Hi guys, I had my Sleeve 9 days ago, and am averaging 430 cals per day. Trying to get my 2 litres of water, but mostly 1.5 or so.

Still on liquid diet, having one shake in the morning and 2 x 125ml (half cup) serves of home made soup with protein powder for lunch/dinner.

At first the weight was falling off at .5kg (1lb) or more a day. but the last 3 days it hasn't dropped, in fact this morning it was 200 gm (half lb) up.

Not panicking, I know that there will be stalls, but I didn't think at this early stage ? I also know I probs shouldn't weigh everyday, but I *have* to ?

Today I thought I might try to up the cal intake a bit and get a bit more steps in.

Anyone else have this so early?

I think we first need to define stall here. A true stall is when your weight does not go down even after 2-3 weeks. 3 DAYS does not constitute a stall.

Keep in mind that your body is made up of lots of other "stuff" besides fat. Things that can easily vary from day to day and even hour to hour besides fat:

1. Muscle mass
2. Water weight (did you know that your body is about 60% water?)
3. Food weight
4. Stool weight

Of those, the biggest culprits early on are likely water weight and stool weight. The latter one because lots of people struggle with constipation early after surgery. Water weight can vary for lots of different reasons, but hormone changes, medicines, temperature differences, fluid consumption rate, stress levels, excess salt consumption, illness and low protein, potassium or magnesium intake all can contribute to water retention.

I know you said you just HAD to weigh yourself daily, but if you are expecting to always see a nice linear drop in your weight day-to-day, weighing so often is probably not a great idea for you. Remember, this is for the long-haul, so don't stress small variations in your weight. It would be physiologically impossible for you to have literally stopped losing fat at this point.

1 hour ago, SpartanMaker said:

1. Stool weight

Of those, the biggest culprits early on are likely water weight and stool weight. The latter one because lots of people struggle with Constipation early after surgery.

Hi, thanks for the reply yeah I know it's too early to be worried.

TMI ahoy...Pretty sure it's the above!! ? This has been a problem for sure! I had a truly awful bathroom visit this morning for an hour trying to birth something equivalent to Rosemary's baby ?? only the second time I've been since surgery.

Still feeling somewhat blocked up, will get something strong to help.

I know I shouldn't weight daily, and shouldn't expect to see a smooth downward projection on. the daily but my (not Dx'd) ADHD compels me lol

Well, we are all different so take this with a grain of salt, but I was the same BMI prior to my preop diet as you are now so relatively close and I just looked back at my weight log and Iwas losing about 6 pounds per week on average in the beginning, but I also had the SADI which is quite a bit more aggressive than the sleeve or even the bypass so my loss statistically should’ve been more rapid than yours with a sleeve. Frankly, I think that you are doing very well with losing a pound a day and I wouldn’t be too shocked if it does slow down a bit. It definitely will not be a perfect line where you lose the exact same amount every day though. There may be times when you even gain a pound or three and hold it for a few days and then one day you will just drop those 3+ another pound. But if you only log your weight once a week, even if you must get on the scale every day, if you only look at the once a week or even once a month, your trend will be far more consistent. Some people only get on the scale once a week or once a month. I know I couldn’t do that but it really would be better for your mental health if you could hide your scale and just do what you’re supposed to do and trust the process.

1 hour ago, SpartanMaker said:

1. Stool weight

Of those, the biggest culprits early on are likely water weight and stool weight. The latter one because lots of people struggle with Constipation early after surgery.

Hi, thanks for the reply yeah I know it's too early to be worried.

TMI ahoy...Pretty sure it's the above!! ? This has been a problem for sure! I had a truly awful bathroom visit this morning for an hour trying to birth something equivalent to Rosemary's baby ?? only the second time I've been since surgery.

Still feeling somewhat blocked up, will get something strong to help.

I know I shouldn't weight daily, and shouldn't expect to see a smooth downward projection on. the daily but my (not Dx'd) ADHD compels me lol

Unfortunately weight loss isn’t consistent. You won’t get a lovely perfectly straight line on a graph. It zig & zags. More one week, less the next. None one week and a gain the next. We also have natural fluctuations in our weight which are all normal and when we are weighing ourselves every day they suddenly are very obvious. There are many reasons why we have these fluctuations and I swear sometimes it’s just your body messing with you.

