MacMadame

I like Steve's new sig line about not having surgery wars at home!

I think greek yogurt tastes a bit like sour cream. So I always put in some sweetener.

Well I didn't go to Mexico and my insurance didn't pay so I'm going to assume, if they had paid, I wouldn't have gone to Mexico either. :tongue_smilie:

A stoma is an artificial opening. RnYers have it between their pouch and their intestines. Bandsters have it when the band cinches their stomach. Foaming is when you fill up your pouch too much or too fast and lots of saliva gets made but there is no place for it to go so you start spitting up foam. Sliming is another name for it. It's a slimy foam.

It's been true for me. I am more sensitive to "artificial" flavors in things and I find a lot of stuff I used to like is now too sweet for me.

We're not malabsorbing so we shouldn't have extra "stuff" coming out. Mine are about the same except they tend towards a green color more easily.

As long as the fundus is fully dissected, the ghrelin making part of the stomach is gone. I do think that some DS patients with their larger sleeves don't end up with the fundus fully dissected. But I also think that may be because of technique in some cases. I don't think the surgeons realized how important that was until recently.

Many surgeons don't even require a patient with a BMI of 39 to do the liver shrinking diet. In fact, if your surgeon can't get around your liver at your lower weight, I'd fire him. (But I'm sure he can.) As for why some have you do a liquid diet, it's because they think it's easier for you to do it that way. There aren't choices where you could eat something you think is low carb or low calorie, but it isn't. I don't agree, but that's the rationale behind it...

I haven't watched tv in months! Right now I'm only getting 6 hours of sleep a night though. This is not good. Something has to give and I think it will be the internet.

Yes. With the sleeve, the first thing is trying to convince themselves that they need the biggest sleeve their surgeon is willing to give them. But it takes other forms too and you see it with all the different surgery types. But you aren't an early post-op with a very swollen tummy that can only hold so much. It's a completely different situation. OTOH, maybe if you ate more Protein, you could have run on 1000 calories a day. :wink0:

This comes up a lot. So I saved one my posts about it. (Yes, I'm lazy.) Here it is: I honestly don't care what I end up weighing. I care about how I look, what size I wear, and what percentage my body fat is. My first goal was just to get to a normal BMI and then worked on my body fat until it got on the low side of normal. Now I just want to look "cut" and/or "buff." At one of my support group meetings, the topic was "Goal" and we talked about setting a goal and also about maintenance. For setting a goal, I thought we were given some really helpful guidelines. Using BMI: A healthy BMI is considered to be anything between 18.5 and 24.9. However, that's a big range and where you should fall in it will depend on a lot of factors. Met Life says the "optimal" BMI is 21.4. That's optimal in terms of insurance -- longevity vs. healthiness and other factors. If you just take longevity into account, 22-24 is the range with the best longevity. Using Body Fat %: Acceptable range for women is 17-34% But the lower 20s are the healthiest. Other considerations: What can you maintain? It's better to have a higher goal and maintain it than to be bouncing all over the place, starving yourself one week and bingeing the next because you can't maintain your goal. Then again, don't sell yourself short ... WLS is different from dieting and people often get much lower than they ever thought they could. Is there a size you used to be that you would like to be again? A weight you remember feeling great at? How much work are you willing to do long-term? How often do you want to eat treats, how much do you want to exercise? It may be less in the long-run than during the weight loss phase and you may find that you'd rather be a bit heavier and not have to work so hard. Or you may turn into an athlete and be able to get down much lower than you ever dreamed of. And everything in between. Bounce Back: A lot of people end up 10 lb. over their lowest weight. So maybe you want to adjust your goal downward to account for that. Plastic Surgery: PS say that they usually end up removing 10-30 lb. of excess skin and fat cells when they do PS on WLS patients. So you may want to make your goal higher so you aren't beating yourself up trying to get down to a weight that you can't get to because you've got 10 lb. of excess skin hanging off you. When you take all these things into consideration, it should give you a ball park figure that seems good to you that you can set as a goal. Oh and here are some calculators that might help you: Calculator Body Mass Index Happy Weight Calculator: Calculators: Self.com They all use different formulas, some more scientific than others.

