crosswind

A long time ago I was thinking I might start a VSG blog. I thought I'd write about my experiences and my amusing every little thing I thought about while losing weight, but over the months I changed my mind. First of all, I'd probably be banned by the vsg doctors for my stubborn insistence on refusing to eat 800 calories of pure Protein per day and second of all, I've got lots of emotional baggage other people may or may not have; which makes me like a really bad cheerleader and mostly sore loser -- even though I am at a new low today of 194.5. When I thought I would start this blog, I had something in mind to write about because I knew it would get people to come -- because everyone wants to know something I already know about one particular thing. I know how to lose lots of weight and not have your skin sagging off your body like a spent balloon. The reason I know is because I did intense research on this when I lost 135 pounds on a lowcarb diet. I actually lost that weight *faster* than I'm losing this time around -- I have *already* done the nine hundred calorie pure protein anorectic diet and it took me...let's see...about half the time it took me this time to take off a hundred pounds. Anyway, problem was that after going through all of that I had a stomach that actually looked like a second butt. You who have lost a hundred pounds really fast and have checked out what your belly button looks like lately know what I am talking about. There was no way I was getting a tummy tuck back then -- I couldn't afford it and it seemed hugely drastic to me at the time. To tell you the truth, getting your skin razored off your body for some reasonstill seems drastic to me, and I have had my stomach cut out. So this is what I know about attacking your saggy bits. I know it works; I'm doing it myself, and even though my skin is a little loose in places I don't have serious problems. I don't have a dreaded "pannus"; my arm skin is not falling down like a saggy stocking. So if you don't want a second surgery, can't afford a second surgery, and are willing to spend a little time and some money, here are my suggestions. 1. Dry skin brushing. There are several published methods on the internet that you can buy that will tell you how to do this. If you don't want to buy them, then this is the upshot. You need a good skin brush with tough natural bristles that are going to hold up. This one is my favorite because it's got a nice paddle action to it and a good strong handle and no this is not an amazon affiliate link: http://www.amazon.co...30481589&sr=1-2 You do this before your shower or at night or whenever but once a day, no more, no less. Again, there are programs you can buy with DVD's and stuff, but the basic way to brush is: Start at the bottom of you. Brush upwards, thirty times; each side of your calf, each side of your thigh, etc.; each butt cheek, and the dreaded stomach area -- firm upward strokes. Then go to the top of you and brush downwards; each side of your arm and your chest area. The point is to "brush all toxins towards your heart." The reason you do this is because you're stimulating the lymph in your body through the lymphatic system which has to go through your heart to get processed and eliminated. 2. If you want more help, look into Carole Maggio's No-Lipo Lipo system, which costs some money but actually does work if you work it. Her program takes dry skin brushing to a higher level by incorporating a fat-busting self massage protocol and skin conditioning system. 3. Topical exfoliation. You can do this several ways, but the easiest is to go to Skinbiology.com and buy their "skin tightening" protocol which includes several choices of natural acids to take off the top layer of skin so you can work through to the lower layers. 4. Copper Peptides. Skinbiology.com. After you do your dry skin brushing and take your shower; apply an appropriate strength copper peptide to the affected area. You can do this with extreme success at the lower belly and on the insides of your upper arms especially. 5. Pilates When cosmetic surgeons do tummy tucks, one of their primary concerns is the fact that the recti muscle -- the one that holds the lower girdle of your organs in place -- has split apart due to the extreme pressure of obesity on those muscles. That's why it's major surgery -- they're not just slicing some skin out and stretching it back into place; they're actually repairing the muscle by stitching it back together across the expanse of your lower abdomen. Pilates can repair that muscle. It's not because Pilates emphasizes "core work" -- it's because it realigns the whole body and *then* works the core -- in time, just like physical therapy, these muscles strengthen and move back into position. 6. Dot Laser Therapy ( or Fraxel, with reservations) The basic strategy behind skin rejuvenation through laser is controlled injury. When the skin is injured, it makes new collagen; this increases elasticity and you snap back. I know dot laser works because I've had it -- but the issue here is really the expense. Treating your belly is a *large* area and you could run into about the same money as your tummy tuck with varying results. But if you're not interested in getting cut open, you will see a result from either of these. 7. Exercise the wattle. Here is an exercise I've been doing to minimize the wattle where my double chin used to be: Lie on your bed backwards with your head hanging off the edge, Lift your head so it is parallel to the floor. Hold for twenty counts. Drop your head. Lift again for another twenty count. Do that three times. On the last one -- lift for twenty, turn to the right for twenty, then to the left for twenty. Do this once or twice a day. 8. DMAE for small areas. DMAE tightens skin, but it's expensive and there is a whole issue -- listen to me now, don't get the stuff from Walgreens -- with making sure that the DMAE is *active* and deliverable to your skin. Perricone makes one and Skinbiology does too. Another option is to make your own -- you can dissolve DMAE capsules in olive oil and slather it on your neck, under your arms, inner thighs -- etc -- and get a therapeutic result. If it's not fresh or deliverable,though, what you're going to get is sort of forty dollars you spent on a nicely scented type of Vaseline. 9. Slow down. If you're very overweight and you've just gotten weight loss surgery, chances are the first one hundred pounds are going to run screaming off of you and you will be left with the aftermath. But after that -- slow down. *Most* people have great elasticity in their skin even into their late fifties, and your skin needs time to adjust. If you're in your first year of a massive weight loss, don't assume that hangy stuff is going to be there forever. It probably won't be. What it needs is time. The rule of thumb is one year per one hundred pounds. 10. Lose more weight. A lot of people complaining about saggy skin are really complaining about extra fat. Let me put it this way: At 175 -- a reasonable amount for my 5 foot 10 frame -- I was still bothered by bits of myself that had shapeless, untaut attributes. At 158 this was not the case at all. You might still need to drop another ten or twenty pounds for the "skin" you're upset about to go away. Fat will fill out the least taut parts of you and that might be part of the problem. 11. Time and time again. If you are not 100 years old, and you have lost somewhere near 100 pounds, your skin is actively trying to contain your internal catastrophe. It is spending 24 hours a day calculating and responding, trying accommodate and contain you. If you have lost 100 pounds and you have had weight loss surgery, that is one hundred pounds that is never coming back and that means your outermost layer has to adjust to this new reality. Six months is all it takes to convince it that there is a reason to shrink. One yea\r is enough to tell it you are now less massive perpetually than you used to be. In a year you might see straight up miracles you never expected. Don't go cutting on all this biological genius prematurely. What if you save ten thousand dollars by just hanging back and waiting to see how your brilliant body responds to being half of itself? Think about this logically. You are an amoeba, pretty much. Your skin is the membrane that separates you from the environment. If you take away certain stressors over time; the membrane is going to behave intelligently and differently. Don't underestimate it. Work with it. And wait.