As long as your weight loss trend (over weeks and months) is in a downward direction you’re doing well.

Add some soluble fibre to your soup or shake each day to help with the constipation. I got into a routine too. No poop for three days I took a stool softener. Remember too at first you’re not consuming much so you don’t have much for your body to excrete from so don’t expect to go every day.

Despite some hiccups (like the power outage and loss of food) things seem to be going pretty smoothly for you. Yay!

4 hours ago, ShoppGirl said:

if you only log your weight once a week, even if you must get on the scale every day, if you only look at the once a week or even once a month, your trend will be far more consistent. Some people only get on the scale once a week or once a month. I know I couldn’t do that but it really would be better for your mental health if you could hide your scale and just do what you’re supposed to do and trust the process.

Thanks for the reply @ShoppGirl I know I shouldn't but it's a compulsion... and honestly if I *had* weighed myself every day back when I was slim...and taken action when my weight crept up in the first place... I wouldn't be here now ?

I am NEVER going to not weight regularly again.

3 hours ago, Arabesque said:

Despite some hiccups (like the power outage and loss of food) things seem to be going pretty smoothly for you. Yay!

Thank you @Arabesque, great advice and encouragement as always ?

ffor double post above, I can't remove or edit it either.

Edited January 25, 20251 yr by DaisyChainOz

9 hours ago, DaisyChainOz said:

Thanks for the reply @ShoppGirl I know I shouldn't but it's a compulsion... and honestly if I *had* weighed myself every day back when I was slim...and taken action when my weight crept up in the first place... I wouldn't be here now ?

I am NEVER going to not weight regularly again.

Thank you @Arabesque, great advice and encouragement as always ?

ffor double post above, I can't remove or edit it either.

What I did and tried to type was to weigh myself every day, but I only logged it in my book once a week. That way, the small fluctuations were less of a big deal when I seen what happened at the end of the week. It would probably be better to even do every other week or every month to log. Or log it every day but just highlight it once a week or once a month something like that so that you can see that really your trend is down

14 hours ago, DaisyChainOz said:

Hi, thanks for the reply yeah I know it's too early to be worried.

TMI ahoy...Pretty sure it's the above!! ? This has been a problem for sure! I had a truly awful bathroom visit this morning for an hour trying to birth something equivalent to Rosemary's baby ?? only the second time I've been since surgery.

Still feeling somewhat blocked up, will get something strong to help.

I know I shouldn't weight daily, and shouldn't expect to see a smooth downward projection on. the daily but my (not Dx'd) ADHD compels me lol

I had to laugh react becaue, while I'm sorry to hear you're struggling, this descriptionis made me laugh!

I had the same issue post op. They gave me lactulose liquid and told me to take it every night but it didn't really do much. Until it did! I honestly thought it would never stop! And then suddenly, I was down about 5kg (10lbs). Seriously. This is normal.

Well, I found out Magnesium laxative works! ?

The evil has left the building!! ??

Thank you very much everyone, for the support, I woke up to find a 200gm (half poundish) drop today, so that's something!!

I am looking forward to hitting my first mini goal this week (under 100kg) and am very close, so have been sweating it a bit!!

16 minutes ago, DaisyChainOz said:

Well, I found out Magnesium laxative works! ?

The evil has left the building!! ??

Thank you very much everyone, for the support, I woke up to find a 200gm (half poundish) drop today, so that's something!!

I am looking forward to hitting my first mini goal this week (under 100kg) and am very close, so have been sweating it a bit!!

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or say congrats but I guess I’ll do both. Sounds like you’re doing great. Keep it up.

Edited January 25, 20251 yr by ShoppGirl

Just a bit of a follow up to this it seems it's is perfectly normal and to be expected.

A friend who had the surgery last year sent me this when I was telling her I haven't lost for a week. Sorry I don't know the Author, or which site it is from.

It did make me relieved to see its not that my surgery didn't work! Phew!

