Ms skinniness

I have so much crap too! I've lived in this house for 23 years. I can't get over everything we have to do to prepare for the sale. The good news is, I am not very fond of quest bars anymore. they are starting make me nauseous. I met with my case manager at kaiser and she sent me an after care plan for me. I am going to have to pull it up and check it out.... ;P I will post it later for everyone if your interest.

Wow, I admire that you want to prepare her for what's to come, but she is only 4 and doesn't have an indebt understanding of what is going on. Perhaps it's time to stop talking about the surgery and just be with her. Enjoy the time together. It's okay that she's needing more time from you. When the time comes for your surgery love her and don't go into any details. She is very bright and intuitive but we don't want to mix up your needs with her. She's very precious.................

CONGRATS! You did great. I remember when I was in the hospital I slept at an incline and that helped me not have as much air trapped. I had no problems with pain except for the incision site. Welcome to the BIG LOSER'S BENCH!

That's a personal call. Even if the surgery is delayed, you will still have lost some weight which contributes to a decrease risk of having a fatty liver. So it's worth it to keep on the liquid diet for now.....No harm, no fowl....

Finally down to 145 lbs. Whew! Thought I would never get here....I've missed this thread.....glad to be back... I will be going towards a lot of stress now, my husband's hours have been cut back now and we are working on moving to Oregon now.....It sure is hard to figure out how to buy our dream property in Oregon and trying to sell our house at the same time. We need to get our house painted and a few things fixed too. Plus the last few days I have been eating a lot of food even when now hungry but still losing a bit....

It is what it is and there's no going back......Now it's time to move forward and reap the benefits of all your discomfort. It does help to talk with someone about this horrible experience. If you need surgery in the future, make sure you share with the surgeon and anaesthesiologist the problem you had here.....Hope you get better really soon. What a frightful experience.

Georgia you are totally rocking these days. Down to 147 lbs is great!

Swizzly I'm so sorry your house was burglarized! What a horrible thing to have to deal with after having a vacation. The 5 lbs will come off you are one determined lady! M2G I really hate it when professionals bash other professionals! it shows where they are in there life....I'm a therapist and I hear it all the time from colleagues talking about other therapists....i stay away from that stuff. Today I weighed in at 146.1 lbs and figured out my body fat is 26.9%.....frustrating, so now I'm lowing my BMI and increasing my exercise to burn body fat......thought I was done, but not. Then I struggle with thinking that my measurements might be misleading because of the excess skin.....I have an appointment with my case manager for weight loss on friday. Maybe they can pin it down for me.....

Look at you skinny Goddess! This is priceless! Yep, that's all of us on here....finding ourselves and loving ourselves! :PI so regret not having a pair of my old jeans to put over my new jeans. But like Fiddle said, I could go to the goodwill and try on my old size over my new size....or go to Macy's and try on a new pair. My body fat percentage calculated out to be 26.9% so it's time for me to work on reducing the body fat % now....

These sound delicious.

This is totally normal at this point. The weight will come off. Your job is to eat proteins and get all your fluids in. Make sure your hydrated because dehydration really sucks..... Sit back and watch the weight come off now. Work on new eating habits and exercise. This is such an awesome ride....

Things are a lot better and I have a better perspective now....Now it's time to focus on me...Wow when I look at your newe pic I see your collar bones! Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.Georgia, I just noticed your BMI and weight on your ticker! Fantastic! Yayyyyyyyyyyyy! You ROCK!

Gosh, I've been in such a stressful and scarey week with my client that I've totally missed out on reading what everyone's been doing.... In fast all my 5:2 posts went to my spam folder..... Good job Georgia on your weight loss.......down in the 140's is fantastic! i am such an emotional eater and need to rein myself back in and today is a fast day for me..... Yep, a fast day.... It's good to be back and need to go back and catch up on everything that I've missed.....

The smell of bacon drives me crazy.....I love bacon.......Your ex will be moving on soon and you will have your bacon free zone at last.......You got this girl.....BTW, I can eat a ton of bacon too, so I try to keep it out of my kitchen as well....

I was at the borderline of a BMI of 35/36 and I have done just fine losing weight. Just like everyone else. I don't eat those foods you mentioned because I eat high protein with veggies. Sometimes I do eat a little bit of fruit to boot.. You will do just fine my dear.....Hang in there.....

I'm 2 years out as of the 4th of Oct and I still eat fast. Will I ever learn?

I don't think your too skinny! You look just right! Hot and sexy! Yep! keep it up!

