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This is a great idea. My surgeon repairs hernias in about 90 percent of his patients who receive VSG, because they are so common in people with obesity.

I'm so sorry about your family's challenges and about this frustration. Your body sounds very metabolically efficient like mine is. So many people say that increasing calories works for them, and I have tried it, but my body rebels with immediate and sustained weight gain if I go over 800 calories or so. I am hypothyroid, but I think it's also bc of years of very low calorie diets and also just how my body is made (my mom says if there were a famine, we would be stepping over the dead bodies). Your weight loss does give me hope. It sounds like you have done very well, though I know it must be incredibly frustrating to be in the home stretch and to be having so many issues with slow loss and easy regain. I am 12 weeks out and have lost about 50 pounds--30 lbs since surgery and about 20 lbs during a 6-month pre-op diet. Have a long way to go so it's helpful to see what others who are farther out are doing. I'm sorry that there don't seem to be any easy answers. Wishing you the best.

Thanks for sharing! I wonder how it would be with soy milk instead of cream and maybe ricotta cheese instead of cottage cheese....

Isopure is at Vitamin Shoppe or GNC--I would buy a couple of individual bottles first to see if you like it. You could also have Crystal Lite with unflavored protein powder instead of the Isopure--cheaper, and in my opinion more palatable. Good luck!

From what I have read here, that is about average. You probably gained fluid in the hospital and your body had to lose that to get to an equilibrium before losing "real" weight. Many people hit a stall by the 2nd or 3rd week while the body balances out, too. I lost around 10 lbs within 3 weeks. Also gained 14 lbs of fluid (I think--it might have been even more) in the hospital.

I would get your Vit D and B12 levels tested to see if you are deficient. Also, could you be dehydrated?

are you taking B12 and vit D also?

Didn't all of the modeling you did today burn up some calories, too?

Give it some time. I felt pretty awful until about 6 weeks, and not really normal until 8 weeks. Now I feel amazing! (I am about 12 weeks post-op.)

I would measure out the amount and eat no more. At first your nerve endings may not be fully healed and you may not get a signal that you are full when you really are. Your stomach is really swollen right now, so that limits your early capacity.

Great job for passing up a nutritionally low value food! Were you going to eat it but decided not to, or did you make it with the intention of eating a bite and spitting it out?

Yoda would say, "Do or do not. There is no try." <showing my geekiness>

Wow, truly inspirational! Congratulations, and keep up the great work!!!

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--basically Healthcare Reform. Does your insurance have a blanket exclusion for all WLS?

Hathery, you should show your husband ShrinkingMom's post. Maybe your husband would go to an intro seminar with you.

I think that's just human nature in this Google world we live in. But you will probably feel better if you don't read about worst-case scenarios. Hope you get in with the cardiologist soon...sending you good thoughts! Please post an update when you know more. Chin up!

Newsweek also does that with U.S. doctors and a lot of them say they were "in Newsweek." They just don't mention that it was in an advertising supplement. I think you do have to meet certain minimum standards for them to include you.

Have you thought of private paying for health insurance that covers VSG before you actually get it? Paying the monthly premiums for a while might be less expensive than paying the whole thing out of pocket? Don't want to be too nosy--not sure if you don't have health insurance or if you have it and VSG is excluded--but there may be some creative solutions. PPACA could end up helping too, especially with health insurance exchanges allowing more employee choice in choosing a health plan.

Almond milk is great bang for the buck calorie wise, but it doesn't have a lot of nutritional value. I didn't really think about this until meeting with my RD pre-op. So she encourages soy milk rather than almond milk (I drink lite soy milk). It has more calories, but a LOT more protein than almond milk. When I was immediately post-op and the pre-made protein shakes were too thick/sweet for me, I thinned them out with almond milk, and it worked great. Just the right viscosity. No problems keeping it down, but I haven't had much of a problem with nausea or vomiting, thank goodness (I'm almost 3 months post op).

You still need to get protein in if you are vegan, though--that is the biggest challenge, especially from the standpoint of the volume we can eat with the sleeve, and another layer of complexity if you want to try to stay low carb. That is the only reason I haven't made the move from vegetarian to vegan yet. I am wondering if I will try it sooner rather than later or wait until I am on maintenance. I've been a vegetarian for most of my adult life (20+ years) and have never had any issues with B12 deficiency, iron deficiency, etc. I have taken a sublingual B12 most of that time, which seems to help, and I get most of my vitamins (like iron) from veggies such as dark leafy greens. On VSG, the green smoothies are probably more realistic than eating the large volume of salads, etc.

I definitely think that VSG would be a great tool for you. Maybe if your husband watched some of the YouTube videos, it would help him understand it more? Could you practice eating slowly now? Don't wait until you are ravenous--that will help.

Sorry, I know it must be stressful to get unexpected news. Try not to overthink it and see what the cardiologist says (I know it's difficult). If it's a general cardiologist, he/she may want to refer you to an electrocardiophysiologist (specialist who handles disruptions in the heart's electrical activity).Here is some general information, but really it's best just to wait to see what the specialist/s say, because you really don't know what parts of the info might or might not apply to you. Sometimes medical findings can be super serious and sometimes they end up being a variation of normal. http://my.clevelandclinic.org/heart/disorders/electric/longqtsyndrome.aspx

PS--maybe you could do this in phases, and go vegetarian first (eliminate all meat products but keep eggs and dairy), then eliminate eggs, and then dairy--and see how you do. I meant to mention that I think it's very important to have a registered dietitian knowledgeable about plant-based diets guiding you on this journey. My RD is a vegetarian herself and she is truly amazing. Emails me recipes all of the time, etc. She has one other patient who is a vegetarian and she said that we are both always asking how the other one is doing!

I am a vegetarian (most of my adult life) who generally doesn't eat eggs. I eat Greek yogurt and vegetarian cheese (cheese that isn't made with animal rennet--but it of course is not vegan, because it's made with dairy). I also no longer buy leather and try to live as compassionately as possible in all parts of my life. I have been getting my Protein from soy products, whey and soy Protein powder, Beans (kind of high in carbs for the amount of protein you get), cheese, and Greek yogurt. I have very seriously been considering going vegan. However, if I want to keep my protein up and carbs down, I really think that I will need to drink my protein (plant forms) and then eat veggies as my meals. My surgeon wants his patients off of Protein shakes once we move to solid foods, but I don't think that is realistic for a vegetarian, and especially not for a vegan. There are very few natural vegan food sources of protein that don't also require that you consume some carbs--and in general, many aren't super-high in protein, and we can't eat the volume needed to get vegan protein from food alone. One example is soy yogurt--it is much lower in protein and higher in carbs than Greek yogurt. I also don't want to overdo it on soy, because female reproductive cancer runs in my family and I am also hypothyroid. I will be interested to hear what you end up doing and how it works for you. It's good to know someone else is considering a vegan way of eating.

I've had kidney stones since surgery also (mine broke up on their own without needing surgical intervention, thankfully). My RD and PA told me the most important things were to stay very, very well hydrated--so that we output at least 64 oz of urine a day, which means you need to drink a lot more than that--and to follow a low oxalate diet. Protein itself generally is not the issue.