winklie

I'll toss my hat in this ring. At 5'10" my max "Healthy Weight" is 170lbs. Let me put that in perspective, I weighed 228 when I was 20 and went into the Army in 1991. After basic training I weighed 206 I think, which was more than the 180 the Army said I could weigh. Then they sent me to the Hospital, where they did all these measurements and said my body fat was very low (I mean I had a 6 pack, and 58" chest") they said my ideal weight was 200-218. So, I set my goal for 200 pounds initially, but dropped it to 190 as I am not as muscular as I was in the Army (we'll see about that once I start resistance training). So, yes, for me BMI is utter rubbish, I have too large a frame (I spent 10 years as a part time bouncer, bigger = better) and will never weigh 170 lbs. I go to the support meetings at the Hospital every month and I'll tell you what I keep hearing. by 18 months out, you will have attained your weight loss. At some point it just stops. Take advantage of that first 6 months, and the next 6, because months 12-18 weight loss slows down a great deal. Anyway, the point was, when you stop losing weight if you are happy and comfortable, then maintain that. If not, increase daily activity and cut back on calories until you do get to where you feel "right".

@@Inner Surfer Girl I also view everything as an adventure!! When I lived in NY, I used to love my Saturday's off, I used to just walk around Manhattan, I called it my Saturday adventure. I'd find trendy exciting new restaurants to eat in take in the sites and just have a good time. As for the whole meeting someone new, while the idea is nice, I don't think I'll ever date anyone again. I suffered through 18 years of emotional abuse from my ex-wife, in fact it is so bad I have PTSD from it. I don't know that I have it in me to ever be intimate with anyone again, the fear of what might happen is so strong, I quite literally cannot describe it. I would like to think in those terms, but, cannot. The sad thing is I am only 47, so I figure I got 20 or 30 years to go.

@wannaBthinsoon If it was pureed I could eat it, the stage 3 diet is really strange from my NUT. She gave me a handout with like 4 new foods, then a sample menu with all kinds of things not on the diet. So, I am pretty much going with if it's pureed, I can eat it. I love Chili too, but not spicy, I am a rather bland eater. Now to find a good low cal/fat/carb recipe.... Thanks for the suggestion!!

@@tpatterson Here is a link too what I made. It is different than the one I found here. I also used Pasta sauce instead of marinara, as I just prefer it. I used Rao's 4 cheese Sauce. https://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-detail.asp?recipe=1793517 Hope you like it 1/2 as much as I did.

@@Dub They force you to walk down a couple isles, coffee is not located on the outside, but typically dead center in the store. Also trash bags, cleaning supplies etc. If you have not tried it the Riccotta Bake is heavenly! And I have enough to make I assume, about 20 portions, I am going to make a bunch more batches today and freeze them. The hardest part was finding Pasta sauce w/o added sugar. I got some, and it's really good!

@@Dub From your mouth,er, keyboard to God's ears! Thanks.

