Fluffnomore

I'd say (off the top of my head) that I was a comfortable 16 from about 190-210. Tighter at the 210 point, for sure, but I could still squeeze into the jeans. I went down to 14 around 190, and can still wear that (at 177) though they are loose in dress clothes. I have a number of items that fit well in 12s now. My observation is that denim is a full size lower. So, my 12s in denim are quite loose, and I can wear 10s. I expect that when I drop below 170 I will go down another size. My observation is that in the 200s I was at the 16W size pretty frequently, 185 and up to about 205 I was roughly in a 14W, 16…and now that I'm in the 100s it's roughly 10-15 pounds per size. Clear as mud, right? LOL

Jumping in about the GERD. I have (had?) it and take Dexilant. My doctor originally wanted to do a lap band because of that diagnosis. I countered with RnY, but he felt I was too low weight to justify that. I went home and did my research and requested the sleeve. He agreed, cheerfully, in the end. I really do think it depends on the surgeon. My personal feeling was that the documented issues with the band were of a higher percentage than with GERD and the sleeve. I have also had the personal experience of having my GERD symptoms clear up significantly with weight loss. (I experienced a large weight loss 5 years before my sleeve surgery with an acute and chronic gallbladder flare.) I know that a revision to RnY is still an option if I should have trouble, but so far so good, and I am still taking my GERD meds. The next step will be to try to take them down gradually with the goal of going off them, when I am comfortable doing that. Probably in the next 5-10 pounds.

We've got enough else going on after surgery, that I wouldn't take anything non-approved or non-proven. And I'm fairly certain that the fat-burners you see on commercials are questionable at best.

I'm going to echo what Lipstick Lady said. I had a picture perfect recovery and I really believe the reason for that is that I started doing CrossFit about 3.5 months before the surgery. As a result, I had some muscle tone and abdominal strength and a nice goal to work toward once I was out of surgery (getting back into it.) CrossFit is not for everyone…but walking or swimming might be. I also completely approve of the knitting. It's much harder to eat or drink when you have two knitting needles in your hands and yarn you don't want to mess up. With cheeto dust, or whatever. LOL.

I considered it and then made a conscious choice not to think about it anymore. After all, there are a hundred ways to die, including continuing down the obesity path. But there seemed to be fewer options for turning my life and health around.

My advice would be to try to make it second nature to drink a lot of Water or crystal light (whatever you think you might tolerate best) as a first step, cutting out the diet soda or soda and replacing it. The other things were really hard to incorporate ahead of time for me; then again I only had about a week between approval and the surgery, so I didn't have a lot of time to change things up. The drinking and eating thing won't come into play as earlier as the others. Of all of the habits, it is still the one that has repercussions for me when I don't follow it. Actually, the good news is that many of the things that you think you won't be able to follow seem like second nature. I was shocked the first time I went to a restaurant and didn't down multiple drinks of unsweetened iced tea. I was the one who always could finish 3 or 4 20-30 ounce drinks at a meal. Now I drink about a quarter to half while waiting for the meal and that's it. Good luck!

Don't know. I'm as big of a Yankee as they come.

In my friend's case it was when, 6-8 weeks after surgery, after a particularly gnarly family party she found herself scarfing down an entire piece of cake and being resentful that she could no longer eat her feelings. Or that she could, I guess, but that it hurt like hell physically and it was what got her there in the first place. She called to talk to me about it and said, "You will not understand, until you go through it, how hard it can be to FEEL your feelings." To not leave the room after arguing with your spouse and pour a glass of wine. To not aimlessly eat late at night to make yourself feel less lonely or sad. I was a wine girl. My husband is a night eater/binge-er, as was my friend. That takes a lot of de-conditioning. I still drink wine--not a lot anymore--and the funny thing is that I still have to think about it when I'm ready to order or pour another round. Along the lines of "Why? Do I really want this? What is happening?" I am far from perfect, believe you me. But I work hard not to ever kid myself about what I am doing. Last summer I was probably able to drink 7 bottles of wine per WEEK. This summer, that seems crazy to me…like it was a different person. And honestly, it was, in a lot of ways. So that's my thing. For my husband, it's getting control of roaming the house and eating whatever is not nailed down. For my buddy, it was realizing that she could fix only one thing with the surgery, and the rest, not so much.