I kind of want to do a before and a not-quite-after today but I really only want to show you guys and then take them down later so they're not hanging around the forum for the whole world to see. Can I take them off or delete them somehow if I do that? Tech assistance, please?

. Hello, I have surgery scheduled in Mexico with Dr. Aceves at the end of the month. I called and scheduled it after poking around the net and realizing that if I went self-pay out of the country I could not only save myself ten thousand dollars but also avoid all kinds of bureaucratic traps such as having to wait to get a psyct eval and waiting for people to get back to me and put me in the pipeline and so forth. I chose Dr. Aceves and scheduled right away -- I love Nina, she put me right at ease -- but the most remarkable thing was...I could not find a SINGLE thing online that even came close to a bad review of Dr. Aceves. Not ANYWHERE. Except for that one guy on this board from a couple days ago who said he almost died three weeks later. I am not sure I believe him and I'm new to WLS scuttlebutt, so seriously: 1. Is there ANYONE out there except that ONE GUY who's had a bad experience, complication or issue with Dr. Aceves? 2. Do you believe that one guy had complications as he said, and if so do you think they were directly related to WLS with Dr. Aceves?

Hi there: Just want to follow up here on my own thread from two years ago and say that I did get my sleeve from Dr. Aceves in March of 2011. I had NO complications, no complaints, no problems whatsoever. I did not reach my goal of 155 but I am holding steady in the high 170s and I have done so for about a year. One thing I had to watch for was supplementing Iron and b12, which got me into trouble at about 18 months. But this had nothing to do with the surgeon or really the sleeve -- I just needed more of it to begin with, anyway. I do not regret my sleeve, or my choice of surgeon, at all so far.

