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Oof, I hear you on the difficulties losing weight the closer to normal BMI you get. I’m just 15 lbs from goal. I’ve already lost 160, it seems crazy that these last few could be such a struggle but here we are. My weight loss has slowed dramatically a few times and each time I have to look and see what’s going on. Am I snacking again? Am I eating calorically dense food like nuts? Is sugar creeping back in? I know I will slowly push the boundaries and let bad habits sneak back in. I just have to keep course correcting, and I’ll probably be doing that for the rest of my life.

there are usually fairly large drops the first month or two, but then it slows down quite a bit. More like what you'd expect on a regular diet. After the first month, I lost about 8-12 lbs a month until maybe month 7 or 8, then I dropped down to about five pounds a month, and after the first year, it really slowed down to a crawl - a couple of pounds a month. I finally stopped losing at around 20 months out. of course, some of this depends on your starting weight, age, gender, genetics, metabolic rate, etc - but it does seem to be the general pattern, at least...

I believe they only have 30 days to decide. It only took my insurance 3 days to approve my surgery; I think they are usually pretty good about answering within the first two weeks. So I would ask the provider's office how far are they booked out.

Hi Jen! I think forming a little group is a great idea! I'm basically in the same boat. Vsg 3 years ago, never got to goal and have gained 10/15 lbs over the last year and a half. I also have pcos and am pre diabetic. I am having a hard time getting back on track and I want to lose about 25/30 lbs. I could really use the support/ motivation from people that are in my shoes.

The truth is exercising only contributes to a maximum of 20% of the weight you have to lose. You’d have to walk 6km in an hour or run 8km in 45 mins to burn 360 calories (about two slices of pizza). Of course there’s lots of other benefits to building & maintaining your fitness. Making adjustments to your diet & reducing your calorie intake is the real key coupled with portion sizes to weight loss. If you consume fewer calories then your body needs to function you’ll lose weight. Work at reducing your sugar intake. Stop the candies for a month but avoid sugar rich alternatives. Then drop any cakes or biscuits. Look to fresh fruit for a sweet treat. Make other small changes to your food choices like @lizonaplane suggested. Again you don’t have to change everything at once. Swap out a couple of things at a time & give yourself time to get used to it. You’ll likely find it much easier to make & adopt small changes to your food choices. You may not see changes in the scale straight away but it will happen. Go back to tracking your food - calories & portion sizes. It’s easy to let these slip especially if you’re guessing or not being as vigilant. Check your protein & fluid intake & increase if needed. Did you have a therapist when you had your surgery? Maybe get back in contact with them or ask your bariatric team for a recommendation. The therapist may help you better manage your stress & what may be driving your cravings. You can get back on top of this. Good luck.

Liquids go through your digestive system very quickly so you don’t really feel full on this stage. Also you’re nerve endings have been damaged during surgery so until they are healed your sense of feeling full is reduced. Consequently, it is even more important to keep to your plan & stick to the calories &/or portion size recommendations (& meet or try to meet your protein & fluid goals of course). You don’t want to put stress on your poor healing tummy & all those internal stitches & staples. Also it takes time for the full message to get through so when you feel full you’ll likely have had too much it’s one of the reasons we are encouraged to eat slowly. What you’re feeling is likely head hunger. Most of the area that signals hunger in our body was removed during the surgery. So if you are able to feel real hunger it would be very minimal. Many of us discover that real hunger feels different from the head hunger that used to drive us to eat. Personally I get restless. Working out why you want to eat (emotions, cravings, habit or actual hunger) is part of the challenge. Do you need to eat or do you just want to eat? There’s a big difference. Good luck & congrats on your surgery.

I didn’t have soft foods until week 4. I was 2 weeks “full” liquids, 1 week puree. Then soft.. even then my plan said if issues, go back to Full Fluids, so perhaps try that?

