JamieLogical

So glad to hear you are getting what you need from this community. It was invaluable to me through my journey as well.

I feel that way if what I am eating has a lot of carbs/sugar. And I get that tired feeling if I eat too much now.

Why are you afraid of it? I have to be on omeprazole daily now, post-op, but it's no big deal. I just take it along with all of my vitamins.

I am pretty sure no doctor in the US is going to let you die just because you had surgery in Mexico. As for my post-op care, I met with my PCP prior to surgery and she agreed to do my follow-up blood work and to see me regularly afterward. I saw her at 2, 4, 8, and 12 months post-op. Now I just see her for my normal physicals.

Why can't you go to beer festivals post-sleeve? I am able to drink beer... not MUCH of it for sure... but I do so fairly regularly. Obviously not something you will be doing in the first year or so post-op, but something you may be able to eventually do again. As for how people are able to gain weight down the road... there are a lot of ways to get around your restriction. As you mentioned, drinking your calories is an obvious one (thus don't overdo it on the beer!). There's also eating and drinking at the same time. By drinking as you eat, you "Water down" your food, making it pass through your stomach more quickly. There's grazing, which is just nibbling on food all day long to where you never actually get "full". There are "slider foods". Those are foods that pass through your stomach more quickly. Usually they are things that would dissolve in water, like popcorn, potato chips, cheez-its, cheetos, etc. Sliders also include things with a high liquid content like Soup, ice cream, sauces, etc. When I was something like 18 months post-op, I did a little experiment to see how many calories I could force in in a day and I got up over 3000! So it can definitely be done! As for any pre-op jitters you are experiencing, just remember that you made this decision after a lot of research and self-evaluation. You made it when you were in a logical and rational frame of mind. Don't let the emotions of last-minute anxiety deter you.

Welcome to the losers' bench! Be sure that in these early days you focus on the basics. Getting your Water in. Getting your Protein in. Taking your vitamins/meds. And walking a little bit frequently throughout the day. Try to aim for a total of 60 minutes of walking each day. Even if that's only 5-10 minutes at a time. I even marched in place quite a bit! As much as the fatigue will make you think you can't/don't want to get up and walk, it really will make you feel a lot better if you actually do it! I also recommend you stay off the scale and just focus on healing and following your plan. The scale can be pretty mean in the early weeks as your body adjusts to all of the changes and it is easy to get discouraged if you feel like you are enduring all of this for so little "reward". Trust in the process. Let your body do its thing.

I assume they've checked to see if it might be caused by GERD?

Welcome! We all start somewhere, so don't feel self-conscious about being new to the site or WLS in general. I think a lot of sleevers started out like you, researching the band only to find out that it's kind of been phased out over the past few years. That's where I started too! I had never even heard of gastric sleeve until I started researching lap-band. As for how long it might take to go from your first seminar to surgery, that depends a lot on your insurance and the surgeon. Both typically require some sort of process with various steps, tests, appointments, etc. Some take upwards of 6 months. Some are as little as two months. It really is different from plan to plan and program to program.

I am allowed to drink right up to the time I eat, but not for 20 minutes after. The drinking BEFORE eating thing is really only an issue in the very early stages. The concern there is that you will feel too "full" from drinking to eat as much food as you need. The ability to eat enough is less of an issue once you are healed up. So at that point, there's really no risk in drinking before eating. If it does make you too "full" to eat as much food, that's probably actually a good thing! As for drinking after eating, I was told to wait 20 minutes, but honestly, even at over two years out, I couldn't drink less than 40 minutes after eating if I wanted to! I feel so full from food after I eat and if I try to drink too soon afterward, I can feel the Water just like sitting in my esophagus and it makes all these gurgling sounds. It's not pleasant! So for me 40-60 minutes after eating just happens naturally. I don't make a conscious effort to wait a certain amount of time. I just wait until I feel like I CAN comfortably drink again. The REAL, CRITICAL key is to not eat and drink at the same time. Eating and drinking at the same time is a surefire way to eat around your restriction. Drinking while eating thins out the food (like in the video above) and allows it to pass through your stomach more quickly and easily.

You must be so disappointed. As frustrating as it is, I don't think your doctors were wrong. As the saying goes around here, "you have surgery on your stomach, not your brain." So if your brain isn't in the right place to deal with life post-op. it's better to address that first. All you can do now is go through this program and hope you are able to change your relationship with food in a way that will allow you to have surgery in the future. I wish you much success! And I really am sorry about the disappointment you must be feeling right now. Don't give up hope!