I went to get a consultation with a surgeon this week. I was asking him for the Mommy Makeover -- first because of my stretched belly that never snapped back after pregnancy, got worse after gaining a hundred pounds and is now hopeless after gaining and losing a hundred pounds again. I also have a pectus carinatum -- this bone that protrudes from my upper chest. I have hated it my whole life and now this surgeon says that with a lift and implants he could make me look more like a normal woman. I can't begin to describe what these two things have done to my confidence over the years. When I was a girl it seemed like everyone pretended I didn't have the carinatum but I was always self conscious, I knew I was shaped wrong and the other problem was that no matter how skinny I got I always looked a little bigger than most girls ( I am anyway at almost five ten) because of the circumference of my chest. Then my belly, which got ruined with my first pregnancy and made me feel terrifically ugly since then -- which was twenty years ago. I didn't think I could ever afford to fix these things about my body; and then I had this sort of moral idea that you just had to tolerate what was ugly about you because everybody had something and if I gave in to surgery it would mean admitting I was unworthy of love the way God made me. So now I'm 47. I'm at a stable weight. I'll never be fat again, obviously, and I am *now* seriously considering this. But my first question is -- and I really want your opinions about this because I don't know what to think -- Am I too old to do this? Does it even matter now? I mean obviously winning the Miss America pageant is pretty much out. When I talked to my ( fired) therapist, who was seventy, about this, she said, well what's the point? Who's going to see you in a bikini now? And I sort of thought...well...I don't know....I don't know. Then I'll think: would this change your opinion of yourself? Would you feel more confident, sexier, would you feel freer? And i think YES I WOULD. But maybe it's just stupid vanity at this point, and indicative of misplaced insecurity when I should be working on my inner strength instead of still lamenting over my ruined belly. Is this something that a 47 year old should just give up on at this point, forget having a sex life or wanting to be a little beautiful? Also, if you've had a tt and a breast lift -- how are your scars? I'm riddled with stretch marks but I don't have any scars on my body and I wonder if the tradeoff really makes a difference. What say you, sleever board? Too old for all this? Or is there still enough time left for this to be worth it?

