MacMadame

That's what ghrelin does to you. They've given it to normal-weighted guys who were full and they went nuts trying to eat more food. (They did the same thing with mice first--same result.) It also makes food look more appetizing. I'm looking forward to not having any/much. Now, I'm not discounting emotional eating or people with true food addictions. If you've got that and you don't deal with it, no WLS is going to be effective for you. But so many of us have been made to feel like our problems are all in our heads and that all we need is a little willpower and that just isn't accurate for most. If it was, WLS wouldn't be as effective as it is IMO.

Go, Chickie!

Sept. 22nd! It's not 100%. I'm going to call today and make sure they aren't going to move me due to not being able to get the OR.

There was nothing uncalm about my post. Do you want the long scientific explanation? Or the short one? The reality is that an obese person's physiology is different from those of the "normos" (as Jack calls them). We have 3 to 10x the amount of ghrelin in our bodies, for one thing. They've done studies that show that the brain activities in the part of the brain that registers satiety is less active in obese people compared to the normal weighted. These are just two examples of how the bodies of obese people work to keep them obese while the bodies of normal weighted people do not. This is why 90-99% of the people who diet and exercise without getting surgery don't lose the weight but then they get surgery and they can. WLS will cut down on your ghrelin and does other things to our bodies that we don't 100% understand that allows us to feel satiety and to be satisfied on much less food. Many WLS patients report feeling satiety for the very first time in their lives, in fact. If you never/rarely feel full, if you are always hungry, then dieting and exercise are like putting your finger in a dyke but never repairing that dyke. Eventually the water will pour out no matter how much self-control and willpower you've got. I agree, but that's a different question all together. That's about prevention. I don't know what it takes to prevent. But denying/discouraging WLS for the young or to the "only" obese doesn't prevent obesity. Once someone gets to be obese, prevention is too late for them.

Good luck, Laura! My date is 9/22 just a few days earlier. I admit at this point, I'm a little scared...

I agree. What's the point of having these BMI ranges and pushing people to get into them if they freak out when we do? Well it's not all bad. I seemed to have dropped 3 lb. and it doesn't appear to be coming back like I figured it would. In fact, today my scale flashed 199.5 before settling on 200.5. Too bad it's not my official weigh in day.

I went on my first diet at 13. Some people are obese or even morbidly obese in HS. I've been seriously obese since around age 25 and now I'm over 50. So that's 25 years I've been fruitlessly struggling with this problem. If only I was 25 now I could have cut out a lot of misery and unhealthy living. So I ask: how many years does someone have to struggle with their weight and be unhealthy before it's acceptable to stop doing the things that don't work and start doing something that does? 20? 10? 5? I say if you are obese and you have been on one serious diet where you got to goal or close to it and couldn't keep the weight off (or alternatively, if you couldn't even get to goal after a really great effort), that you've proven you are one of the 95-98% who can not lose and keep it off with diet & exercise alone. If that happens by the time you are 20, then why should you have to wait any longer? Heck, there are kids younger than that who have been dieting since the age of 8. If you are 16, are 100 lb. or more overweight, and have been dieting since you were 8, then you've been dieting unsuccessfully for 8 years. How much longer should someone in that situation have to wait? The only reason I don't like teenagers and younger kids getting WLS is because they are still growing and we don't necessarily know all the implications of WLS on a person's growth. But a WLS that is restrictive only is relatively safe and could help them maintain a normal weight while they are growing. I can't fault someone who has been struggling with their weight for years and is morbidly obese from getting WLS even if they are fairly young. If we had another alternative to offer them, that would be different. But right now WLS is our only effective treatment. So their choices are WLS or obesity. I can't fault a young person for choosing WLS given the alternative.

Sorry, I've been AWOL. I was letting some guy I just met put a camera up my butt. :biggrin: They found some polyps too so now I have to come back and get it done again in a few years. :smile:

This is freaky. I've never heard of Twitter until today when I was reading a very old Newsweek in the waiting room of the doctor's office. Then I see this post! Anyway, I don't see any particular need to be on it or that somehow it will help me communicate with WLS patients better. Sorry.

I didn't think anyone said that. I was worried the OP would think I meant that. So I was happy that no one was taking it that way.

I think for most of us, there are 3 concerns when it comes to long-term: 1) Will I lose all my weight 2) Will I keep it off long-term 3) Will I find myself getting sick as a direct results of this surgery For #1 the 5 year study done by LapSF says that you will lose your weight. For #2, you can regain with any surgery if you don't make the lifestyle changes. But that people are finding with a sleeve is that if the boughie size is small enough, the sleeve doesn't stretch out and the long-term regain stats are good. For #3, partial gastrectomies have been done on ulcer and stomach cancer patients since the 70s and those people go on to have healthy lives with no direct impact from the surgery. The only thing to watch out for is osteoporosis, which can be solved by taking a Calcium supplement Here is a link to LapSF's 5 year study. Although they studied people for 5 y ears, they only reported results from when they started using the smaller boughies. Note that each line is a set of patients. So one set of data is for patients 3 years out from the sleeve, one for patients two years out and one for patients 1 year out. It's not the weight lost by a single set of patients at 1 year, 2 year and 3 year like I thought when I first read it. SSAT - SSAT 2008 Annual Meeting Abstracts - Laparoscopic Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy for Morbid Obesity: a Report of a Five-Year Experience with 750 Patients</b> The interesting thing is that the 3 year patients had a higher BMI on average and so lost more absolute weight even if their EWL % was lower. The 3 and 2 year patients lost more absolute weight than the RnY group they were compared to, in fact. I think that's promising because it shows you *can* lose a lot of weight if you have to.

