Phinley

Oatmeal's a pretty solid staple food for me. Can be super low calorie depending on how you make it. Try keeping it bland in the early days. Use water or 50/50 skim milk and water instead of whole milk and just a pinch of salt and cinnamon with a dab of honey for flavour.

I tell anyone who asks. My ID photo is old so it comes up a lot too. My manager at my old job site got the bypass before me and he's the one who encouraged me to at least look into it as an option. Dude did me a huge solid with that and if I help anyone else out the same way then it's just paying it forward.

Total Daily Energy Expenditure. How many calories you use In a day.

Started expanding laterally when I was around 6. Looking back through old pictures, I reckon I hit obese at about 10 years old and stayed there until I was 26 when I had the sleeve done.

Got Earl Grey running through my veins in lieu of blood. A huge factor in my weight loss is that I'm perfectly happy with a nice cuppa over food.

No weight loss since August isn't really a plateau anymore, it's just eating maintenance. Nobody besides people with dwarfism or very short coma patients will maintain on 1000 calories so your counts are likely wrong. For calorie counting to work, you have to weigh or measure every single thing that passes your lips. No eyeballing portion sizes or mindlessly snacking on something and forgetting about it. If you're honest about it and still don't lose weight, get in touch with CERN because your body has figured out how to conjure energy from the Aether and they'd love to study you.

I'm over 2 years out and still don't feel physical hunger. I fasted for 5 days once to test it and never felt a single hunger pang. Some people just get lucky with their surgery and experience greatly diminished appetite compared to most.

Wish I'd turned to calorie counting earlier. So many weeks where I gained weight or maintained and I wondered "how the hell did that happen." Turns out a whole lot of things are way more calorie dense than you'd expect. I weigh and track my food now, paying attention to nutrition labels and all that jazz. I hit my goal a while ago and I'm still using calorie counting to maintain but getting on it earlier would've shaved a good couple months off my losing phase.

If you just rely on the physical restriction effect, you'll eventually be able to eat enough to maintain and eventually gain weight. That's where they get the 40-60% averages. If you use the surgery properly, as a hard reset on your diet to help you re-learn healthy, sustainable eating habits, you can lose however much you want. Chiming in here having lost 110% of excess weight and maintained that perfectly for a year now.

Yeah, I went through a short "what the hell have I done to myself" phase during the 2 week liquid only diet post-op. Went away when I internalised that there's no "undo" button and they can't put my stomach back in. No sense stressing over something you can't change. Then the pounds started dropping and it was only happy thoughts from there.

Got the sleeve at 25. Best decision I ever made.

Depends on the salad. If it's mostly lettuce and other leafy goodness, it compresses down to nothing when chewed while something loaded down with mushrooms, beans, broccoli and other more dense, fibrous vegetables it can keep me going for a good while.

I aimed for the exact centre of the healthy BMI range.

No, I never had any issues with it. Just cut it out when I started eating real food because there was better stuff to spend my calories on.

Yeah, my doc told me to start drinking juice. It's easy calories at a time when you're not getting much else in. I stopped once I was past the pureed food stage.