I got on the scale today and it said: 179.8. I'm making this announcement because I want people to know that so far, my year-long experiment with sleeve eating has not been a failure. If you've ever read my posts before, you know that I am not dieting with the sleeve. I am not lowcarbing. My calories are not at starvation level and they have not been since I got my surgery last April. My actually surgery was March 29, but I mostly count it as April 1 just to round everything out. Okay so the thing is, there is research out there that says that people typically lose sixty percent of their weight in the first year and that's all you get. There is research that says that you will "stretch" your sleeve after six months or so, lose your "honeymoon" with your sleeve, stop losing and get stuck. There are surgeons who say you *have to* be on a lowcarb diet of 800 calories for the rest of your life or you won't lose the weight, and they say that you need to exercise like a demon *while* you're eating that 800 and you have to stay like that forever or you'll get fat again. I want to tell you that in my experience this is not true. What I want to tell you is that I got the sleeve because I was 46 and SO FAT -- I weighed 289 -- and I was at the end of my rope. I had dieted before and gotten the weight off only to regain it and the way I did that is pretty much to follow all the instructions above. Eating 800 lowcarb calories a day will get you to goal weight, there is no doubt,but in my opinion that's just no way to live and it's impossible to sustain. It also creates such intense anxiety about eating and your body and your food that it creates a horrible unending complex about fat, and feeding yourself, that the cure is worse than the disease. I got my surgery in March. I was *severely* depressed and the reason I was depressed primarily was because I WAS SO FAT. I really hated myself. But I decided that the fat was emotional mostly and so what I was going to do was this. I was going to lose weight without dieting by having a surgeon remove eighty five percent of my stomach. And knowing that was taken care of and I had done the most *extreme* thing I could possibly do to solve my weight problem, I was going to let it come off naturally, eat normally and not push myself or punish myself because obsessing over my weight has basically been my career since I was 13 years old. I had this thought once when I was watching Oprah Winfrey. All that woman ever talked about was her weight. All she ever did was look at the scale. Every time she lost fifty pounds it made the freakin national news and when she gained the weight back she made this weird confession and apology to everyone in the world. So obviously she was obsessed but what I really thought was holy crap, really? Imagine what Oprah could have accomplished with her life if she was not spending seventy five percent of her time obsessing over her pants size. Imagine what *I* could do if this was NO LONGER A PROBLEM for me and when I say NO LONGER A PROBLEM I mean I NEVER HAVE TO THINK OR WORRY ABOUT IT AGAIN. So really....I was looking for more than weight loss. I wanted to be healed. Completely. So the weight has come off really slow. In August of last year, I weighed 237. In November, I weighed 222. In January, 209. On April 1, my surgiversary, I weighed about 190. I've gone on vacation, I've drunk numerous glasses of wine, I've eaten cake and Pasta and carbs, I've avoided cardio really for the most part -- but my calories are *naturally* way under what I would need to sustain these weights and so....slowly....it's coming off. And it's still coming off and it has now been *over* a year. I think I'm going to hit goal eventually. This will be without dieting, without worrying about the "honeymoon period", and without forcing myself to do ninety hours of cardio a week. And when I get there there's not going to be some freakout/rebound where I now have to figure out what "maintenance" is and be on the verge of shooting myself in the head because I had a piece of birthday cake or a piece of gum with sugar in it. So this is what I want to say: If you're just starting this project ( I refuse to say journey -- UGH) then realize that patience is required. Plan on a year *or more*. Even if you believe the honeymoon thing you're not going to drop all your weight *inside* your "honeymoon" so think about it...what are you going to do when it's over? Because you're still going to have to lose a lot of weight and you're going to have to sustain whatever you're doing for the rest of your life. It's frustrating that such an extreme solution is not instantaneous, but it is NOT, so prepare yourself. You're going to be working on this for at least a year. A year is a long time and you can't just not be alive for a year while you get thin. I didn't have that year to waste and you don't either. If you're just starting this project, consider what you want your life to be as a thin person. Not a "formerly fat" person. Not a constantly dieting, obsessed person. This is what you'll be free of when it's done, so prepare by starting now and living your life. And finally: Prepare for the idea that you may not lose all your weight in the first year. But remember this post by me and realize that you *will* very likely get exactly where you are going by the end of the second one and forget all that stuff about first years and honeymoons. This is not magic, it's science. It's mechanics. The mechanism that uses energy that is your body will continuously be operating at a deficit *even after* the honeymoon, *even after* the first year, and that means you *will* get there. You *have to*. This requires patience, and then more patience. That's really the *only* think you need going into this. The rest, I really promise you -- will take care of itself.

Well, that's true, NannieG. I've had a couple similar things happen to me over the past eighteen months. You *can* make the scale start to climb. I can remember two instances where I thought...hmmmm...I seem to be a little puffy. This had more to do with how I felt than what I weighed. I did check on the scale -- four or five pounds up one day. Could be Water weight, could be...not. So that's just a question of cutting back a little. The thing is, the issues just aren't as extreme as they were. I gain four pounds instead of twenty before I even notice. It's not a huge sacrifice to cut my calories back. . I imagine that's how normal people do it.

I really don't think there is such a thing as a honeymoon. What I do think is that in the first months you've had serious, major surgery and had your stomach cut out and if you're not an alien this is going to cause you to eat quite a bit less than you did before. After your stomach heals, you're going to want more food. You'll be able to eat more food, naturally, since the scars have healed. After that period though -- in my experience -- the weight still comes off even at a much higher caloric load because your body really uses all those calories. When you get to a point that you're eating exactly what you burn -- you stop losing. I'm not sure if I'm there yet. The scale is still going down. Lowest I've seen it is 165; but it bounces up to 171 on occasion and every once in a while if I've eaten late at night a couple nights in a row. I look at it this way. I had the surgery because I wanted a permanent solution. Permanent is permanent -- there is no "honeymoon" small stomach and then it balloons and suddenly turns into my old stomach that could easily digest an entire pizza in one sitting. It just aint gonna happen. I have figured out a way to overeat, though, and that is to eat too many calorie dense minimeals too often. The problem is, though -- basically in order to do that I have to eat *all the time*. Eating over 2000 is so rare simply because all I'm doing in that case is finding stuff to eat and eating it. I just don't see the potential here to get four thousand calories inside me the way I used to be able to -- ever again. This was major surgery. It cost me twenty thousand dollars. It's permanent. I literally can not reasonably do more than that.

