Bufflehead

High weight (the most you ever weighed in your life), surgery weight (day of surgery), current weight.

You need to be off opioids for at least 24 hours in order to avoid endangering yourself and others, as well as to not be violating laws against driving under the influence. Other than that, as long as you are feeling up to it -- I could have driven 3-4 days post op if not for the opioid thing, since I was still taking those for about a week post-op, at night. Another thing to keep in mind -- you'll likely have a lifting restriction for at least a few weeks after surgery, so if transporting your nephew to daycare (not sure how old he is) involves lifting him/his carseat in or out of your car, you'll need a work-around, such as getting someone else to do the lifting, or, if he is old enough, teaching him to climb in and out of the car on his own. Good luck!

I had to stop eating at 8 PM the day before surgery and stop drinking at midnight. Other than that my surgeon didn't require anything special. I have no zen so nothing required on my own part there. I did take the day off work to make sure my bag was packed, the kitty litter was changed, took the dog to the boarding place, all that kind of stuff.

Things like bananas, strawberries, and milk are going to add a ton of calories and carbs to your shakes. I make my own -- to me all the ready made ones tasted like industrial sludge or ag runoff -- but use things like flavored sweet drops or SF torani syrups for flavor and mix with unsweetened almond or cashew milk instead of dairy milk. If you really must use dairy milk, maybe look at the special low carb/high protein milks like Carb Master (at Kroger stores) or Fair Life.

Unless you subtract out equivalent calories to make up for the alcohol, yes, of course it will. Extra calories = slower weight loss. You could always choose to do something like skip breakfast and lunch to make up for drinking alcohol -- how much food you need to cut out of your diet depends on what kind of drinks you are having and what "a few" drinks means to you. Not saying I think it's a healthy choice (AT ALL) but it's your body, your decision. I am sorry about your wife's leaving. I can't imagine how hard that must be.

Biotin doesn't work to stop hair loss (neither does protein btw). It might help hair grow back thicker and faster, though I don't think there's any peer-reviewed, published scientific evidence to back that up. I think most people who want to believe in biotin take 5000 mcg a day. If it really did work, then no one who is post-op would suffer from hair loss, as everyone would be taking it and successfully keeping all their hair. My surgeon told me not to throw away my money on it -- I wish I had listened, but I took megadoses of biotin, got 75+ grams of protein daily starting within 24 hours of surgery (and for weeks before surgery) and still lost massive amounts of hair. There are ways you can disguise hair loss, with products like Toppik or Nanogen, or a new hair cut (side part, short, layered). But it either is or isn't going to happen and no potion or pill will stop it. Best wishes to you that it doesn't happen!

30 grams of chopped chicken breast, small apple, 200 grams chopped grilled asparagus, small hard boiled egg, cheese string.

It sounds like possibly your legs were strapped down overly-tight in the operating room, and your nerves are irritated. But I would definitely check in with your bariatric practice and describe your symptoms. It sounds like the kind of thing you should get a real medical opinion on, not speculation from some weirdo (me) on the internet. Good luck!

walk (as others have said above) if you can't be walking, sit up, don't lie down unless you need to in order to sleep -- but you may find it more comfortable to sleep sitting up anyway, don't assume you need to lie down to sleep. when sitting up, if you can, be in a rocker or glider. Rock/glide and with the forward motion, cross your arms over your abdomen & chest & gently press towards your back use a heating pad on your shoulder or wherever else you feel the gas pains good luck!

Last month I went in for my every-third-year mammogram. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from the Breast Center telling me there were "technical problems" with my mammogram and I needed to get it re-done. So, back I went this afternoon, and learned that: 1) I had told them last month that I hadn't had any significant weight loss . . . I guess I was just thinking 'recently, no' rather than comparing myself to three years ago. And actually I have lost about 160 lbs since August 2013, I just don't really think about things that way anymore. So they were not convinced, comparing the two mammograms, that the same person had showed up in August 2016 to get her breasts smashed in the giant waffle iron as had been there in August 2013. 2) The August 2016 mammograms were also basically useless because I had so much loose skin on my breasts and upper torso folded and mashed up that they couldn't see a lot of what they needed to see. So the mammogram tech lady had to spend a lot of time this afternoon pulling and smoothing my skin to make sure they could see properly in the images. Something you may need to warn your future mammogram techs about!

