JupiterinVirgo

There are a lot of ups and downs in the first few months. The first few weeks, are killer. I was so exhausted that sometimes when I had to go out shopping or something like that, I would get stuck in the car too exhausted to even drive home. Let alone unload the groceries. Be gentle with yourself. I found that I was more durable at six or eight weeks. I took a lot of naps for the first two months post op. As for the nausea, I definitely went through a stage where I was pretty nauseous a lot of the time. I still can't eat before 12 PM without feeling sick to my stomach. But the nausea gets better too Once you learn what your body needs and wants, and you become flexible from day to day because your sleeve definitely will be more accommodating some days than others.

I am not a proponent of blindly following orders, no matter who they come from, including doctors and surgeons. That said, the days and weeks immediately following your surgery, your body needs you to be extra gentle, extra loving, and pay extra attention to it. Remember, that the surgery is essentially an amputation of 80% of your stomach, which is then stapled back together. While the wound of your organ is still healing, especially in those first few weeks, you want to be extra gentle. The one thing that was not on my approved list that I added in the first few days after surgery, was raw honey in my tea. Because I believed it to be medicinal, and good for the wound in my stomach. I cannot say for sure if it helped heal my stomach, but I can't say it most certainly did not hurt me. I knew it was right for my body. And I always follow my inner knowing. Please, be careful with yourself. When surgery is a bit further behind you, you might have more space and room to experiment a little bit with what is best for your personal body. But for now, take it easy.

My high weight was in the 320s, now 4 mos after surgery and 240!

I only weigh in at the surgeons office, so as not to lose my mind, and today was my three month check up. I wasn't expecting that much. From inside my body it is not easy for me to tell by eye whether I'm losing weight. I was worried Bc instead of following a plan, I eat intuitively, and my diets consists mostly of cheese, nuts and fruits, with a bit of meat here and there. I don't count or track; I just follow my body and let my sleeve measure my food intake. I have not had to throw away my whole wardrobe so I just didn't know if I was doing the right things. But... I'm down 60 pounds in three months! Closer to 75-80 total. I'm so happy! Thank you for celebrating with me.

Thank you all so much! All of your suggestions are very helpful. I am going to look deeper into this. I just really feel my inner compass leaning more and more toward eating purely organic and unprocessed non-animal foods. The surgery has changed me, is changing me, in ways I really didn't expect at all!

I strongly recommend that you take some kind of daily supplement to help your bowels. If someone had told me this it would've saved me a great deal of worry and discomfort. After surgery I had an impaction from not being able to go to the bathroom, and nobody warned me about it or told me to take milk of magnesia or anything like that. I didn't have to go to the hospital because I do the dirty work myself but it was traumatic an awful anyway. It made me very angry that my surgeons office did not guide me to make sure that I was taking a supplement to prevent this from happening. You're bound to go to the bathroom less when you're eating so little, but if what you are eating isn't coming out it will eventually create a plug that needs professional intervention to fix. Once you get an impaction, no laxative will help no enema can fix it. It has to be done… Manually. The other thing is, taking in much bigger portions of protein in the forms of powder, requires an in Normas amount of water. I found that on the pre-op diet, which for me included basically just drinking protein shakes, my body could not use the protein and it all ended up caked against the wall of my bowel. I have said this 1 million times about every topic: educate yourself. Do not just blindly follow things that doctor say because they are doctors. Western medicine does not take into account individual bodies, genetics cultural influences of what foods will make your body flourish based on where your family has emerged from, and they often forget to tell you about the details, that can create suffering for you. You really have to protect yourself from the ignorance of only taking one point of view into consideration. We all do.

Cheese is definitely one of the main staples out of my diet. I have become a total cheese snob since surgery. I go to local gourmet cheese shops and buy grass fed, non-GMO, high and delicious cheeses that I eat every day with fruit. I also like the sweet red cheddar from whole foods. I suggest trying grass fed, goats milk cheeses, organic, and artisan.

I think it is completely amazing that you've been able to lose most of your excess weight by yourself. I think you'll find that many people on these forums, like you, have found ways to lose a lot of weight on their own, at some point in their lives. I myself, had lost and gained probably hundreds of pounds over the years. By the time I was considering weight-loss surgery though, I was once again at a higher weight than I had ever been-in the 320s. I didn't feel like I could lose it on my own, even though I had done so numerous times over the years. The problem, was that sooner or later, my Will would break, or some crisis would put me over the edge and I was just not able to keep up the work that got me to where I was before. I knew it was necessary that I had to lose weight, or my life was going to deteriorate even more. But I also knew that I wanted to do it for the last time, and so something had to be truly different. For me, that was the bariatric surgery!

