JamieLogical

@@Butch Luce I am so inspired by you not giving up on life! You can have a lot of great years ahead of you still.

I didn't bring a shaker bottle. just a collapsible funnel to keep in my carry on. I used that to get my Nectar powder into bottles of water I purchased in the airports.

I vote you do it. Yes, the pain and recovery for a panniculectomy or tummy tuck can be very trying, but it is so worth it in the end. I am 5 years out from my extended tummy tuck and I am grateful every single day that I had it done. I had a particularly rough recovery, but that is all a distant memory now!

I'm just about 2 years post-op now and I am far from perfect with my eating. Luckily I am training for a marathon, so I burn a lot of calories through exercise. You don't have to be perfect, but you do have to find the right balance. If bread is creeping in, younhave two choices, you can try to cut it back out again and focus on protein more, or you can try to incorporate it into your routine. Maybe have whole grain bread or toast as your pre-workout snack. The carbs can help fuel your runs. I often have a piece of multigrain toast with peanut butter on it before a run.

I definitely don't recommend doing runs two days in a row. If you need/want to do cardio on your off days, then try some sort of cross-training. You will definitely have a harder time recovering and be more likely to injure yourself if you run multiple days in a row.

I was told to wait 20 minutes before drinking after eating, but usually have to wait closer to 40. Eating AFTER drinking isn't going to stretch your stomach or make you eat more food or anything like that, it's just uncomfortable, because your stomach is still full of food. You need to wait for the food to pass through your stomach to make room for liquids to move through. That's just trial and error until you figure out how long to safely wait. For me, if I eat until my sleeve is "full" it usually takes 30-40 minutes before I can comfortably drink. If what you are "eating" is liquid or liquidy (protein shake, Soup, yogurt, chili, etc.) then you won't have to wait as long, because that stuff passes through your stomach quickly.

I don't see how you could possibly get enough calories in if you are only eating 2-3 times a day. With my restriction, I think the absolute MOST I could possibly eat in one sitting, assuming I went for calorie-dense foods, is 300-400 calories. Usually it's closer to 250. You would starve or completely wreck your metabolisim on that few calories over the long term. I personally now eat 7-8 times a day! I'm training for a marathon and burning 2500-3000 calories a day. I have to eat as much as I can as often as I can to not keep losing weight. But even before I was training and back when I was still losing weight, I was eating 5-6 times a day... usually around 1400 calories a day.

This is what I never understood about people saying surgery is the "easy way out". Though I always used the knee replacement metaphor, because it is also surgery with about the same mortality/complication rate. How is a surgical solution to a serious health problem ever a bad thing?!?!

I would say my one "complaint" about Dr. Ortiz is the limited interaction I had with him. I never spoke to him ahead of the surgery. The day of the surgery, he came and visited me in my room for maybe 10-15 minutes before-hand and then I never saw him or talked to him again. I was fine with that, though. The OCC team is EXCELLENT and answered all of my questions pre and post-op. I never felt abandoned or neglected in any way. Dr. Ortiz is a very very busy man so I didn't really expect a whole lot of personal attention from him. He was very nice and friendly during our brief visit, though.

Welcome and congratulations on taking some steps toward surgery! This site is a great resource on all stages of the process before surgery and years after. Feel free to ask questions, contribute to existing threads, and just lurk around! Nervous and excited is pretty much how all of us felt in the beginning, so you are certainly not alone!

Why did you think you could manage 1/4 cup? It definitely depends on what you are eating. I could pretty easily do 2 oz. of cottage cheese or yogurt when I first started my puree stage, but tuna and chicken... yeah... maybe three bites and I was done!

This is certainly true. I always considered my sleeve to be "weight maintenance surgery" instead of "weight loss surgery". I have lost hundreds of pounds "on my own" over the years. At one point I even lost 90 pounds in about a year. Several more times I lost 40-50 pounds. And I can't even count the number of times I lost 20-25 pounds. I always said that if losing weight was an Olympic event, I'd be a multi-time gold medal winner. But what I truly truly sucked at was keeping it off! When I began considering VSG, I was back to within 10 pounds of my highest weight, staring down the barrel of another year-long diet to get back to a reasonable weight, and knowing that in two years, I'd gain all the weight right back. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It was time to change the game! So far it seems to have worked! Since reaching goal just about a year post-op, I've now been maintaining for a full year with no sign of impending regain!

I tried to continue my workouts through my pre-op diet, but had to give up. My pre-op totaled up to about 450 calories a day and it was exhausting just trying to make it through the day at work. I think I only managed actual exercise the first 4 days or so before I had to quite. It got to the point where I was so weak it was hard to just wash my hair in the morning!

If it feels like you have to go #2, that's your intestines, not your stomach...

Things improved considerably for me once I was able to eat solid foods and get more calories in. If you are still only hitting around 450 calories a day, of course you are going to be exhausted! You are starving! Once I was up around 800 calories a day, I was a pretty functional human being and able to introduce some cardio. I had to get up around 1100 calories before I really kicked up the intensity of my cardio. Then I probably hovered around 1400 calories a day for the majority of my weight loss phase.