Don't forget that you are building muscle and when you do weight bearing exercises you are tearing your muscles down and they are rebuilding so there is some inflammation to be expected which means water retention too. So it's part of the process. The good news is that the more muscle mass you have, the more your going to be burning. So keep it up...... and you will most likely start decreasing in inches too.

I am such a sugar addict that I found this to be of help in some ways. Hope you enjoy it... Addicted to Sugar? 7 Steps You Need to Take Before You Can Break Free Last month, I devoted my blog to reviewing some of the more surprising adverse health outcomes associated with excess sugar consumption. While most of us know that sugar is not the best substance to load our body with, many individuals struggle with tactics in actually breaking free of their addiction to sugar -- and yes, it can truly be an addiction. In fact, the results of one study showed that a greater neurological reward was provided by intense sweetness than by the drug cocaine. Similar findings occur when we look at withdrawal from sweet as well, indicating that getting off sugar may cause the same neurological symptoms as withdrawing from nicotine, morphine and alcohol. Now more than ever, we are seeing more and more associations linking addictions of sugar and drugs in the same bucket. Additionally, we all face the unfortunate reality that sugar is readily available in our food supply as a cheap fix for our cravings, 24 hours a day, in thousands of different venues and forms. Finally, we often use sugar as a reward (kid stops throwing a tantrum at the store, kid gets cookie at home) and the main food substance during celebrations (when is the last time you saw birthday candles sticking out of broccoli florets or a 1-year-old baby smashing lentils in his or her face for the quintessential first birthday picture)? So given these studies and the vast availability of this stuff, is there any hope? Can you really break free from the chains of sugar addiction? The answer may be yes, and it doesn't necessarily include admitting yourself to a rehab facility for six weeks. The start of your sugarless healing could perhaps come in the form of seven easy steps. Step 1: Don't replace real sugar with artificial sugar. In an effort to provide us with the sweetness we crave without the excess calories we dread, manufacturers created artificial sweeteners. The first, saccharin, was discovered in the 1870s by a scientist at John Hopkins University. He wasn't trying to come up with a fake way to sweeten our foods, in fact, back then food actually was actually that -- food. He was actually working on coal tar derivatives and as the story goes, some of the white substance spilled onto his hand. Later that evening, the substance on his hand transferred to the roll he was eating at dinner making it exceptionally sweet. After that fateful spill on the hands, the world of food has never been the same. Artificial sweeteners have been blamed for a lot of things that ail us -- but most recently, artificial sweeteners and their effect on our ability to lose weight have come into focus. As it turns out, a lack of calories doesn't always equate to a lack of consequences. A 2013 study in the journal Diabetes Care found that artificial sweeteners can actually alter the way the body metabolizes sugar. A 2008 animal study found that rats given artificial sweeteners ate more calories throughout the day and as a result, gained weight. The researchers found that the ingestion of artificial sweeteners essentially caused confusion between the gut and the brain. The authors of the study stated that, "sweet foods provide a 'salient orosensory stimulus' that strongly predicts someone is about to take in a lot of calories. Ingestive and digestive reflexes gear up for that intake but when false sweetness isn't followed by lots of calories, the system gets confused. Thus, people may eat more or expend less energy than they otherwise would." While these studies provide incentive from a weight approach to kick the fake sugar habit, it's what artificial sweeteners are doing to your sugar-laden diet that is most concerning for the true sugar addict. Why? Studies show that replacing regular sugar with artificial sweeteners is akin to kicking your cigarette habit by switching to cigars. You're still getting the sweetness you crave, so you're never really taking away the sweet taste that keeps calling your name. Chances are, you'll go back to the real stuff. I often tell my sugar addict patients on day one that in 60 days, I want them to crave salmon over licorice. They look at me like I have two heads of course, but after three months of truly sticking to a no-sugar plan, their cravings do actually turn. Step 2: Start an exercise regimen and add milk to your diet. Eating lots of sugar has been shown to enhance reward mechanisms in the brain, thus making it difficult to break the habit. Rats that were given sucrose for example, wanted more of it and self-fed with it if it was available in their cage. While the comparison may seem extreme, I see this as no different than the individual who keeps candy bars, Cookies and hard candies in their home or office desk. If it's there, and you've got a preference for it, chances are high you'll eat lots of it and chances are even higher that you'll feel pretty good after eating it -- at least for a little while, until you crash and need more. But what if you could boost one of your most efficient acting "feel good" effects through foods other than sugar? One study for example, showed that consumption of whey Protein (a major protein found in milk) increased serotonin (a feel-good hormone first isolated at the Cleveland Clinic that is associated with mood elevation). Other studies have found an association between exercise and serotonin increase as well. Step 3: Say "no" to fat-free products. Here's the low down on fat-free foods. Fat (something we like that tastes really good) goes out and sugar (another thing we like that tastes really good) goes in. Why? Because manufacturers are selling you on the fact that the product is fat-free -- not sugar-free. Huge culprits include fat-free salad dressing (honey or high fructose corn syrup often coming in as the second or third ingredients), fat-free cookies or cakes (angel-food cake for example has a devilish 20 grams or more of sugar per slice), fat-free puddings, muffins and reduced-fat Peanut Butter are also offenders. The solution? Keep your salad dressings and peanut butter the full-fat variety. The monounsaturated fats in them will actually help to increase your overall sense of satisfaction and slowly move away from the cookies, cakes, muffins and puddings by trying out some of the other tactics in this article. Step 4: Improve your sleep habits. A 2013 study found that our circadian sleep cycles have a whole lot to do with whether we reach for a cookie late at night. We also are less equipped to resist a high-calorie treat (sugar-laden doughnuts come to mind) if we are sleepy throughout the day, according to another study. An additional study found that when individuals were sleep-deprived, their reward activation centers in the brain were actually greater, thereby making it more difficult to say no to the candy bar. Bottom line, while diet and exercise have a lot to do with staying away from the sweets, neither of them will be as effective if you're not getting enough ZZZ's. Step 5: Keep Snacks close by. One tactic that's worked with many of my patients is keeping healthy snacks on hand. I had one patient who told me that she'd be driving her car and would see an ice cream shop and without even realizing it, would be entering the parking lot to get a fix. Her impulses were reduced though, when she started to keep trail mix in her glove compartment. She could easily grab it and have a few satisfying bites of peanuts, raisins and whole-grain pretzels. Just this simple action distracted her from the ice cream shop. Figure out what your trigger is and have something on hand to distract yourself. It could be an apple in your purse, a bag of healthy popcorn in your pantry or a string-cheese stick in your office refrigerator. Step 6: Chew gum. A 2009 study found that individuals who chewed gum hourly and for at least three hours in the afternoon reduced their cravings for sweet snacks. While the study used a sugar-free gum variety, which does in fact contain artificial sweeteners, it nonetheless provides an interesting tactic to perhaps lower your sweet cravings. Step 7: Never forget the benefit to your body. One of my patients has a serious sugar addiction. The challenges with these patients are helping them gain a greater ability to lose their sugar cravings without gaining weight. One thing this patient told me was the secret to her success was remaining constantly aware of what sugar was doing to her body. She told me she's been able to stick to her no-sugar plan partly because her desire to be around for her grandkids had become more powerful than her desire to eat a bunch of gummy bears. Remain focused and never forget that reducing your sugar addiction has benefits well beyond the perfect body. For more by Kristin Kirkpatrick, M.S., R.D., L.D., click here.