I chose the sleeve because it is just as effective, and it is less invasive. The recovery time is quicker. Anecdotes I've heard from other people, turned me away from the bypass. I come from a family of nurses who tell me that bypass patients lose a lot of weight but looks sickly. Longer-term results indicate that bypass patients need much more nutritional support for a much longer time-forever. While sleeve patients are informed that they should take vitamins forever as well, medically speaking, some surgeons say that it is only probably necessary/a good idea. It is not life or death. There are a lot of people on these forms who had bypass and are very happy with the results, so you just have to choose what's best for you. But for me, bypass absolutely did not seem like an acceptable trade-off.

I think my biggest realization has been that getting healthy, and eating well, and buying food that is not poisoned with GM owes another chemicals, as well as being able to take hog quality vitamins, is a privilege. I realized that part of how my weight got so out of control was that I was to impoverished for many years to take care of my body. I am very grateful that my circumstances have improved so much, which is allowing me to become healthier.

I was always a big meat eater, and I'm about four months out from surgery. My tastes are changing quite significantly. Not only am I highly concerned about where my meat products come from, but more and more I feel disgusted by them. It is not a moral decision: I'm not going to eat meat because blah blah blah, bought an intuitive body response telling me that I don't need to eat very much of it anymore, and what little I do we absolutely must be organic and grass fed, preferably total free range. I eat so much fruit now. None of us on this forum came to needing the surgery from binging on grapes and oranges LOL. That is what my body asks me for now, one before surgery it was always a big fatty meats. Lately, even if I'm just having some chicken soup or something, I find myself thinking… "How long has this animal been dead? How old is this dead animal flesh I'm about to put in my body? "

The short answer is no. Your sleeve should never become any bigger than two thirds the size of a normal stomach. That is not based on your individual habits. Dr. Weiner has some great videos for bariatric patients. He discusses many of the myths perpetuated by other surgeons. Not only is he a bariatric surgeon, but he is the first sane voice I have heard post surgery about long-term weight loss and Maintenence.

Phood!

How very little I actually needed! I always suggest getting a 45° angle pillow for your immediate recovery. For the first week to two weeks it was extremely helpful in allowing me to get into a restful position and also be able to get up without a great deal of pain.

Personally, I absolutely cannot emotionally take the stress and pressure of the daily weigh in. I'm only about four months post op, but I only get weighed when I go to the doctor. I feel that it is important for me not to focus on the numbers on the scale. Unlike past attempts at weight-loss, I am not on a diet this time. I had most of my stomach permanently amputated. There is no going back, or going off. If I have a day where I eat poorly, it's not like it was in the past. First of all, the damage I can do on a day like that is very limited. Secondly, it's not as though I can just give up. I made a permanent change to my anatomy, and so my focus is not on the scale, but I'm recognizing that long-term sustainable change is not formula.

I can really relate to your struggle to find the healthy middle ground between extremes. The BMI scale, that most weight loss surgery patients are using to determine whether or not their bodies are "normal "is extremely outdated, and it wasn't vented by insurance companies. Personally, I do not see this BMI scale as an accurate representation of good health for anyone. It was done with bad science, and it was done without a completion of information. We now know that our bodies are a great deal more complicated than the simplest equations used to determine BMI, and that mortality rates are not based on this. Like you, I have no magic number. I thought maybe that has been a symptom of feeling like I'm too far away from my suppose it goal weight, but the goal weight that I've chosen is a great deal higher than what any chart says I "should "be. That by itself does not bother me at all. But the truth is I never expected that the surgery would make me "thin." I'm only up about four months out from surgery and down 65 pounds, 80 total. I now see that I would easily reach my first goal weight within the first year of surgery no problem. I chose the weight that I chose as a goal because it was the leanest I had ever been as a full-grown adult woman, and it was under 200 pounds. I remember that I reach that weight after losing about 100 pounds on my way there. Once there, my body was very reluctant to release any more weight. And while I'm sure it could've been forced, that is not what happened/what I did. In the end, I sort of just want to let my body decide what is a healthy weight for it. I am learning more and more all the time how intelligent my body really is. Maybe more of us need to stop giving our power away to institutions who tell us what our bodies should be, and start trusting our bodies!