Your welcome. And I just want to clarify that I wasn't saying the OP should get her head shrunk because she's nuts and would clearly mess up a sleeve too. I edited a few times to make it clearer I wasn't saying that, but tone can be so hard to convey online. But not all WLS fails because of physiological reasons so it's good to examine that part of it if you are in the position of not having lost a lot with your surgery. So it was more of a general statement than a specific one.

I haven't even got WLS yet and I've found a potassium tablet in my poop. They are coated and sometimes they don't dissolve like they are supposed to.

Your head? Heh heh. You walked right into that one, plain!

The sleeve stomach is more the size of a man's index finger. It holds about 4-5 oz. by year end. It doesn't stretch out more than that because it's made from the more muscly part of the stomach, not the stretchy part. [in the early days, they used a bigger size and those stomachs did sometimes stretch out, but the new smaller size doesn't.] As for what it feels like to be full, it's a normal functioning stomach, just smaller. So, for example, you can wash food out of it with liquids about as well as you can with a regular stomach. (Which is to say, you can a little, but not really, not like with a band.) You still aren't supposed to drink while eating because of the size -- you can't get in all your nutrients if you fill up your sleeve with Water. I think if you weren't able to make the lifestyle changes necessary with a band, then you might want to look at the DS as well as the sleeve. Both surgeries cut out the portion of the stomach that produces ghrelin, the hormone that stimulates your appetite, so hunger control is a more sure thing than it is with a band. However, the DS also has a malabsorption component that allows people to continue to eat similar types of food to what they ate before -- it's more Atkins based than South Beach diet -- which the sleeve (and the band and RnY, for that matter) work best with. Which is not to say there aren't food restrictions -- too many carbs make some DS patients have smelly farts and diarrhea. As far as being reversible is concerned, the only reason to remove a band is that it's causing health problems. A VS isn't going to do that because it's a real stomach, just smaller. It turns out you don't even need a stomach to live (my aunt lost hers to cancer) so you shouldn't be having health problems just by having a little one. Most of the sleeve complications come early on and are fixable -- over production of acid, strictures, etc. Other complications are the sort of things that can happen to anyone and are extremely rare. The only serious complication is a leak and that generally isn't an issue after two weeks. Your stomach heals around the staple line and then you can't "bust a gut" any more than you will bust your current stomach if you eat too much. The DS does sometimes come with health problems because of the malabsorption. In that case, the intestinal switch part can be reversed but not the stomach part. RnY can technically be reversed but it's a big scary operation and is usually only done if your RnY is killing you. Even then, you may have an atrophied pylorus value and scar tissue that keeps you from having a real stomach like you had before. The band is easier to reverse but it sometimes causes permanent problems, too, because of scar tissue that forms around it. You need to accept that if you get/have one, your stomach may never go back to the way it is before if it has to be removed. In the end, being reversible doesn't seem like a big deal to me. If you aren't willing to commit to WLS because it's not reversible, then they shouldn't have a band either IMO. WLS is a big commitment and you need to go into it thinking it's for life, because it almost always is. But the big thing you need to think about if you want to revise your surgery is why exactly did it fail... if it didn't fail mechanically, if your head is the problem, then whatever you revise to will fail as well IMO. You can eat around any WLS even the a bazooka surgery like the DS. If you didn't like the full feeling of the band, maybe you'll find something to not like about another WLS and you'll eat around that too. The surgery only works on your guts... the head work needs to come from somewhere else.

I have a hiatal hernia. I'm not surprised. The report said it should be asymptomatic but something has to be causing this horrible heartburn I've got and since even water aggravates it, I'm pretty sure it's the hernia. Plus I was tested for that h.pylori.whatever stuff and I haven't got it.

That doesn't mean his 99% isn't his own opinion vs. having sat down and compiled all the stats from his practice. In fact, him being concerned about it makes it all the more likely that it *feels* like that many to him. We tend to notice what concerns us more. 99% is just not a believable number when the national average is only around 40%. That's not to say that it isn't a high number or not a problem, just that I bet if he actually compiled some stats, he'd get a number like 87.4 or 72.1 -- something really high but not so high as to include pretty much anyone who is married and has WLS.

Sounds like one of those 67.3% of all stats are made up stats.

Many insurance companies prefer the 6 month diet to be done by your PCP anyway. Why not see if you can get into see your PCP earlier? Just makes sure they know what documentation is needed and do it properly every month.

Goodness, yes.

It's a reprint of some article that appeared in Self magazine. So it's not really from what I'd consider a credible journalistic source. And it shows.

Having good karma doesn't mean being a door mat. Tell them that they owe you some $$ for their screw-ups and then find another surgeon!

Unfortunately the OH software sucks. I've learned to work around it but if another site popped up for sleevesters that had better software and decent traffic, I'd be all over it!

That would make me mad too.

You really are a trouble-maker, Froggi. Do you enjoy making people feel unwanted and defensive?