Not to dis on your friend, but that's just not how this works. The ski slope chart itself may be about what your weight loss looks like for many people, but I promise you, you are losing fat the entire time. You just can't overcome basic physics.

Think about it. If you eat less calories than you burn, your body has to make up that difference from somewhere. Even the leanest people on the planet have something like 40,000 plus calories of fat stores. This is what your body uses to stay alive when intake is less than output.

Do the math:

• Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), is made up of your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR), your Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT), and your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT).
• The average normal sized person has a resting metabolic rate somewhere between 1200 and 1800 calories. It's even higher for overweight and obese people. This is just an estimate, but yours is probably somewhere around 1900-2000 based on your height and current weight.
• EAT obviously can vary quite a lot from basically nothing if you don't workout, to well over a thousand calories per day if you exercise a lot.
• NEAT is important as well. The basic idea is that very few of us are completely sedentary. We are moving around cooking, cleaning, doing chores, etc. This is what we sometimes call "Activities of Daily Living". This tends to add another 15% to 20% to your overall calories for most people.

The point of me adding all that is because very few people really understand how many calories their body needs per day just to stay alive. If your body needs 3000 calories per day and you are only consuming 800, then the rest of your energy needs for the day have to come from your tissues. If we do things right, the vast majority of that will come from fat, though no matter how hard we try, some of it will come from muscle tissue.

Regardless, (and here's the point of all this), there is never a period of time when eating a very low calorie diet like we do after bariatric surgery, when you just lose water weight, or stop losing fat. Early on, you will lose a lot of water weight, but what you are losing is not JUST water. Later, you may experience stalls, but that's not a period of time when you stop losing fat. Instead, you may be putting more water weight back on (this IS part of the healing process), but you're still losing fat underneath that water gain. Note that there will be other times when your weight plateaus or even goes up some. This is 100% normal and not a cause for concern. If you are following the diet plan your surgical team sent you, you WILL lose fat. It's impossible not to.

This is why I said it's just not healthy to weigh yourself daily. Scales LIE. They don't measure our amount of fat loss, they just measure weight, and weight is made up of so much more than just fat.

I'm going to go ahead and add another comment because I can just about anticipate the next comment (since I've heard it a lot):

"I don't care about all that, I just want the scale to go down!"

Let's try a little thought experiment here: If I could wave a magic wand and you would instantly look just like a fitness model, be super athletic and healthy and you'd be able to rock that size 0 (or whatever), dress. Would you want me to wave that wand? What if I told you you'd secretly still weigh whatever you weigh today? You'd still look and feel fantastic, but the scale would stay right where it is now. Still interested?

I"ll wager almost everyone here would take me up on that deal. The possible exception might be the folks here that already look like fitness models. (You know who you are!)

Why? Because ultimately we want to lose weight to look and/or feel a certain way, not strictly to be a certain arbitrary weight that at the end of the day really means nothing. Scales are just a really poor way of measuring fat loss, at least in the short term, so it's best we don't make them out to be more than they are.

One thing my doctor told me too when I inquired about a similar issue (tho for me it didnt stall until 3 weeks out), was that pre-surgery there was that very intense liver shrinking diet. A few weeks after surgery, the liver will start to build back up to a more normal size, which can cause a slight weight increase or stall. There are many other factors to the stalls, but this was just one aspect I had never considered. It all seems pretty normal!

I'm at 7 weeks post surgery now, and down a full pants size, but actual weight loss since date of surgery is only about 17 lbs. I'm so happy I made this change in my life. This is going to be the best year ever!!

17 hours ago, SpartanMaker said:

Not to dis on your friend, but that's just not how this works. The ski slope chart itself may be about what your weight loss looks like for many people, but I promise you, you are losing fat the entire time. You just can't overcome basic physics.

Thanks for the detailed reply.

It makes perfect sense that the loss is going on in spite of the lack of movement on the scales. My Dietician said the same to me yesterday at our first post surgery apt last night.

I don't agree with the "don't weigh everyday" mantra myself. It would be no less disappointing or frustrating to find out after a week the scales haven't moved. for me it would be far worse!!

YMMV of course.