@@Dallas Powell I am going to make a post, you may well not like. Call it tough love. It consists of two parts, first. Stop eating more than 800 calories a day. Man the fuck up, and just stop. I eat 600-800 calories a day and am never full, I do get satiated from time to time, but I find ways to distract myself, take a long ass walk. Like 2 hours long, you can't eat if you are an hour away from home in some park. CONTINUE EATING AS YOU ARE AND YOU WILL DIE. Part two. Run, better yet, drive, and drive quickly to the hospital that performed your surgery, and refuse to leave until they have solved this problem. It is IMPOSSIBLE for you to eat 3 lean cuisines with a 4 oz pouch. There are really two possibilities, first, a Fistula, secondly the opening from the pouch to your intestine if that junction is too large (it should be roughly 1/2 the diameter of a dime at this stage) you lose the restrictive portion of the surgery. Then, it becomes possible to eat as you have been because the food does not even slow down in your pouch, it just slides right through and you won't feel satiated until you have filled your entire roux limb AND pouch.(and I am not going to do the math but if you have a standard Roux limb it is 150cm long so think of how much food it takes to pack 150cm of garden hose and you get an idea of the volume of food you COULD stuff into yourself) Either of these is a borked surgery that, and I am going to bold this; YOU PAID FOR. YOU ARE A CUSTOMER. YOUR SURGERY WAS NOT COMPLETED PROPERLY, REFUSE TO LEAVE THE HOSPITAL UNTIL THIS IS FIXED. I'm not an asshole, but you have to understand the customer, salesman relationship. You or at least your insurance paid for a service that is defective. Pack a bag and head back to the hospital. Under no circumstances leave until this issue is resolved. Look up the hospitals resources. Call them. Dispute your discharge, just about every hospital has Q A people you can call. NO EXCUSES, NO COME TO MY OFFICE, NO LET’S MAKE AN APPOINTMENT, FIX THIS AND FUCKING FIX IT NOW, OR YOU ARE LEAVING ME NO CHOICE BUT TO SEEK LEGAL REMEDY. Sorry for all the cursing, but this has gone on long enough. We cannot help you, only your surgeon can. He already admitted a 'problem' making your pouch, We'll if he has to go back in and unfuck his mistake, that is on him. We have done all we can do, anything more in this post is speculation, you need medical care, and now. Best of luck and let us know how it goes.

@@heather5565 Seems like things are looking up!

@@gpmed Thanks for the tip about organic milk. I have not had any problems going through skim milk, but I have had a really hard time moving from diet stage 2 to 3, so I am still consuming a lot of shakes. As for 2% milk, I only use it for my one or two cups of coffee a day, and at $2.99 for a half gallon, (at the corner market) I am not worried if I have to pour some out. Expiration dates are just another thing I am going to have to look into with more detail. I think planning a weeks worth of meals ahead of time, and shopping for what I need may be the best idea. I am also going through a hard time with cans. Yes, cans. You see just about every can is lined with a clear plastic, which is loaded with among the worst chemical ever created by man, Bisphenal-a or BPA for short. This stuff actually causes gene and DNA damage! In fact, the evidence is so overwhelming that even the lame FDA is even getting involved in trying to ban BPA from the food chain. I knew all about BPA and have avoided it for years. This is until yesterday when I found out that pretty much every can is lined with plastic containing BPA, now canned anything is off the menu, glass jars only from here on out (gulp).

@BLERDgirl@skepchick@VSGAnn2014 Although I do not generally do this in a public setting I'll share my life statement with you all, it was crafted over years of hard, uncompromising work, where literally every decision I made had the potential to cause death. "I will relentlessly strive for perfection in all things I do, with the hopes of settling for mere excellence" The funny part is that I never considered my weight into that, I just sort of let myself go over a number of years. I think I was intentionally trying to make myself less attractive while married (that is a nightmare I will skip). Now my weight is a covered by my life statement, I WILL lose the weight I want to lose. No one but me can stop me, and I am not about to do that. The really hard part, and they don't go over this with you as they should imho prior to surgery, is learning how to eat post op all over again. Not just what, but when, how, how to cook it, how to prioritize Protein, what are no no's. I literally feel like I have absolutely no idea what I doing post op when it comes to eating and I am just winging it. This is why I have not fully embraces stage three of my diet, and still prefer to consume shakes, it's a known food, I know what to expect. I guess, once I get back to regular foods, things will be easier, that is, more choices, and simplified cooking. We shall see.

@@Sajijoma All good ideas!!

You may have hit the nail on the head. I am used to shopping once to twice a month, apparently I am going to have to go more often and buy smaller amounts of food. Funny, I got the big Riccotta cheese, it never dawned on me to get the little one! The things we have to relearn, it is not that it's a chore or difficult, it's just amazing how much of your life has to change as a result of WLS.

@ Thank you, although once you are at your destination it just becomes a matter of getting home, and sadly that took quite awhile, lol.

@@VSGAnn2014 Well thank you very much, that is the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week.

@@wannaBthinsoon It was horrible. I have a great sense of humor so I took it in stride, but yeah, it was a bad day.

