eat more and stare at my plate wistfully (like at Thanksgiving when I took a little spoonful of everything and still only ate 3/4 of what was on my plate - even after skipping the dinner rolls, which I used to take 3-4 of and smear with butter!)

But really, you end up thankful that your stomach capacity is much smaller as the weight comes off Overall, very positive.

@@LipstickLady, that's a good idea to track food before you eat it. I need to do it that way instead of tracking after I eat.

I feel it's common. If I'm being really honest I went ape sh*t. I feel if your in a place to identify what your doing your in a place to nip it in the bud. There was no food I could eat before hand that would help my state of mind during the liquids phase. If anything I was detoxing from the junk overload which made it a bit tougher for me i feel. Looking back i wish I would've cooled it and spared myself the torture of the following week.

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@@summersetMy diet was heavy in Pasta, rice, crackers, sweets, etc.......I ate very little Protein.

I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way but I'm going to ask it anyway:

Did you ever count calories when eating like this and when you weren't on a diet? Like really counting calories with weighing everything and not only estimating so you can compare the amount of calories with what you're eating now? Just asking because people tend to underestimate the amount of calories they eat quite a lot (even the professionals do!)

I think some people are more sensitive to certain foods than others (there is obviously evidence regarding this) so in general I don't think you're a big exception but part of a whole crowd. However, when looking at the diet of some WLS patients it's purely the fact that they're eating less of what they ate before. Especially on this board there is the talk about patients who "can eat all the crap they want" and lose weight effortlessly in the honeymoon period because the "surgery is doing it all".

Well, what is the surgery actually doing? It restricts the amount of food that can be eaten, sometimes combined with malabsorption, so it seems that quite a lot of people can eat "crap" and losing weight anyway (someone remember the guy who lost weight on twinkles to prove a thing or two?) without having to rely on the so-called "clean" foods.

I'm not saying it's not true for you but I'm not so sure you couldn't maintain your weight on a diet containing different foods if the amount of calories is about the same. I understand that you wouldn't want to experiment with this, though.