. Hi there. I might the wrong person to ask because I did *not* diet and did *not* work out crazily. I mean I do get exercise -- Pilates 4 times a week -- but I don't obsess about either thing. I eat out of the grocery store and do eat CARBS; I hate Water and I'm sure I get in at least 100 ounces of fluids every day but that includes decaf and sobe lifewater and Vitamin water zero. So I was a slow loser on purpose. But let's see -- I think I got under 200 in February; to about 190 in March; I was 183 in April; 176 in May..and now to a NEW LOW of 172!!!!! It's about 117 down so far. My "goal" is 155. I keep thinking I'm going to stop losing at some point but so far that hasn't happened. I'm also in size eights these days. Be patient. It comes off even when you think it's not coming off.

I'e got all kinds of stuff on my bathroom countertop. Stretch marks and the sagging are really diminishing although I know I can't hope for perfection. I'm using Mama Mio Skintight; Goodbye Stretch Marks, Boob Tube and Get Waisted body shaping cream, and they're all working a little bit, over time. I also have this stuff called Excel premium Stretch Mark Creme which got a fantastic rating on amazon. I just started using it a couple days ago though. I'm also down to 176, so a couple more pounds seem to be drifting off. I went to see a plastic surgeon in April. He told me a tummy tuck was the only solution ( of course) and if I lost any more weight the area would get worse. I'm not sure about this anymore. My belly is really looking a lot better and I keep asking myself if I would trade it for a tight belly button and a scar where I got slashed open from hip to hip. I keep thinking I'd really rather not have the scar.

It's been roughly a month since I posted a loss. That sort of isn't true, in fact I lost about five pounds and gained them back again and I'm now steady at about 178. My goal weight, when I got surgery, was 155 -- but I would settle for 158 without a problem. I had my surgery fourteen months ago with Dr. Aceves and I have lost 110 pounds. I have lost roughly eighty percent of my excess weight and this is the first month that I haven't seen any change on the scale. I have done this roughly effortlessly, without dieting -- and I had a month in there where I was drinking ALOT of wine -- still posted a loss of about ten pounds. Now I'm not sure what to do. The last twenty are bound to come off more slowly and my body has undergone QUITE a change so it might just be a little "catching up" my body is trying to do. I know I'm still eating under the calories I should need to stay at this weight but my metabolism could have slowed from the year I was giving it so much less to eat. I *really* want to get under 160. Last year it seemed like it was wasn't even a possibility, so I just left it alone. Now...man... I am *so close*. Right now I'm a size ten and even a tight eight. My waist is 27 inches, my hips are 37. I'm not sure if I should do a little more "leaving it alone" to see what happens or if I should really push off those last twenty. My problem is that I'm worried if I do that I'll gain it back and start yoyoing again, which I cannot stand and really can not do again. What do you guys think? Actual diet, or fortitude and patience?

When I went to see the plastic surgeon he told me five pounds would come off that way and I guess it does account for some. My hips and waist are fine, but my arms are still kind of chubby and I have a little backfat. I don't think it's *all* gone, but I am five nine and some change and people keep telling me I look "fine". At 178 I'm five pounds over "normal" according to the charts. I think I have at *least* ten to go -- if that were my "new normal" I'd probably be happy with that. Cheri you went to Dr. Aceves too! According to his website, his patients lose 98 percent of their excess weight in two years, and that keeps rolling around in my head. I'm not ready to give up yet! I'm on the fence here. It's actually not always the best thing to burn through a plateau. I think rushing it too much can result in resistance that just keeps making you fight off those pounds. And the best way to mitigate loose skin is patience. I know I can make that twenty pounds come off. The question is whether I'm doing enough right now to make it happen and I've just hit a slow spot, or if I actually need to diet, drop my calories and add cardio. Right now I do a little walking and swimming and Pilates three to four times a week.