@proudgrammy I Can completely relate. Wednesday was my two week checkup, so a Surgeon appointment followed by NUT. I have to be at the Doctors office at 11:30. To do this requires three buses, I leave my house at 8:50, to catch a 9:15 bus (that is always late), ride it half way to the next bus station, and walk 3/4 of a mile to the bus station as the bus I was on misses the connecting bus more often than it makes it. It's all good, just more steps. Get to bus #2, depart at 10:00 am, Arrive in Manchester at 10:25 am, wait for the #13 bus at 11:00 that will take me close to my Doctors office. Get that bus, and make my appointment, no problem. I was told the Surgeon was 15 minutes and the NUT was 1/2 an hour, so I would be done at 12:15, which is great as I can catch the #13 back downtown and take the 1:30 bus back home to Nashua. But nooooooo The NUT was 1 hour. AND for the first time EVER they were LATE taking me in. I get out of the office at 1:10, and call a cab. I explain I have to be downtown in 20 minutes to catch the bus home. No problem they assure me. Cab arrives about 10 minutes later, we missed the bus by 30 seconds. He was behind it honking and flashing his lights, but it would not stop. SOooo, now I am stuck in Manchester for 3 more hours until the 4:30 bus (the last one of the day). I decide I'll go visit my sickly mother. She has a Doctors appointment and we spend like 1/2 an hour together and she and my sister leave. I wind up walking laps in Manchester for the next 2 1/2 hours. At long last the 4:30 bus!!!! I get on, so tired..... We get on the highway. Accident. We are 1/2 an hour late getting back to Nashua, and miss the 4:51 and 5:00 buses, now we get to wait for the 6:00 bus. It was 6:45 when I got home. Oh and I woke up at 0430 for some odd reason. So I can completely relate to the whole rushing to get somewhere, only to have everything fall apart. Thank god it was a nice day out, if it was Winter I would have died.

Honestly my NUT never mentioned Rice or a lot of other things. I know better, but, it's not going to kill me, and I took it as a little victory. If I stuck to just the things on the sheet she gave me moving me to stage 3, I think I would have added like 4 foods. She implied that if it was pureed and low on calories and high in Protein it was more or less okay. We even talked about soup and I specifically said, Oh I can grab a can of soup, puree it and have a soup now, Wonderful! But yes, there is a disconnect. It's bad at my Center as well, there are quite simply too many hands in the pot. I have received contradictory information from everyone up to and including my Surgeon. Not that any of them were wrong, they all just tend to see things a little different, and as such give different information to people.

So I was cleared on Wednesday for Diet stage 3, pureed foods. I went shopping got some things I knew were on the diet, but really wanted to plan this out, then I realized it's just for 2 weeks, then on to semi-soft. So, I continued on diet stage 2, until this evening. So my first, pureed meal consisted of a can of Campbell's Home Style chicken with brown rice and a can of chicken. Some complex math ensued trying to figure out portion sizes. At last I had all the math done, I tossed everything into the blender, and turned it into, something not unlike vomit in texture. Weighed it, cooked it, weighed it again, and divided the portion into two. It worked out to 9.4 oz of "soup". I got through about 4.5 oz and felt, well not "full" like if I eat another bite I will die, but, I guess satiated. It became and effort to add another spoonful of food and that is where I stopped. So the chicken and the Soup after cooking yield about 20 oz of food. Just under, divided by 2 worked out to 10oz per serving (I had planned on eating 1/2 of what I made). I made a little video, I have to reboot my machine (software updates, i'll see if I can upload it)

@@gpmed it's funny you mention "figuring this process out" but every time I think I FINALLY got it, the rules change (diet stage) lol. It's sort of like being married again, just as soon as I figure out what my ex-wife was pissed about or wanted, she would completely change the scenario.