Eh, my cholesterol was 195 when I decided to get surgery and it's 131 now. I find my cholesterol goes down when my calorie consumption goes down. It doesn't seem to matter what the calories are made up of.

My surgeon also suggests people use protein shakes so that they can be freer to try other things -- like veggies -- at meals. I have one pretty much every day for breakfast and he thinks that's great.

Oh, I see it on the sleeve boards. I see it all over OH and it drives. me. crazy. I even wrote a whole post about it on my blog! Fatty Fights Back: MTYHBUSTERS: Starvation Mode

I did my BRIC class in the AM. We did some speed work for our run. Then I did a track workout in the PM. More speedwork, but the focus was on cadence. I finally have a good one!

I'm trying to figure out how many calories I need. I've been eating more fruit and I want to eat more veggies too. Today I had some bacon on my cheeseburger. Does that make you feel better? :Cry: But no bun. I never ate the bun pre-op either so I'm not going to start now. My spreadsheets say I should maybe eat 1800-2000 but that just feels like too much. I'm eating about 1600-1800 right now. The main problem is that most of my numbers are guesses. I'm not sure what my BMR is. I wear a heart rate monitor off and on when I workout to get an idea of how many calories I burn, but it can really vary. Plus today the HRM went nuts and either read 0 or 200+. So I don't trust any of these numbers. I think I'm going to eat at this level for a few weeks and see what happens. If I am still losing, I can add in more stuff. I look right about how I want to look minus the loose skin but I wouldn't mind have 5 lb. of wiggle room. Oh and remember me when the DSers on OH start blathering on about how you can't lose all your weight with a VSG. :drool5:

My program advises to stay under 800 for the entire time you are losing. There are some exceptions to that. For example, when I was training for my first triathlon (about 7 hours of high intensity exercise a week), my surgeon wanted me to up my Protein to 100 g a day and that caused my calories to go up to about 900. Then, when I upped my workouts even more, I got to up my protein to 120 g a day and that caused my calories to go up to 1200. But I still lost weight because I was working out so much. You need to eat enough to have the energy to do your daily activities IMO. If you are so tired that you take naps all the time, don't exercise as hard, and otherwise conserve energy, you are lowering your calorie deficit. But if you have plenty of energy, all more calories will do is slow down your weight loss. It's a myth that you "need to eat more to lose weight". That advice is based on a combination of wishful thinking and misunderstanding of some studies that have been done around this subject. If you operate at a calorie deficit, you WILL lose weight. That's just physics. :Cry:

Actually, lots of places charge more! My surgeon charges $395 which is *low* for this area, believe it or not. Anyway, what insurance company do you have? If you have BCBS of CA (Anthem?) or UHC, then I would agree with the surgeon's office flat out. Those guys are butheads about the sleeve! But not all of them are and many will give it to you on appeal, it just depends.

I'm so busy, I never have time to eat except planned meals. So get lots of hobbies! And, if you are tempted by stuff you've decided not to eat, then I find it's a lot easier to deal with if I leave where the stuff is. Since my surgery, "out of sight, out of mind" works well for me. (Pre-op, not so much.)

Please do not personally attack people. It's against the rules.

I got my Talbot's bag back!

I get put in the hospital for having anorexia? (I know, I shouldn't joke about that.) But the suit is supposed to fit if you are 98-116 pounds, so I think I'm safe. I will probably lose a few more, but not *that* much more.

CA - only 24.1 obese. But 37.1 are overweight. It looks like about 1/3 are normal and 1/3 are overweight.

I felt fat today. Why? I was 115 on the scale earlier in the week but today is my official weigh in day and I was up to 116. Lame! But it's the way we are wired, I think. All my never been fat girl friends all hate their bodies. Even the XS ones.

My lastest NSV.... In late Feb, I bought a wetsuit -- size M. Today it's too big and I had to buy another one... size XS!!