I just want to say before I tell you this that I am NOT a rep for this company -- it's me, Crosswind, who's been contemplating a tummy tuck lately because I hate my belly -- but I hated it before when I had my first kid and it just never snapped back. That was the first time I gained and lost 100 pounds and it was just hopeless. Well so now I've been applying myself to this problem rather diligently. I do skin brushing, which probably helps, bit since I'm a woman and I put a fair amount of weight on the entire area between my waist and my knees it all looks like a war zone frankly. But the tummy tuck thing I'm just not sure about. I'd love to have that perfect fantasy body but at the same time there are scars and risks and I keep asking myself if I want to trade marks for scars. Neither option is perfect but in the meantime, while I've been contemplating this, I ran across this stuff on Amazon called Mama Mio Skin Tight, which they sell to postpartum moms who are just confronting the shocking reality of the stretched out belly button. This is stuff works. It's not perfect -- it won't make you look perfect -- but it does make a *difference* immediately. I am not sure what its real results are over time because I just got this stuff yesterday BUT -- if you just want to look a little bit better right now -- under your arms, lower belly, upper thigh -- really, there is a little bit of tightening and smoothing going on that is just enough to make me think that if there was some slow...even minor change that could occur over time it might be enough to decide to skip the extra surgery portion of the body makeover. Seriously, try it -- you'll see what I'm saying. I think I paid 30 dollars on Amazon which is a lot, lot cheaper than surgery. Good luck!

...buttoned, zipped and sat down in a pair of Size 8 jeans. Yep, pretty tight. Muffin top. 20 pounds to go. But...wow....

One more: Mama Mio Skin Tight and Mama Mio Boob Tube. Seriously -- it's been five days and there is definite improvement. Not perfection but I'm not even concerned about perfection. Just bearableness. Try it!

if you do, let me know how it goes .

Start: 289 End 179 Twenty four pounds to go

Last month I got a full blood panel done and found out I was iron-deficient. The lab value was 9.3 outside of the "normal" values of 12-15. So I started taking a bunch of Iron and B 12 and I thought I was actually feeling better. However, when I got a recheck yesterday the thing was still going down -- now it's 8.7. It's weird. I do feel better. I'm not so tired, and I don't have any of the symptoms they talk about online like chewing ice or eating dirt or extreme pallor and etcetera. What I'm wondering is if maybe my serum iron *is* improving even though my levels appear to be going down. Is that possible? I just don't feel that bad. Anybody with any experience with this?

Lol. What I did was, I got a Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy a year ago. Basically not a thing else. I did start a job which got me moving a little more and I got back into Pilates again a few times a week. I swam last summer, love the Water. But I did not diet,. as I keep saying ( alot). And I think I look pretty good, skinwise, because it all went so slow. I'm thinking the little bit of jiggle I've got might snap back if I go slow on the last 24. Maybe not to perfect, but who's perfect? Still considering the tt and the breastlift, but something is telling me to wait.

Actually, you know what, it's not working. I tried to upload and it just hangs

. Okay, cool, thanks...

. Hiya. I'm a female and I'm five nine. I did gain a couple pounds over christmas, but I was basically just laying around and eating Cookies and drinking tons of wine for ten days. When I got back to work and into my regular routine the scale started moving again. It felt like it started moving faster because I was eating lesss sugar; the Water drained out and took a couple more pounds with it. i do count calories though normally, though mostly out of curiosity. I eat seventeen, sometimes eighteen hundred most days. And I found it really easy once I was paying attention to work on portion control, like buying the 100 calorie Snacks and lean cuisine frozen stuff because most of those meals are under three hundred, which is what I can usually get in me in one sitting. I don't see those habits changing. I don't go out to eat very often and when my stomach is full I just don't want anything else. I do have to be careful with Pirate's Booty though. I don't buy it anymore because it is pretty darn easy to eat a whole big bag of that