You are not crazy to think it is possible. You have to be willing to commit to really hard work though. I lost over 200 lbs and got to a normal BMI but I fought the last 20 lbs in hand to hand combat for each pound lost. I will say that I think it is a mistake for many people to set intermediate goals, such as losing 30 lbs by x date. It's like the weight loss gods hear your post and will laugh in your face and make you hit stalls and pauses at just the wrong time in order to frustrate you. Plus I have seen people set these kind of goals, not hit them, and then go completely off the rails with their eating because they are so stressed out and frustrated by not meeting these self-imposed goals. My advice -- set the ultimate goal you really *want.* Be willing to maintain extreme discipline in order to get there. Forget about intermediate goals, but celebrate the milestones along the way. Good luck!

I'm 3 years post op. I choose not to eat bread made with yeast or drink anything carbonated because they make me uncomfortable. They don't make my physically ill (nausea, vomiting, sliming, etc.), just uncomfortable. I don't have any other issues with food. Before my operation I occasionally had mild reflux, due to a hiatal hernia which was fixed with my sleeve surgery. No more GERD post op. I haven't thrown up once post op. I was never nauseated. I don't have any problems with gas or indigestion or anything like that. One of my brothers-in-law says that people in my family all have the stomachs of goats and the constitutions of cockroaches, and I think he's right. None of us ever get any kind of sickness from food, none of us ever throws up, none of us ever has any kind of digestive or elimination problems, and we rarely get any kind of disease at all. Other than the bread and carbonation issues, I've got the same set of non-problems post-op that I had pre-op

Talk to your dietitian (and potentially your nephrologist if you have one) about a possible modification to your post-op diet plan. A high protein diet is good post-op for rapid healing but it isn't *necessary.*

It's true that you might regain some of the weight you lose. What's also true is that statistically, your odds of maintaining a significant weight loss without surgery are somewhere between zero and five percent. Your odds of doing that with surgery are more like 70-90 percent, depending on how you define significant weight loss. Why wouldn't you want to give yourself the best odds? The fact that you are aware that you need to make lifelong changes and that they may be tedious shows me that you have a better starting point than a lot of people. All of us were where you are now at one point -- struggling with a long term or lifelong disease of obesity, and wondering if we had not been successful in putting it into remission before, how could surgery possibly fix what we saw as our major problem: willpower, grit, determination? But obesity is a medical problem, not a failure of willpower. Medical solutions work best for most medical problems. I had been morbidly obese for pretty much my entire life, I won the prize for "biggest tummy" at a toddler fair when I was 2! I had lost significant amounts of weight at certain times in my life (never got close to a normal BMI though) but always regained and then some. I started out with a BMI well above yours. I've lost 200+ lbs, hit my goal weight, and maintained successfully for over a year. There is absolutely no way I could have done this without surgery. It has not been easy. It will not be easy going forward. In fact, at times it is tedious and frustrating. But above all it is possible now and it wasn't before. Good luck to you!

@@ShelterDog64 I've got absolutely nothing against people using Genepro when it works for them. To be honest, I think that many people tend to over-consume protein post-op, so if Genepro is less protein than it says it is, maybe that is a good thing! Even if it was tested and turned out to be like those herbal supplements that claimed to be ginseng and were actually just ground up houseplants, if people are using it, they are losing weight, and their bloodwork is good, I see no harm in it at all.

@@summerset there is a fair amount of controversy about whether Genepro can back up their claims. For example, they claim to get 30 grams of protein out of a tablespoon of powder -- but a tablespoon of powder weighs about 15 grams. A gram is a unit of weight. In this universe, with our laws of physics, it isn't possible to get 30 grams of protein from 15 grams of anything,

@@shedo82773 according to this article, which appears to be from a reputable source, 30 grams may be the max your body can absorb for the purpose of building up muscles. But your body uses protein for all sorts of essential processes, including burning it for energy or storing it as fat if needed, and for those purposes the body retains and uses all the protein you put in, above and beyond 30 grams at one time. It's just that it won't use the surplus to build up big beefy rippling muscles. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/health-fitness/healthy-eating/know-your-nutrients/how-much-protein-can-the-body-absorb

I was on soft foods until 6 months post-op, then transitioned to a "regular" weight loss mode that still severely restricted the type of food I could eat (no grains, no starchy veggies, no tropical fruit, etc.). As you can see from the responses here, programs vary a lot. You'll definitely want to check in with your own team to get clarification from them as to what your program calls for. Good luck!