Consider too that if you are consistently eating only 800 calories and exercising that much, your body may be holding on to extra weight for dear life. I eat between 1000-1200 calories per day and work out pretty hard about 3 x per week. On those days I try to make sure my net is around 1000 calories (I eat up to the amount I've burned, if I can.) I still lose. Slowly…sometimes it feels like a snail's pace, but I lose.

Yes! This is so true, and some days so hard to understand. I have somewhere between 15-20 pounds to go and I have committed myself to slow and steady. I was just not prepared for how SLOW that would feel. I know that the weight loss happens differently for everyone, and some people seem to reach their goals in a heartbeat. But I have to give myself a pep talk almost daily about how different my life is from last summer…especially when I can't see the difference myself.

I do not. But then again, I don't really drink to get drunk, either, so I don't know for sure. What I do know is that a glass of wine does NOT make me tipsy, and I know that is a common occurrence for some after the sleeve.

Every day, in the morning. The fluctuations don't bother me.

My doctor didn't have this rule, but I didn't want the caffeine or coffee for a couple of weeks anyway. I'm back to 1-2 cups of regular per day. Some people say it is an appetite stimulant. I've never reacted to it that way, or at least if I have it's because it's first thing in the morning and I'm ready for breakfast anyway. I don't often drink it other than first thing in the morning anyway.

I've often observed (as have many others) that being overweight is one of the few things that people really feel free to call you on in public. My husband, who has not had the surgery and is obese, was just told this week by someone he hasn't seen in a year "You look like a beach ball" and "You look like Fred Flintstone." He further reports that his eating habits, which are pretty good in public, have been also called out, "You sure don't LOOK like you eat salad all the time," etc. I don't know for sure, but I imagine that really skinny people also have issues with this. I spent the weekend with friends and I noticed also that in general, people's eating habits were dissected. From the 14 year old teenage incredibly skinny runner who heard at every meal and a lot of times in between "Oh, don't put that platter by Dan! He'll eat all the food on it and the platter besides" to my overweight son who had food pushed on him at every opportunity "What do you mean, no candy at the movie theatre? Live a little, Mom." (We had just eaten dinner and dessert 20 minutes before.) This can be a real problem. The surgery and the results from it have made us hyper focused on this for sure, but I know that I am now very careful about commenting about any plate other than my own. Wish others would be, too.

My observation is that there are a couple of different approaches. There are those who have to cut everything cold turkey so that they won't be on a slippery slope back to where they were, and there are those who need to feel like they have wiggle room. I think this is a personality issue rather than a success issue, too. I don't do well with mega-restrictions. I personally don't feel that there is anything that is off limits, but there are plenty of things that are poor choices. So I have a commitment to tracking everything and making good choices 90% of the time. We have "nicer" fast food places that have a lot of choices here, like Patio and Portillos, and if we do fast food, that's where we tend to go. It's really rare that I will order a burger these days but if I do I like to order a better one than a McD's and eat half of it or less.

I have one obese kid and one slightly overweight one. Part of it is family conditioning: my husband is a big believer in rewarding with food. And I think the younger one lost the genetic lottery too. It's always been easy for him to put on weight. He is currently working with a counselor on his choices. At 11, it is almost impossible for me to monitor every bite he puts in his mouth and it would probably backfire anyway. He's doing a food diary and trying to make better choices while also trying to do something fun for a physical activity every day. It's a huge question mark to me.

I've lost some perspective on all of this lately. I'm 8 months out and weigh about what I did when I felt I was "normal" about 20 years ago. Maybe 5 pounds more? It's hard to know. I'm in a size that I'm comfortable with (like some of you though, the 10-12 I remember is probably a 6-8 now, so being in a 12 now is probably more like a 16 then.) I feel pretty good. I'm getting stronger, not where I want to be at the gym yet, but overall so much better. My surgeon's office says I can consider myself a success now. And I think, objectively that is probably true. I'm past the average amount of weight lost. My arbitrary goal here is a 149, because that puts me in the "normal" BMI range. My surgeon's goal is anywhere from 160-165. I never thought I would get to this weight and feel like I had SO far to go, though. That is what is strange. And I do feel that way from both a fitness standpoint and a numbers standpoint. I think (I hope) the numbers are less important though.

I'm an idiot, but I was approving copy in the hospital room the day of surgery! (Fortunately, it was fine.) I work from home, so I started answering emails and stuff right away. My surgery was on a Thursday, and by Monday I was more or less back in the routine. I had an event two weeks after the surgery. That was a bit tough…almost 6 hours of a silent auction and dinner, but it was fine. (The catering company heated my Soup. No big deal.) I also had to go down to someone's office for a two hour meeting about a week post-op. I was tired by the end of the meeting, but it was okay.