. Hee Hee gmanbat. Not to mention...shampoo.... ~a

It's been 95 days since my surgery, or 13 and a half weeks, or three months and three days. I have now lost 53 pounds, from an alltime high of 289 down to 236 as of this morning. I come around these boards but I haven't been posting much because I've been in kind of a little observation pod myself, testing out food, working the sleeve, and something else: pouting because my weight is in the 230's and not the 130's. Usually when I come here I read people saying they're completely pissed about the same thing. So I wanted to put my spice into the pot here and tell you that even though it seems like it's coming off really slowly, and even though day to day you could measure your loss in eye droppersful the fact is it's pretty likely that when you get to three months, you will be somewhere around a fifty to sixty pound loss. If the loss is faster than that, it's usually because you had more to lose to begin with. If it's slower than that it won't be slower by much. Maybe it will be 45 and not 55. That could be because you had less weight to lose to begin with, or you have some other condition that's comorbid, like diabetes or hypothyroid. It's all good, you're getting better. If you are reading about somebody who lost seventy or eighty pounds in two months, they are losing the same *percentage* of weight you have to lose. And the prediction by bariatric surgeons for how much you will lose over a certain amount of time is pretty much uniform: *Most* of it will be gone at one year. Not in four months. Not in six months. One year. I want to tell you why this is a good thing. First of all, if you are eating the starvation calories you would need to eat to lose one hundred pounds in six months your metabolism would be shredded by the time it was over. The minute you stopped and tried to "maintain" you'd really be in trouble -- you might have to stay at six hundred for a year after that, and keep slowly adding calories, and be stuck for the rest of your life eating eight or nine hundred "maintenance" . Besides being trapped at a much lower metabolism, your nutrition would have to suck over time if you had to live that way forever. Also, when you lose slower, your skin has time to bounce back. Extremely fast weight loss means your outer layer looks like a stretched out sock. But extend that loss over time, over the space of a year -- you end up with taut, glowy stuff that's better than any fashion makeover. You might not ever get the skin of your childhood but the real sag and pucker will be minimized as much as it can be. You might have completely given up on bikini dreams at this point, but...consider the arms. Consider sleeveless. Consider the one piece. Patience can pay off. I am not a calorie counter. I am not a lowcarber. My BMI was just under 40 when I went down to Mexico so I would say I'm an "average" candidate for this procedure. I've eaten taco bell, gone out for wine, gone on vacation, eaten Pasta and pizza and chips. What I've noticed when I do stuff like this though is that my body starts asking me for chicken and vegetables. And the other thing I've noticed is that *no matter what* I do, the pounds are still coming off. When I got back from vacation last month, I was starting to worry. When I left on May 19, I weighed 249. I hung out with my relatives and ate seafood and had wine spritzers, went out to eat every day and lived the life of riley for two weeks. When I got back I weighed 247. I thought I was slowing my loss and I probably was, a little but...maybe not as much as I thought. So the month of June passes and my decision is not to freak out, not to go lowcarb, and to eat normally, work out a little while I push the Protein and the Water. I went out with my friends and had a couple glasses of wine with them but I'm worrying. Now I'm not losing that twenty to thirty pounds a month, that ten pounds a week. Now it seems like *nothing* is happening. June 15, suddenly it's 245. I'm still thinking maybe I need to lowcarb...maybe I need to push my calories down from 1200 to under a thousand. Maybe I need to do something. But I don't. I walked a couple miles outside til it got too hot out, and I swam in the pool twice. Ate like I didn't care. Now it's 236. In six weeks I lost eleven pounds. And I really did nothing at all but live normally. I did not scour the internet for lowcarb recipes, I did not get on some punishing regime to tweak my abs. I didn't do anything but eat and live. So I just want to say that you *can* make this into a clean, disciplined Jillian Michaels experience, where you only eat cottage cheese and you run on the treadmill for an hour every day. You can force your calories down to five hundred and brutalize those pounds off of you in record time -- you can do that, it's possible and you have medical supervision. Or you can NOT do it. It's coming off either way.

Well, I guess when I was younger I was kind of a snob about this. Or at least very negative about any kind of surgery. Ten years ago I would *never* have gone to get a VSG but then...my mom was alive then and *her* attitude was that if you weren't a one hundred percent natural beauty then you were faking it. She was also very overweight and at some point decided she just didn't care anymore ( even though of course she did very much) and she was just going to be fat because there was nothing wrong with that -- and of course there isn't. Boob jobs, nose jobs, eyelifts, all that -- were for insecure people who had too much money and not enough to do in their lives. But now i think attitudes have changed. Now it's more like hey man, if you really want that what is difference between wanting that and a cool old car you like because they basically cost the same amount. And the kind of confidence that comes from either one might take you just as far. i don't know. I'm still working it out.