janet1000

I had no idea the fat was making the stool grey. So now I am going to aim for grey stool. Personally, I was worried about this issue. I thought my Iron (not being absorbed) or my minerals were making my stool grey. If fats are doing it, I am over joyed. I try to remember that we malabsorb 80 percent of all the fat we eat, so I try to eat tons of fat. Thanks for sharing that info.

I remember the stalls. It felt like they would go on forever, and my weight loss was done. Your weight loss now will have more stalls, more patience is required, and you will have a better time of it if you find other things to focus on. Just forget the scales. Join a gym or start a new class, stay with protein/high fat foods and your body will slowly (very slowly) release it. Don't try to wake your body up or shock it with diet changes. Just stay the course and it will stop being stubborn and release the last of it's fat. Most people do not slide into home base reaching their goal weight in 2 weeks. We will gently glide into our goal weight after months. 99% of us go into stall after stall the second year of the surgery. It's going to take as much time to get the last 20 or 30 lbs off as it did to get the first tonage of weight off. Frustrating, but reality. As I said, find something else to think about. It's hard cause my DS and weight was all I thought about for 2 years. But the more I tried to get the last 20 lbs off, the more stubbornly my body hung onto it. Drove me crazy.

I am a DSer 3 yrs out. You and I have some similar issues. Maybe you can benefit from some of my experiences. Keep your carbs limited to complex carbs (brown rice or low carb bread) and start your limit at 50 carbs a day. If you are not losing weight at 50, drop it to 40 carbs a day and test that out for 2 weeks. If you don't lose weight... you know the drill. I had to drop my carbs down to 20 per day before I would start to lose a pound or two per week again. Eating sugar like sweets and juice only lead to cravings of more sugar. It acted like an addiction for me. If I stayed off the sweets for 3 weeks, then I could walk right past them and not want them. But as long as I as I was eating them, I had to have them every day. Vicious cycle. Not to mention the righteously OMG gas it causes - YKWIM! Start packing your Snacks. Make your snacks from Protein and fats. Veggies are nice for a break, but the protein will give you endurance through the day and make you feel foll. Use hard boiled eggs, nuts, cottage cheeze, yogurt, string cheese, block cheeses, deli meat wrapped in lettuce with mayo (in a sandwich bag that you eat right out of the bag during your break), etc. Pack that in your school supplies to eat and start leaving lunch money at home (till you kick the sugar cravings and stop buying sweets at school). When you want a treat, use fats. There are recipes for fat bombs on the internet. There are tons of low carb/high fat recipes that taste like a dessert. Eat tons of fat (5 times more than the standard diet allows). Fat keeps you full, makes your skin and hair pretty, feels great on the tongue, is used for the ADEK vits, and helps move the back end issues. Make sure you are taking your total load of Vitamins every day. Especially D3, which will cut down on your depression. Find something else to be a treat instead of food. I know it's hard. Been there. Start collecting something, or start buying clothes, or going to the movies once a week. What ever you pick, that is your treat instead of that muffin/donut. Keep stress eating for now, but change the food. I chomp on carrots, celery, apples, broc, etc. Not only will you cut your calories and carbs way down with this strategy, you will find that you start to disconnect the stress with the sweets. When you stress out, your body nags you to go eat sugar because it releases endorphins (feel good hormones) that acts as "a fix" and you feel better/calmer after eating it (for a little while). So eat as much as you want when stressed, but don't give your body 'the fix' of sugar. You can have protein, or veggies, while stressing - but no carbs. It will be hard for 2 weeks but then gets much easier. Good luck. You are on the right track.

If you don't take major Vitamins as a DSer, your labs will be in the shitter within the year. You have to learn about vitamins (start with Vitalady program). Learn that routine of vits. She sells them premade so all you have to do is open the packs and swallow the pills. Do that in the beginning and learn what all the pills are. Then buy them on your own. I buy most of my vits on line, but go back to Vitalady for tender Iron. Then at 6 months get your labs pulled and compare them to what your labs were before surgery (please get your labs done before you go under the knife!). You need to track where all your tests results are trending, and if they are going down then you need to increase that Vitamin. Going up or test shows they are too high, you cut back. You need to track and tweak your pills based on those numbers. This is why every DS person takes different levels of vitamins. I see some of the DS veterans are on here which is good for the new people. I learned so much from them, so listen to their advise.