Watch out for specialized bariatric vitamins and calcium. You can tell they are trying to appeal to the fat brain in all of us "lemon delight" or "creamy caramel" or "chocolate fudge truffle" vitamins and supplements packed with calories and carbs. And then you read people here saying things like, I just love my chocolate fudge truffle iron chews, they are just like a candy bar! My daily treat! No one needs candy masquerading as vitamins and minerals. Go take a Feosol tablet, a generic chewable multi-vitamin, and save the calories, carbs, and money you would otherwise be throwing away on the fake candy vitamins. /rant mode

I stayed two nights -- standard for my surgeon -- but if I could have gone home same day I would have. I barely got any sleep what with all the people hassling me for blood samples and checking my incisions and making sure my compression booties were on, the cold hospital, unfamiliar bed, noisy surroundings . . . if I could have gone home and crawled into my own bed I would have been delighted to do it.

I like this article -- it seems reasonable, striking a balance between the "you need 100 grams of protein a day or you will wither and die" school and the "everyone eats too much protein, eat under 50 grams daily or your kidneys will fall out of your body" group. People recovering from weight loss surgery -- or just about any surgery -- do benefit from lots of extra protein to speed healing. And I've certainly found that sticking to a high protein diet with adequate fat and fiber helps me maintain my weight, and to lose I just need to dial down the calories from that general plan. But to me high protein isn't insanely high, and I've never bought into the mindset that protein powder is like a magic pixie dust and the more of it you sprinkle all over everything, the faster you lose weight. The truth is that protein powder has calories and as long as you are getting adequate nutrition, just adding more and more and more protein powder will simply slow your weight loss down because you are adding more and more and more calories.

Unjury chicken soup protein powder, Celebrate tomato soup protein powder, high protein soups sold at Nashua Nutrition. Just because lots of other people eat fake sweet stuff doesn't mean you have to -- go savory!

Look at it this way: Say you knew someone who had severe financial problems, ended up getting evicted from their apartment, their car repossessed, bouncing checks all over the place, overspending on credit limits, and eventually filing bankruptcy. They couldn't afford to support their pets so gave them away to the county shelter. You get the idea -- bad situation, severe financial distress. They work extremely hard after their bankruptcy. They get a new job. They are diligent about making sure they have enough money in their bank account, they decline to spend on credit cards, they check their credit score regularly. What would you tell them: (1) Wow, you are too obsessed with money. You should have a more normal relationship with money. Stop looking at your bank account balance and just go with your natural instincts! Spend what you want and stop being so negative about money. or (2) Good job keeping on top of your financial situation, I know it's caused you problems in the past. If you keep up with these great habits, you'll never file bankruptcy or get evicted again. Sometimes when things give us problems in life, we have to commit to doing hardcore, serious work to fix those problems. Don't let anyone tell you that the work you do to fix a problem means that you are "obsessive" or engaging in "negative behavior." Don't even let your (fat) brain that wants you to stay fat try to tell you that. Good luck! PS: I am calling it your fat brain not because I am picking on you or trying to be insulting. I think we all -- primarily ME -- have a lizard brain that instinctively wants us to stay fat or to gain weight if we aren't fat anymore. My fat brain tells me things like "this one piece of cake won't hurt anything" and "you deserve Starbucks after a long week at work." I notice other people on here with fat brains telling them things like "you need to eat more calories in order to lose weight" or "ice cream has lots of protein" or "I can't eat that much mashed potato anyway, I should eat as much as I want on the puree phase." All of us have fat brains that try to trick us and lie to us.

What does your bariatric team say? My surgeon and dietitian would have both horsewhipped me if I attempted sausage and eggs at 8 days out, and probably tried to retract my surgery, but unless we had the same surgeon, my instructions are irrelevant to you. So what are your instructions?

No, but I was under strict orders from my surgeon to contact the office if I developed a fever 100 or over.