It really is a matter of personal preference. Some (not all, so do your research) hospitals in Tijuana have emergency and ICU facilities, which could prove valuable in the event of a catastrophic complication. However, hospitals have a much higher rate of infection that surgical centers, because of exposure to germs and bacteria from sick patients. Surgical centers are only housing patients who are there for surgery, not because they are sick. Infection is a MUCH more common and likely complication from any surgery than is something catastrophic (like excessive blood loss, respiratory failure, blood clots, etc.) that would require emergency services. Like I said, it is a personal preference. If you truly fear major complications, then a hospital might put your mind at ease. If you want to just look at the actual percentages for types of complications, a surgical center might make more sense.

@@CNOEL3 Being able to chug water will come back. It took me maybe 2-3 months to get to that point. One thing you may want to try is different temperatures of water. I have found that ICE COLD water (with ice literally floating in it) is MUCH easier for me to drink than room temp water or even just a chilled bottled water. I bought an insulated water bottle that keeps my ice in ice form all day long at work and that has helped tremendously.

I wasn't allowed solid food yet until 40 days post-op. But to answer your question, it's really up to you. You have to meet your protein requirements. However you achieve that is what matters. For me, bread of any type was VERY filling in my early months post-op so I didn't "waste" space on it and opted for denser high-protein foods. If you can eat it comfortably and are meeting your nutritional requirements with it, I don't see why you shouldn't eat it.

What you are experiencing is 100% normal! I cried daily in the early days post-op. I wondered if I would ever feel normal again. I had so many bouts of pain and discomfort and frustration! The good news is, it's all temporary. In fact, it's VERY temporary. You will legitimately see improvement from one day to the next. A few weeks out, you will start to feel vaguely human again. Just hang in there!

As was mentioned above, hormones are stored in fat. As fat breaks down, those hormones are released back into your blood stream and cause all sorts of havoc: irregular periods, mood swings, increased fertility, etc. It should level off as your weight loss slows.

My nutritionist has had me on a pro-biotic since my pre-op diet. I was allowed to take pills at 7 days post-op, so I did have a brief period beginning the day before my surgery until 7 days post op where I didn't take it. I would suggest discussing the situation with your surgeon to find out what the best solution for you specifically would be,

Average cost seems to be around $4500? Some are more and some are less. It really depends on the surgeon and facility you choose.

I get so frustrated that there is such a negative stigma around WLS. It saves lives! Lots of them! And it could save a lot more if people weren't so opposed to doing it for fear of judgement. I feel like with my friend, all of his negativity is because he thinks surgery is the "easy way out" and because he can't imagine giving up all the foods he loves. I eat lunch with him multiple times a week. He sees that I can still eat great food, I just have to eat a lot less of it. And even that isn't convincing him that the sacrifice is worth it.

I got word this morning that one of my coworkers and friends passed away over the weekend. Details are still sketchy, since most news is coming second or third-hand, but his death has hit me like a ton of bricks. I had to leave work as soon as I found out, because I just couldn't stop crying. He was in his early 40's, had a wife and a young daughter. I immediately assumed he died suddenly due to some complication from obesity. He was probably over 350 pounds and not very tall. As I said, I don't know anything for sure yet. But he had JUST had a conversation last week with another one of my friends/coworkers about how he and his wife were trying to do everything they could to give their daughter a leg up on life, since they didn't know how long they would be around for her. He and I had talked a lot about weight loss and getting healthy over the years. Back in 2009 my sister-in-law died of a pulmonary embolism at the age of 41, which prompted me to try to get very serious about losing weight. I managed to lose 90 pounds by summer of 2011 and Ron was very encouraging to me. We talked a lot about how much hard work I was putting in. And he started calling me "Skinny" every time he saw me. I eventually regained almost all of that weight before my VSG, but we continued to talk about weight loss once in a while. And he noticed once I started losing weight again after my VSG and encouraged me with my running. In my grief today, I couldn't help but feel a little "mad" at him. He knew he had weight and health problems. He knew that those things might take him out of his daughter's life too soon. Yet he didn't really do much about it that I could tell. Had he been willing to have WLS, he might still be here right now for his daughter! So this brings me to another thought. I have another very good friend/coworker who is also obese. He's both older and bigger than Ron was. He has chronic knee, back, and neck pain. He's always complaining about how he doesn't sleep well at night because of the pain he's in. Yet, of all of the people I told about my WLS, he was the most against it. Even two years post-op, he still acts like it was a bad decision. And now, in light of what has happened with Ron, I want to shake some sense into him and try to convince him that he should seriously consider WLS. There's no way he makes it to 60 and he's already in his late 40's! I know having such a talk with him would probably doom our friendship and might not have any effect on him. But I can't help but think about how much I might regret NOT having that conversation with him if something happens to him they way it did with Ron.

Thanks, JamieLogical, for pointing that out. *I'm* comfortable counting it as 30g based on local support group members who are using it and having good labs, as well as my surgeon's support, but everyone should consider the chance that it's only 15g per serving. Well, obviously beyond the liquid food stages, we should all be aiming to get the majority of our protein from actual food. So hopefully we'd only be using Genepro or any protein supplements as just that, a supplement. At that point whether it's actually 15 or 30 grams or somewhere in between shouldn't matter much. But if someone is supposed to be getting 90 grams a day and is relying solely on Genepro to get there, the risk would be only getting 45 grams, which would put them WAY short of their target.