I found advice from a surgeons perspective:

My surgeon's group wanted us to reach 1200 calories a day as soon as we could. I did this at around 3-4 weeks out...eating 6 little 200 calorie "meals" a day. We were told to stay at 1200 during all of loss phase. I know this is VERY different advice than what many clinics give their clients. Some want people to stay below 1000 calories for a very long time to "take advantage of the window of loss". My doctors are part of a study addressing how extended periods of very low calorie diets may be corelated with rebound weight gain due to negative metabolic shift. They believe that for the best LONG TERM outcomes....eating calories closer to maintenance for healthy weight sooner...is better. I eat 1600 calories a day now, and have maintained the last two years with no weight gain. There will always be individual experiences and exceptions to every rule.

Sorry if this is hard to understand, I am in actual tears and I just don’t know what to do. I desperately need advice or comfort or just something from people who may understand what I am going through and maybe know why I am feeling this way. My mom and I had the bariatric sleeve surgery done 2 weeks ago and the experience with her that I have had has been mostly miserable and upsetting. I am extremely obese and have always had a very difficult time keeping the weight off. Long story short I went for a doctors visit and my doctor recommended that I get the bariatric sleeve to help me, since with certain medical issues such as PCOS it can be hard to lose the weight without help. My mother begged me to do it and said that she wanted me to be able to live past her and my dad, and then she went and said that she would do it with me. Now, to some this would seem like a thing of encouragement, and while I do believe that may be part of it, I truly do not believe that that is the true underlying reason. You see, my mom is an alcoholic (she is viciously mean when she is drunk), and I believe that she is very self-absorbed. Not in the way that she thinks she is the greatest thing to walk the planet, but in the way that she always needs to be the center of attention. We haven’t always had the best relationship, as she has said and done many things that have really hurt me, and every time that we have tried to talk about these issues (when she wasn’t drunk) she always has some excuse, or blames everything on her past trauma, or how she just wants to let loose and have fun. A spitting example is how she once told me when she was drunk that she was just wanting to let loose, since she lost some of her twenties -aka the party years- due to having me. Almost every hurtful thing and word that she has said has stuck with me for a long time, and when my family tried to go to family therapy, my mom decided to stop since the therapist “kept saying that everything was her fault.” Another key thing is that she is also overweight, but not nearly as big as me, and she has tried hundreds of diets and pills and has never stuck to any of them for very long. Anyway, I tell you all of this so that maybe you understand why I think she mostly wanted me to do the surgery since I am clearly at more of a health risk and part of her wouldn’t feel right doing it without me. This of course could all be in my head. So no, on to the real problem at hand. Ever since we have been released from the hospital she has not been doing well -I am a college student and came home for the recovery process but plan to move back to campus as soon as possible. At first it was just minor things that bugged me a little bit, such as every time a food commercial came on the television, she would moan about how the food looks so good and yadda yadda. This was minor, but it still bugged me since I too had gone through the surgery and did not need to hear her constant moaning about how good something looked on the tv. This coupled with the constants complaining about how much she was hurt, and how much she hates the blood thinner shots that we must give ourselves, slowly started to drive me up the walls. I HATE needles, but just recently I have been able to give blood and receive shots without crying, while she has literally been fine and delt with needles for years, but all the sudden she claims that she hates needles (which I mean who doesn’t, but come on). After I got annoyed enough, I watched her do the shot and saw that she had been doing it in a way other than the nurses had showed us, and when I tried to point it out to her, she waved me off and said that she was doing it the way that she was showed. Another thing with her complaining about her constant pain. The first night we got home, - 2 days post op- we both slept on the recliner couch. The next night she tried to sleep in bed, even though I had warned her against it. She tried for a few days, each day complaining about pain, while I suggested that she try sleeping on the couch again. I sleep on our recliner couch for nearly the two whole weeks that we have been home. I have finally been able to sleep in bed for the past two nights, and