I am a DSer 3 years out. Carbs do the gas and foul smell for me. So bread, rice, potatoes, Beans, sugar, chips - I will get gas that sounds like a herd of buffalo are coming through. Everyone is different. Some people get wicked diarrhea from certain foods. I did not have any food issues (lucky I guess). Dairy can do it, carbs definitely do it, and certain chemicals can do it. Curb your carbs and see if the gas doesn't die down. Smelly BMs - part of that is the food you eat. If you stay close to clean Protein, protein powders, a little veggies, a lot of clean fat (you need to eat 5 times the fat as a normal person), your smell and gas will subside. By clean, I mean eat from the perimeter of your grocery store – your food should not be coming out of a box. If it doesn't get better, get a script from your doctor for an antibiotic to knock down some of the colon bacteria (and definitely stop eating carbs because that is what is feeding the colon bacteria). Even when you eat cleanly, you will have smelling BMs. Half of what you eat isn’t getting digested. It is sitting in your guts at 100 degrees in a Soup of bacteria all the way through your intestines for 24-72 hours. So you are releasing fermented, bacteria soaked undigested food at the other end. I’ve used all the poo products and the one I use at work is called Ozone Spray. It’s the only thing I’ve seen that will kill the odor on contact. It will also suck the oxygen out of your lungs, so spray it and get out. Also keep flushing. Don’t let it sit in the bowl cause it will waft up and start sticking to the walls and mirror (kidding here, but it will start traveling down the hallway and kill small children and pets). My family is disgusted by my bathroom smells, and it will stay in the hallway and bathroom for hours – so keep flushing it down. It gets better as time goes on. At the 2 yr point, your body will adjust and your bathroom issues will level out.

My comments are related to the DS - that's what I have. It really depends on how your system adjusts to the surgery. Some people have a really hard time with carbs, simple or complex. It gives them extreme gas, bloating, diarrhea, cramping, etc. Having this reaction enough times, and you have a Pavlov's Dog reaction to carbs. Then there are people like me who have no reaction to sugar or carbs at all. Sometimes I will eat something that gives me extreme gas - like food Outlet Meatballs, which are supposed to be Protein but apparently are anything but LOL - but that is the extent of it. I'm fortunate that I can eat whatever I want - and if it is total sugar, I make sure to get in my car and drive home at the 2 hour mark cause gas is going to start then. Fruit and veggies go right through me. I do miss salads. This will get better as time goes on. Our systems adjust to this surgery. In the beginning, everything affects you. Over time, less and less. I know that the DS has been a miracle for me. I've already stretched out my sleeve. I knew that was going to happen so I didn’t bother with a RNY. The malabsorbtion is the only way I was going to lose the weight – because it’s beyond my ability to get around it. It works automatically, and every day. I don’t have to manage it, I don’t have to stay on a strict diet, it works. It works better if I eat the right foods, but it still works at a minimum level every day. What I really like is I am no longer diabetic. I don't know how this happened, but my blood sugar levels normalized 3 weeks after my surgery. Before I lost all the weight! Loosing weight definately helps your A1C, and it helps everyone. But something about this surgery goes beyond the fat loss because I read about people dropping insulin meds 2-3 weeks after surgery and then go on to lose 100lbs.

Get your eating plan in place. Then your vits. 2 most important items you should not lapse on for the the rest of your life. At least with a 2 step, the stomach part is already done so you should be up and eating and taking your pills much faster. Learn what Vitamins you need to take from the veterans of the surgery. Log onto all the DS forums and look at with the old timers take for supplements. My surgeon told me to take 3 multi-vitamins a day - that was his total advice. He was so off the map on nutrition and vits it isn't funny. You will need to be taking a lot of vitamins the rest of your life and tracking your lab results. Low carb eating. High fat (you absorb only 20% of fat you eat), and high Protein. Skip carbs. Good luck. It's a great surgery.