TheCurvyJones

FACE! I was 273 pre-op. Now 143. 130lbs down. I will be 4 years out Dec 21.

You can try the Protein powder w. Water. Maybe as a last resort. I find that kind of gross but it might tide you over. If you have a backpack or fanny pack I would plan to bring some foods with you. Pack and plan to be away all day and take in what you can. They can question you if you want but you have a medical reason to bring in your own food. Keep your eye out for soft stuff you can eat-- Soups, etc but you'll have to basically depend on your food stores. Take a cold pack to keep your cheese, etc cold at the bottom of the bag. At least you'll have something to snack on until you're off of the grounds and back at your car where you have food you can eat. Make some egg salad or tuna salad and stick it in a ziplock and keep it cool with an icepak or in a cooler in the car. Also see if you'd be able to leave and come back. You could go to your car and have something to eat and go back. At 2 weeks out though I don't think you'll be all that hungry, but I know very little about the duodenal switch only that the sleeve is part 1 of it and based on how I felt at 2 weeks out, some Snacks should be okay. I LIVED on pintos and cheese from taco bell during the fist few weeks. Even now I will go through there for some Beans and cheese.

It is not easy. Takes a lot of dedication and you might want to throw things the first couple of days. GEts easier the longer you're on it. Might be easier to say that you need X amount of cals per day so you know how many shakes/ cups of Soup etc you can drink. I was honestly so tired of food that I started my pre op diet a few days early. It was a great relief to not have to be concerned with what I was eating every day.

Carbonation does not stretch the sleeve. It's something docs tell their patients to get them to not drink carbonated beverages like soda but mostly beer. By the time carbonation hits the stomach it is mostly flat. You'd have to stick a nozzle down your throat and pipe carbonation straight into your stomach in order to stretch it with carbonation.

The sleeve CAN stretch. My surgeon has done re-sleeves on patients whose stomachs have stretched. However it takes a concerted, long running effort. You have to really try really hard-- as in consistently abuse your sleeve-- in order for this to happen. What likely has happened is that the part of the stomach that is removed that produces Ghrelin-- not enough of it was removed so your hunger signals have come back. This is something you will want to have checked just to make sure. Don't guess. If you feel like you can eat a ton without feeling any restriction (and by that I mean dense Protein, not slider foods. Can you eat an 8oz yogurt or drink a 12 oz Protein shake with no problem? Can you pack in an entire piece of fish, eat a whole burger patty? Then your sleeve may have stretched) What a lot of people think is "I can eat a whole bag of doritos now, so my stomach is stretched!" Nope. Doritos turn to mush once you chew them up. Slides right out of your stomach, doesn't provide you with any satiety or sustenance and in a short amount of time you're foraging for food again. Secondly, excess acid production feels a lot like hunger. It's not always that burning feeling. Not to pander or placate but make sure it is not excess acid, either. If you're not on a PPI or have stopped taking it, get back on it. Lastly, nothing can help you but getting back on track. Kick it back to basics- protein, produce, lots of Water, move your tush. Give yourself some time to get your act together. You should see those lbs slowly start to come off. Regain is a natural part of the weight loss journey. DOn't let yourself feel down or depressed about it. Get mad and get that weight back off. You'll feel better once you're working at a new goal.

Also have them check your hemoglobin. I am severely anemic and these are things I experience when my Iron is really low.

My sleeve is like,"Im only gonna warn you once and then it's on., b*tch" And then when I am heaving over the toilet, I can just hear her saying, "I told you. Didn't I tell you? Don't try me." Lesson learned, right? Don't try your sleeve... it's the new boss!

This is what I love about the sleeve. The ability to lose and KEEP LOSING past all those points I had aimed for before but was never able to achieve on my own. Congrats I am sure it will feel fantastic! Make sure you celebrate your milestone-- do something nice for you!