Did you have a pre-op diet? If not, you could just be transitioning into ketosis, which causes headache right around 3-4 days into a carb-free diet. Are you getting all of your Water in? Dehydration can also cause headaches.

Comparison is a recipe for misery and disaster. The first month post op is about HEALING and taking care of yourself. If you are sticking to your surgeon's plan, you are doing NOTHING wrong. Everbody and every BODY is different. You had major surgery. You have drastically altered your nutritional intake. Give your body a minute to adapt and adjust to what's going on. There is a reason 95% of people go through a stall between weeks two and four. I really encourage you to put the scale away and focus on just following your plan. If you follow your plan, you WILL lose weight. How fast you lose it is irrelevant. I was a "slow" loser by most standards. But that didn't stop me from reaching my goal, where I've been maintaining for almost 16 month. I promise you that I have never once looked back and thought to myself "if only I'd reached goal two months sooner". In the grand scheme of things, your sleeve is forever and you will have YEARS to enjoy your happy, healthy life at goal. If it takes you a month or two longer to get there than someone else, who cares?!?!

Ketosis is known to make urine (and breath) smell bad. Ketones are passed in your urine. You may want to have tests to check that you are simply in ketosis and not experiencing ketoacidosis.

Did they say which surgeon/facility they used? There are many fantastic and reputable surgeons in Mexico performing all varieties of weight loss surgery. There are a few hacks that people are wise to avoid. If you can get more information, please post it here.

@@SarahSleeve What day next week is your appointment? I want to be sure to be thinking about you and sending positive thoughts your way.

The general rule of thumb is to be at/near goal for a full year before having skin removal surgery. I think I was actually only at goal for about 8 months prior to mine. When you start having consults with surgeons, they will let you know what they think and what their guidelines are. Same thing goes for the order of the surgeries. Depending on what you need done, they will put together a plan that ensures you aren't under anesthesia for too long in one go and that you have adequate recovery time between surgeries. If it were up to me, I'd advise having the "easier" surgeries with shorter recovery first, like arms and boobs. A LBL or TT will have a really long recovery time and can be pretty brutal. Wouldn't want a difficult recovery from that to deter you from getting the other surgeries. As for how much weight you can plan to lose with skin removal, the answer is none. Yes, the skin you have removed will have potentially significant weight to it. But the swelling from an LBL or TT last MONTHS. Literally months. At least 2-3 months, In my case, I had soft tissue swelling that lasted NINE months. You will be virtually immobile in he early days and have very limited/restricted activity for probably at least two months. So between the swelling and reduced activity, by the time you achieve your true "results", you probably will have re-gained some weight. It will definitely be impossible to tell how the weight of the skin removed affected your overall weight.

I have only vomited four times post-op (I'm well over 2 years out now). One was when my whole family had a stomach bug and ALL of us were throwing up, so nothing to do with my sleeve. The second time was my second Thanksgiving post-op. I ate too fast or didn't chew well enough and something got "stuck". I had tremendous pain in my chest and foamies until I finally threw up and felt a million times better. The third time I went on a pub crawl and drank WAY too much alcohol... definitely nothing to do with my sleeve and everything to do with me being an idiot. The last time was this past summer. I ate way too quickly again or didn't chew thoroughly again then proceeded to play Lasertron (fancy laser tag) for about two hours. By the end I was dying. Again with the "stuck" feeling and foamies until I was able to throw up and get out whatever was stuck.

@@larry971 Wow! What a huge difference! You look like a whole new person!

I felt really tired all the time until I was on soft foods and was able to get in more calories. If you are going to try to be physically active, I encourage you to try to get your protein and calories in. I didn't do anything more intense than "brisk walking" until I was over 850 calories a day. Then I stepped it up to 1100-ish calories a day as soon as I could from there. I would say, for me, that was about two months post-op?

Oh wow. That must be devastating. What are your next steps? Is some other form of WLS an option?

PS: Your shirt made me a little teary.

I wish I could help you! I know there are others on these forums who have had pregnancies and babies post-sleeve. Hopefully they can chime in and help you out.

Here are some pics of me at my heaviest and then at goal: That last one is the day I ran my first half marathon!

I am sorry that you had such a difficult start to things. I am glad that you've now identified the problem and are hopefully treating it and starting to feel better? Now you can start settling into where you should have been a couple of weeks ago, focusing on getting in protein and water, taking your vitamins, and working your way through the food stages. Hopefully this will all be behind you soon and the rest of your journey will follow a more "normal" course.

Huge congrats! The feeling of accomplishment I got when I completed my first half marathon... can't even put it into words! I want to cry for you just thinking about how great that felt! Can you believe how far we've come?