my pain is almost gone, while she claims to still have pretty bad pain. And guess where she has been sleeping the past few days. The couch. Now comes the parts that have really been getting to me. She has not been following the diet plan that our Doctor gave us. First it was her not drinking enough fluid, which I constantly had to tell her to do. Then, it was the incident that occurred a few days ago. Our doctor has us on full liquids right now, which consists of things like sugar free pudding, low-fat yogurt, chicken broth, and instant mashed potatoes. Well, a few days ago she went to the store with my brother, I cannot remember why I did not go, but I did not. When she came home, I went into the kitchen and saw a bag of open potato wedges and I instantly knew that she had some. So, I went and asked her, and she said that she did and that she made sure to chew them up well and that her stomach tolerated them just fine. Then I found the little foil covering of sour cream and knew that she had some of that as well. And while sure, potatoes mashed in your mouth is similar to mashed potatoes, the things that get me are: 1. They’re fried, which is an absolute no no as of right now, and 2. They aren’t on our list of approved foods so why even chance it. Anyway, I tried to move past that one and dropped it. Then tonight came. My mom made my dad and brother biscuits and gravy and eggs for dinner. I had some of the scrambled eggs because those have been approved by our doctor, and apparently, she had more than just eggs. Then, just a few moments ago, she came into the living room with a small bowl of chili. We are not supposed to be having chili for another day. And again, I understand that its only one day, but that fact that she cannot follow simple doctors’ orders has driven me mad. Now here’s the real kicker. Not only did she have the chili before she was technically allowed to; she put Fritos Scoops chips in it. Now I know for sure that we are NOT supposed to be having those. And then the smell of it and the anger drove me crazy, and I excused myself from the room, claiming that I had to go charge my phone. Well, after I did not return for a few minutes she came looking for me and knew I was upset. I told her I didn’t want to talk about it and that it didn’t matter -I said this because my opinions and feelings have never ever felt like they mattered to her, especially when we are in conflict. She came and sat down and kept pushing asking me why I was mad and said things like “so you’re mad because I had chili one day early?” and then she used the, “I have already lost weight” which I replied I wasn’t talking about her weight and that didn’t matter. She also said that it should not matter since she didn’t make me eat it. I then told her I didn’t want to talk about it now and she finally left. I know that I shouldn’t worry about it, and that I should just focus on myself, but it kind of feels undermining to me. She did not need this surgery as much as I did, but even still I feel like she doesn’t really care or understand how much effort this is. I honestly believe that she thinks she just going to get skinny and not have to do anything. She doesn’t exercise and clearly, she doesn’t have the willpower to not eat something if it looks or smells good, not to mention that fact that she never watched the hour long lecture the doctor wanted us to watch and just asked me what it was about and told me that she would watch it that night at work. Heck, she didn’t even know what the bariatric sleeve surgery really even was until a few days before the surgery when I mentioned that part of our stomach was going to be removed. I am just getting really upset at this point and I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to have to lie to the doctor or listen to her lie to the doctor again -she has lied about her alcoholism, tobacco usage, and what she has been eating before the surgery- when we have our first post-op appointment. And I don’t even want to bring these things up to her, because she gets very combative when she gets defensive and is never able to see things past her own perspective. My dad says that it wasn’t me who needed her support in this, but that he thinks she needed mine, but at this point I don’t even know what to do. How am I supposed to support her when she cant even follow simple rules and restrain herself from eating things that she is not supposed to be eating? How am I supposed to look at that and make my own progress when she is making it seem like its fine to just go back to eating whatever I want whenever -which I know is not true. I know I have more willpower and restraint than she does; that fact has been made abundantly clear to me. I am just at a loss. I know her surgery is going to be pointless and she is going to complain when she plateaus or even gains the weight back. How do I keep myself from getting so upset over this? Am I just crazy? Am I acting selfishly? Please help. I am sure I did not include some of the information or things that have happened, but I know this has already been a lot to read.