Just hang in there! It's really really hard to do screw this up, especially so early out. A couple of things to remember: 1. None of us loses weight every single week during the weight loss phase. You'll have some weeks where you remain steady. 2. During this time pay CLOSE attention to your inch loss. Try on something you used to not be able to wear... I bet you can, or I bet you're closer than you used to be. Because we don't lose inches and scale weight at the same time, your body has it's own system. Drop a lot lbs... then your inches catch up... then drop some lbs... then inches catch up. I used to make a game of it. I'd go buy something I knew I could not squeeze my butt into and every Friday, try that thing on until it fit. And when it did, do that again. It made Fridays fun. 3. Get used to these pauses. I call them a pause cause that's all it is. At 6 weeks out you're nowhere near a plateau. Just keep following the rules, stay hydrated and Protein focused. And make sure you're pooping! The scale will move again very soon!

I had surgery on Friday morning. Saturday I was off of pain IV, walking around, in general feeling good. ON Sunday I flew home (i had my surgery in Mexico). On Monday I woke up, went to the grocery store, picked up my parents as they had come into town to visit. We hung out all day, I showed them around town. Around 8:00 I was DONE. I was starting to feel sore, so I took a pain pill and went to bed. But during the day I felt good, I had no complications and moved around very well. I was hopping up and down stairs it used to take me at least a minute to gear myself to climb.

Yes!!!

I took regular old pills. They're small enough to swallow. You should be able to take them whole. Your doc just doesn't want them to get stuck but unless it's a GIANT pill that isn't going to happen.

At 90 days out it should not hurt to eat. What does your surgeon say?

Possibly ate too much. It's hard to decipher. Could also be gas. Hope it goes away soon!!`

Welcome to the Loser's Bench!

In answer to your question, I don't feel strongly about it one way or the other. I don't hate attention but I don't crave it either.

There was a point where the attention was different... but the romantic interest just didn't come to fruition for me. I am treated differently than I was when I was fat. I was invisible when I was fat, then more visible the smaller I got. But once you hit a certain size you look "normal" and you kind of blend in again. I only really get attention from people who knew me when I was heavy.

I don't know how to do it on the app. I can never get the app to work for me. On the computer, click on the little wheel next to your username at the top of the page and click on settings. When your settings are open you'll see Settings Gallery Surgery Information... Surgery information is where you put your stats. Height weight, all that stuff.

Also I will add that people romanticize not being able to eat much and tend to freak out when they can eat more than 4 bites of something. You're still eating MUCH LESS than you were before surgery and as long as you are a) not packing it in or grazing/eating when you really don't need to be and b)still losing on the amount you're eating, stay the course. If you're tracking how much you eat and the calories you consume, you'll probably find that you're in a normal range. The Sleeve is designed to cause the body to need nutritional input every 2-4 hours. That varies depending on your body makeup and your metabolism but just because you're not existing on 300 cals a day doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.

I take peri colace. it is a stool softener with a stimulant. But make sure you're getting in plenty of Water and Fiber.

Every word of this. I will be 4 years out in December and I will tell you that these habits will come in HANDY when you're at goal and trying to maintain. How you lose it is how you will keep it off. Very soon the division of labor between you and the sleeve will change. It will be less of the sleeve doing the work and mostly you and you won't continue to lose at the clip you've been losing while not eating on plan.

HW- Highest Weight or the heaviest you can recall SW- typically this is day of surgery weight since a lot of us have to do a liquid diet so we're smaller than our heaviest weight GW- Goal Weight CW- Current Weight

It took me a few weeks to get back to feeling myself. Just take it easy, take a break if you need to, have a seat and rest. Your body is the boss, give it what it is asking for. When I hit a wall, I HIT A WALL. For the first 8 weeks or so I was DONE by around 8:00 and I slept like i'd done manual labor all day. Losing weight rapidly is hard work.

Those feelings are normal and they come and go for me. Some days I really could not give a crap if I eat or not. Some days I'm mad that I can't eat all of what's sitting in front of me. Our tool helps us with portion control but the mental... there's no tool for that. Just have to find a way to move past that feeling because it is very fleeting and temporary. Most of the time I'm not even thinking about food and have to remind myeslf to eat.

Definite change in tastes. My toothpaste doesn't taste any different, but I don't like anything 'sweet'. Paste, no gel. And I have to brush bent over the sink because if I even swallow a drop of toothpaste my sleeve revolts. Retching for a good minute or so. I bought some honey roasted peanuts the other day and was mad because they taste funny. Everything is too sweet or too salty or just tastes weird. chocolate tastes like chalk to me, except during PMS, when it is delicious. How weird.