How funny, stalking here on VST! Great job!

I have suffered from debilitating migraines for many years before my surgery and this was a big concern of mine. The good news is, I haven't had a migraine since before the surgery. And if I get a migraine, I will take my prescribed medication like maxalt or zomiz and if they don't work, i will go to urgent care and get a shot of dilaudid. That's the plan I have. I am so thankful for not having migraines now.

That is really awesome....My DH eats a protein and veggie diet with some fruit but hasn't lost any weight. I really wish he would!

Each person's goal is going to be different. i do notice that when people get to the goal they set, they set a new goal. This is what I did. I never asked my surgeon's office what my goal weight should be until the end and the doc just said, "you look really good and i don't recommend losing any more." Heck that was about 10 lbs a go. Now I am totally happy with my weight and working on maintenace. I do have to go back and do a reset and get back on track. I weigh myself daily and I do have days where I have a lot of head hunger. So I know that I have to be careful.

Yayyyyyyyyyyy! Happy Birthday! You made it! Sounds like you are back on track now and even lost a little bit too....I focus on eating proteins mainly with veggies and skip the breads, pasta's, and rice. When I do eat something carby, my cravings for sugar come back. I am addicted to sugar so I read all labels on processed foods and usually avoid labels that have any sugar listed on them. I also don't eat corn because cattle are feed corn to fatten them up, so what is corn going to do to me? It is really hard to maintain this and am do fall off the wagon often, but all in all, I'm doing good..... I have been losing for the past 4 days and am so happy even if it's just a few ozs....