MacMadame

I only know WLS surgeons in SoCal. Sorry.

I lost 105 pounds. 32 was pre-op (It took 7 months) and the rest was post-op. I may still be losing but I consider myself at goal. I'm not actively trying to lose, but I do want to put on more muscle and lose a bit more fat.

Yes, absolutely normal. It's part of why Protein shakes are hard for many of us to stomach during this time.

Isn't Juarez one of the cities that is still under a travel advisory?

I track all my food on MyFitnessPal.com. I still mostly only eat 3-4 oz. at a time but lately I've been able to eat more at lunch. Unlike most people, I start out the day wide-open and get tighter as the day progresses. My schedule has recently changed and I haven't worked out a new routine. But meals such as lunch or dinner tend to be meat and veggies. I sometimes have a few bites of potato. Once in a while I'll do Soup or a salad... I put a lot of cottage cheese and egg on the salad if it's from a salad bar and I get salad with grilled chicken if I'm at a restaurant. Snacks tend to be yogurt, cottage cheese, cheese sticks, nuts or trail mix, Protein hot chocolate or a Protein Bar. Sometimes I do fruit or beef Jerky. Breakfast is almost always a Protein shake. Sometimes I put fruit in it and sometimes I do not. When I work out, I do trail mix, gels, sports drinks (I mix in a compatible Protein Drink to up the protein), Protein Bars and bananas. I'm still experimenting with that as well. At this point, I still don't really eat bread or Pasta. I do sometimes have pizza and will eat the crust. But I've never been a big bread person and pasta now sits too heavy in my sleeve. I exercise 7-8x a week on 5 different days but I'm trying to get up to 9-10x a week. I'm training for a Half-Ironman and I need to do more than I've been doing. I just started working out with a personal trainer and I run 3-4 times a week, bike 2-3 and swim 1 time. I need to get another swim and another strength session in there!

Socal? How about Dr. Owen? He has a good rep and he's recently started doing the sleeve: Bariatric Surgeon Profile - Milton L. Owens M.D.

I vote for cock! (Just kidding.)

Here are some links to different cards: RestaurantCard Restaurant Card Bariatric Surgery

Six under five because that means later you'll have six teenagers. :confused1:

Hey, I'm a lifetime member of Jenny Craig, too! Not that it did me a bit of good. I hate the word "tool" though. It has other conotations for me. But I can't think of a better word. It really is a helper and doesn't do all the work so "tool" is accurate. But I just think "he's such a tool" when I here it! :confused1:

Hey, I use the food diary that way too. I put in everything I plan to eat and see how it adds up and then make choices for the unplanned part that balance it. For example, if I put in all my food I bring to work (snacks and lunch) and my breakfast, I can see that I would have to eat 40 g of protein for dinner to be okay. THAT is not going to happen, so I'll change out some snacks. Or, if my calories are higher than I want, I'll eat something lower calorie for dinner.

Dr. Cirangle is great! I think he has "magic hands". (The nurses who work with him rave about his skill.) He can be blunt, which some people don't like, but I prefer it, because I can sense the concern behind it.

I think the best is to do both. Mix up some interval training with some endurance work. The intervals make you faster so you get more distance in in the same amount of time and the endurance work increases your engine so you can go for longer periods of time.

go here: Couch to 5k - C25K Running Program

Obsessed is a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated. :biggrin0:

Update: I am now weaning off the prilosec. We'll see what happens.

All teaching hospitals are like that... you hardly ever see the surgeon and a lot of the people you do see are gone in a few years as they get trained and moved on. I had a blood clot in a teaching hospital (The one they modeled House after. Hee.) and it was actually kind of fun, but that's a short-term deal. I made a decision not to use Stanford or USCF up here in NorCal precisely because I wanted to have a close and long-term relationship with my surgeon. So far, I've seen my surgeon every month at our support group (he runs it) and I've had 5 follow-up visits in 9 months. Not every surgeon is that hands-on and I love it.

I got a card with my sleeve. It also has a picture of my surgery on it and info for the ER, if you have a complication, and my surgeon's contact info. Restaurants don't have to honor them though so I never use it. I just get a to-go box. But you can download your own card from the internet if you want. The card can sometimes make it easier to explain...

Yep. I was afraid of the sleeve at first because of the permanency. I knew people who had WLS and had horrible problems and so I thought I wanted something that I could reverse if that happened to me. But I realized over time that WLS is permanent, even the band (if you take it out -- you regain) and also that the horrible problems that people with bands get are all *caused* by the band. It's not like bypass where people have problems caused by Vitamin deficiencies. The other thing I learned from watching people with bands is: -not everyone gets restriction. Without restriction, the band doesn't work. I didn't want to pay all that money and then still be hungry all the time. I could do that without having surgery! -even people who follow all the rules and never do anything wrong have problems with their bands like slippage -while the sleeve has more serious complications upfront than a band, the band has many, many more long-term problems. Overall, I think the sleeve is actually safer than a band when you look 10 years out -the upkeep of the band would eventually frustrate me and I'd be bad about getting fills and unfills the farther out I got -weight loss with a sleeve is better on average and definitely faster on average. That's very motivating. -while the band would be cheaper in the short run, it would end up costing just as much as a sleeve in the long run -the resurgery rate with a band is quite high and I'm old enough that I only wanted one WLS surgery

This is why I don't often say "I wish I'd done this earlier." I say things like "I wish it hadn't taken me this long to get to this point."

My surgeon was using a 48 f and his patients were regaining their weight at 2-3 years out. He uses a 32 f now and this is less of a problem. The regain stats are more in line with the DS and better than bypass and the initial weight loss is similar to bypass. (He's done over 1000 of the things and has been doing them for over 7 years.) Because of that, I wouldn't use a surgeon who was using a boughie over 30 something.

Like me! I could kick myself for taking so long to get to this point. I wasted all those years. But... nothing I can do about it now, right?

You aren't wrong, but I think of it slightly differently. My slider foods are foods that I can *always* eat no matter want because they *always* go down. So Protein bars are a slider food for me. For me, I have no issue with dieting. I'm actually pretty good at it. Maintenance scares me more and is more difficult. However, if you don't like being "on a diet" think of it a "retraining your body on how to eat". Because that's something we have to do. I look at what normal people at a normal weight do. And they definitely watch what they eat and cut back at times. So we are going to have to too!

My feeling is that my calcium related numbers are much better NOW than they were pre-op because I've improved my Vitamin D numbers and stopped taking the blood pressure meds which were depleting the calcium in my blood. (PTH was fine though.) I think if you are conscientious about your labs, you can avert most of this stuff. Plus most of us will end up on more than 1000 calories a day long term. I'm already up to 1400 most days.

I think it's because deep down I want to lose a few more pounds. But I don't want to continue to eat 1200-1400 calories a day, either.