@@tpatterson I do not have any measuring device for liquid ounces, oddly. I use my food scale pretty much for everything. Like everything, I even weight the amount of milk I put in my coffee in the morning. I'll look into getting a liquid measuring cup and determining what kind of difference there is between 4oz on the scale versus 4 oz in the cup. The point of this thread was to be happy, somehow, I did not walk away that way

Well it was a test run. I had no idea how much I was going to eat. No rice is not a great idea, however the soup is actually pretty good in terms of calories and processing. This is what I had time for tonight. Tomorrow I am going to do a Ricotta bake, I think I got the recipe right.

Oh and if I may offer another suggestion, get a Fitbit, I like the Surge. Use the GPS to track long walks, or just let it count your steps all day. It is more accurate than an IPhone (I too have an IPhone 6S +) AND you can track your food with the desktop or cell phone app! It's one stop shopping.

That is the great thing, you build on what you can do. So if you can do 1/2 a push up, do it. And do it a couple times a day until you feel the burn in your pecks. Same with sit ups, do whatever you can, a couple times a day and build on what you have done. When I got into the Army I was capable of doing, ready, 13 push ups. That was it. When I graduated basic training, 8 weeks later, I passed my PT test, and did 80 push ups, and > 100 sit ups. The run was the hardest for me, I was road running 3 miles a day every day for the last 2 weeks of basic. When the PT test came along, we ran on a track. And let me tell you, running on a track has NOTHING to do with road running. They are completely different and I have no idea why. I made the run, by like 40 seconds. I will say this, pull ups were never my thing. We had a pull up bar right outside our chow hall. And everyone had to do 10 pull ups to move ahead in line. I don't think even at the end I could do 10 without help. You can cheat at a push up too, Start from your knees, Put a pillow (like a couch cushion) under you and just get through one. After you get through one, build on it. One leads to two, two to three etc. Great workout, easy and not time consuming, but you will feel it. I'd say, when you can do 20 military push ups and 50 or so military sit ups, look for a gym and continue to build, but at that point, you will have a good base to work from. Your major muscles will be used to working out, and adding new exercises will be easier. Get a book, skip the trainer in my humble opinion. Trainers are frequently not certified, or even educated in what they do, further, the reason they exist in a gym is to act as salesmen. I avoid them like the plague. Oh and walking. Here are a few tips, anyone can do, and they make a huge difference. First, if you drive somewhere, you park as far from the door as you can. Seriously. Go to the mall, park in overflow parking 1/2 a mile away and walk it. Second, never wait, walk. I am a New Yorker (well until I moved back to NH) and had no need for a car. I walk everywhere. Pro tip, don't wait, walk. If I get to the bus station 10 minutes before my bus, I do laps around the bus station until my bus is ready to go. When waiting for a bus, I take 50 paces to the left of the bus stop and 50 paces to the right and pace back and forth. Get to an appointment early, walk around the building until it is time to go in. In practice never sit, always stand and if you are standing you are moving. There are a million ways to increase your step count, and that is SOOO important. Your leg muscles are the biggest muscles in the body, you WANT to work them, everyday as much as possible. I do it because I can, and secondly I hate leg workouts in the gym. No idea why, I just always have. I am no pro, but I have been in very good shape in my life, and I was a gym rat for a long time, before I let myself go. Actually before I got married. But THAT is another story. Good luck!

I was thin at one point in time in my life, when I was in the Army, we were all Gym rats. But i'll tell you this. If you want to start out, even before you start resistance training, go the Army way, push-ups, Sit-ups and, Marching (running if you can). I get (at 2.5 weeks post) 7-10 miles a day in walking at just shy of 3 mph. In two weeks supposedly the remaining weight restrictions come off. I have a home gym I built, but I need an elliptical for the winter here in NH, and I am on the fence about buying one, or just getting a membership at Workout World. I walk everywhere, and the problem is the closest gym is about a mile away, getting there is not too hard, but if I hit it hard, and leave it all on the floor, I am worried about the walk home. Although I guess you could call it a cool down. I don't know. But I do know that push ups and sit ups are great exercises that work major muscle groups. Unfortunately you need a partner to really get the most out of it, as, to really "get it" you have to go beyond muscle failure, and you cannot do that alone. I wish you the best of luck with whatever you decide.