Of all the options available, it is well proven by research that marijuana is a highly effective for many ailments, from treating cancers, to alleviating pain, anxiety, and insomnia. After surgery many people have a difficult time eating, and the so-called munchy effect for weight-loss surgery patients can actually be very helpful. Painkillers, sleep aids, and other pharmaceuticals have been shown to cause many unforeseen issues and problems, not only while they are being taken, but in the long term. The political climate around marijuana in this country has changed dramatically. Personally, at least nine times out of 10 I always choose the natural alternative. I think your instincts to smoke a dried plant instead of take the dangerous pharmaceutical is a very good one.

Raw chocolate made with organic cacao (not cocoa) paste is highly nutritious. Sweeten with raw honey or stevia.

I absolutely had raw honey with tea for several weeks following my surgery. RAW organic honey contains many highly nutritive properties that help heal wounds and combat infection.

You look great!

Personally, I'm not much for thrift stores. For some reason, it has become very important to me during this process of losing weight to indulge myself, when it comes to clothes. Every time I go down one or two sizes, I buy myself pretty things. I didn't care before, because finding clothes and a size 28/30 that actually reflected Who I am was very nearly impossible. Even though it costs more money, it allows me to celebrate myself often. And since great adorable closer so hard to find in big sizes I know I can always sell off my old wardrobes, and get some seed money for the next round. I love clothes.

Even my elastic pants are getting too big to wear!

I love the fat acceptance movement! I remember that as I was psychologically and spiritually preparing for my sleeve surgery, going through a period of Feeling very angry that I had to have the surgery in order to learn to love my body, love myself. I became very keenly aware that I had been withholding love for myself because I didn't think I had a body that deserved love. This was not an intellectual thought, but a block inside of me. I didn't know how to love a fat body. I had been tortured and tormented my whole childhood for having a fat body. I was told by supposedly well-meaning family members horror stories about little girls who stomachs exploded, Lectured to eat more strawberries and less candy, and offered giant slices of cake when I felt sad. I can't help but wonder, how my life might've played out differently, if as a chubby little girl I was excepted as I had been, and not constantly told that it was not OK to be who and what I was. I wonder if I even really would've had a weight problem at all as I got older, if I had been allowed to be what I was without being made to feel that I was less than everybody else everywhere I went. By the time I was in third grade, it was very obvious to me that my fat body was not acceptable. By the time I was in fifth and sixth grade, I knew that my fat body made me unacceptable. And by the time I needed surgery, I knew it was because I had been stuck in this loop for 30 years, and I had internalized all the hatred other people had for my body. And I needed a whole lot more weight to separate my "self" from the hatred. The fat acceptance movement, is really about body positivity. It's about recognizing that there are many kinds of bodies, and none of them are innately bad wrong or ugly. As a public, we are extremely misinformed and poorly educated about fat, diet, body, and overall health. Our doctors in our surgeons are themselves severely miseducated, on the effect of lifestyle and diet not on just one kind of body but all bodies. The fat acceptance movement wants fat people to be comfortable in our culture. It wants fat bodies to be accommodated like other kinds of bodies are accommodated. It wants recognition that a fat body is not automatically an on healthy body despite the mythology of our culture. And at the end of the day, the fat acceptance movement is asking that fat bodies be allowed to exist without shame blame and ridicule.

I had my bariatric surgery done at Einstein bariatric Center. I can't say much for their ongoing support after surgery, but I will say this: my surgery was smooth, uncomplicated, and effective. I have had no complications, and I was treated very very well in the hospital. They have three different surgeons I think, that you can choose from, and these surgeons have been reviewed online by lots of people. In the Philadelphia area Einstein this definitely known to be one of the better hospitals.

He clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, when to comes to bariatric surgery. There is a lot of personal inner work to do around losing weight and keeping it off, but weight watchers doesn't do any of those things. Bariatric surgery doesn't just change your body. It changes your mindset. Being human and all that, even after sleeve you will sometimes fall into an old outdated habit, but your sleeve will hedge against the damage you will do in your temporary insanity. you will remember that unlike a diet, you have made a permanent change to your body, and there is no falling off the horse for any lengthy period of time. The sleeve procedure also removes the part of your stomach that produces the appetite hormone. This means that you have help that goes beyond your sheer sense of will, which, no matter how strong, will break eventually. The suppression of your appetite will help you to get and keep the weight off. There are plenty of doctors who would support your decision to have W LS. Find one.