That's just the thing, it's not slow at all. :-) We just THINK it is. I have no idea if our stats are similar, but at about a month I was somewhere right around where you are. The weight loss has slowed down now, at 8 months, to a trickle, but it is still going down. At 177 I wear about a 12 and look and feel 100% better. My goal weight is basically a moving target at this point (it is arbitrarily set at just below a 25 BMI) but my surgeon tells me that I can consider myself a success NOW. Just struggle to keep perspective. There are lots of days it will elude you!

I think your starting weight was too low to drop 50-60 pounds. You are right on track. 23 pounds in less than a month. Think about that. It's amazing.

Skywalker, one other point. My husband has a well-documented diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He, also, hates having it "out there" and although he knows he has to mention it in these situations it makes him uncomfortable. But it does influence everything that happens medically: he is on certain medications that shouldn't be used with others; when he is in the middle of a swing his mindset and control are compromised; and people with bipolar have a tendency to go off their meds when they are either feeling too good or too bad. Again, it's not a reason for someone NOT to get the surgery, and in the end he wasn't approved for other reasons. But I had my worries throughout his approval process as well that he might not be as well-prepared for surgery because he had some magical thinking around what it would or wouldn't do. My point is, any disorder, whether it is depressive or metabolic, needs to be thought about. In the end, my feelings about whether he was or wasn't ready for surgery were moot. If he had gotten the surgery, he would have had to figure out how to handle himself. Our friend, who didn't reveal the extent of her eating behaviors, had some very serious "come to Jesus" moments afterwards. She is doing okay, but it's going very slowly for her. Again, I'm not making any judgment calls on whether YOU are ready or not. I'm trying to shed light on the other side of it.

I can only tell you my experience, and my husband's with our psych/readiness evals. I was approved initially; he was not. I believe that he went in with the attitude that he just needs a smaller stomach and the rest will fall into place. In addition, he was very honest and up-front about some of his less helpful behaviors (night eating, etc.) and it was a red flag to them. I was able to go in and say honestly that I was exercising and that I had a strong grasp of what the post-op eating requirements were. That I saw it as a tool but not the answer. I was approved immediately. I have another friend who has similar issues to my husband's but didn't tell them everything. She was approved. I can see that walking in with a mocha (light cream or not) would probably be like waving a red flag, because of the sugar content. I get that this might not be an every day thing for you, but if the main point of the appointment was to get you approved, then this is on par with walking in and eating an ice cream. Not fair, but it is about 30 grams of sugar in one drink. There's actually only about half that amount of sugar in a serving of vanilla ice cream. Would you know this? No, of course not. But if you look at it through that lens, then you've inadvertently allowed him to form an impression of your readiness. We're NOT all ready for the surgery when the surgery hits, else we wouldn't have any posts about how hard the pre- and post-op diets are. And I am certainly not saying that you can't or won't be successful. But I do think that if you can pull in someone else to write this evaluation and do your homework ahead of time, you won't have as much to worry about. The good news is that I doubt anyone will submit your chart to insurance with that letter included. So there's that.

I am so sorry for your loss. My deepest condolences to you.

Yikes. I really feel like unless you are a doctor or somehow being asked, you should not insert yourself. We get excited about the weight loss and some of us have a need or desire to evangelize about it, but we have to get here on our own steam. I have two examples of help that worked with me. A friend approached me last year with a Nike Fuel band last year before I even considered surgery. She was changing to a Jawbone, and offered me the band, talking about how much fun and addictive it was to her to watch her steps every day. Then, I also have a friend who was sleeved in June of last year, who started talking to me about her plans in August of 2012 and suggested that I look into it too. I was even a little offended with her; surely I wasn't as bad off as she was, right? But I was, and she knew it. Amazing now that I sometimes thought my weight gain was invisible to others. These are two very close friends and the subject was approached very carefully. On one hand, people say rude stuff all the time to overweight and obese people; I'm sure each of us has a list in our heads of the things that have been said to us over the years. But unless you would be in the right position to stage an intervention for drugs or alcohol, another person's weight is not something I'd comment on.

I've never vomited in the 7 months since my surgery. I tend to have that reaction to anesthesia, so I made sure to request anti-nausea meds as a matter of course. Of course, because I just typed that I'm due for a little barf-o-rama here now.