GotProlactinoma

It feels unbelievable. I still CANNOT BELIEVE I could go into any shop in the mall and find something that fits. When I could buy at LuluLemon I think I head tears in my eyes. They only go up to a 12. I’m not crazy about shopping but I CAN buy regular clothes. The biggest thrill for me clothes wise is I AM WEARING CUT OFF JEANS and I look normal. I’m not thin, I’m normal. I can ice skate or run along the beach with my child. WHAT?? And I don’t look ridiculous. And I love just playing and running and whatever. I jump on a scooter and go ride with the kids. Unbelievable. It feels so good. I have a new relationship with food. My breakfast is always the same and always with the eggs as protein. I need it. It just IS. My food is fuel, also mid day I need that protein powder still, which I add to full fat plain Greek yogurt, maybe throw a couple berries and some flax seed in, take it in my lunch. So the first half of the work day, food is just fuel based on the protein I will need. Dinner is protein and veggies, pretty utilitarian, but I get into cooking as I always have, and it might be any kind of ethnic taste. And my dessert or late night snack is always either my homemade seed based granola with raw milk, eaten out of a tiny snack container so the amount is always the same, or my beloved 92% dark chocolate which is not candy, it’s not even as sweet as fruit. It is just a fatty, healthy, antioxidant snack. But to me it’s chocolate and yummy because I don’t eat anything sweet any more. please believe me cause it’s true: I hope every day that I will get my workout in. 4-5 days in the week, I do. I care for my mom and kids so there are times I don’t. I actually really want to do it now. I never thought this would be me. ‘So the obsession is positive, if that makes any sense. Instead of being worried or concerned or guilty about my eating or working out, it’s just part of my life now fo real. And it seems weird. I hope I can stay like this forever. It’s only the end of year one.

I am a July 2017 sleever. My goal weight was 140 lbs, and by June I was 144, which sometimes goes up to 145. So I didn’t get down to it. But I eat a nice amount in a day, I’m never hungry (except right before I eat of course), I have my little snacks which I don’t need to feel ashamed of, as their macros and calories fit in with a healthy diet. So my weight loss counselor told me as she graduated me, that I don’t need to worry about the numbers of the scale any more. I still feel I have too much fat and skin in the lower half of the body. I do plan on surgery to help with some of the trouble spots and skin. And I work out now, I FINALLY believe all those thin people who used to say they loved working out. Didn’t you also think they were lying? Lol. Now I am one of them. I still can’t believe it. I don’t overdo it but I like to do some kind of workout or exercise at least once a day, even if it’s just stretching for 20 mins some days. The surgery was one of the best things I have ever done for myself. Which I did more for my kids than for me, because my blood pressure was getting so bad and I wanted them to have a mother for a long time. But it ended up giving me a new lease on life. I did not lose 100 lbs in 6 months. It took me a whole year to lose 60 little pounds. But that is pretty much what I needed to lose. I could go down 10 lbs but maybe I will after body shaping, skin removing surgery, and maybe I won’t. My face and arms and chest are pretty small and I am not sure I want them any narrower. At my age it just makes you look old. I thought losing so slowly would mean I wouldn’t lose my hair. I was wrong. I lost about 75% of it by last November and by January I was getting vitamin and mineral IVs and extensions in my meager hair (which looked very post chemo). Still have the extensions and also a ton of 2-3 inch new hair growing back in. Whew. My advice to anyone starting out would be to take full advantage of your surgery recovery period when you cannot est normally, and DROP ALL SWEET FOODS PERIOD. Go very low carb, and make your carbs be fibrous veggies and seeds etc. Avoid sweet tastes. Many Bariatric products are full of sweeteners, keeping your palate and gut bugs preferring sweet tastes. Avoid them. Seek the salty tasty ones. Use unsweetened, unflavored protein powders. My doctor’s Nutritionist told us to avoid fruit for 6 months. I did. Thereafter, only 1/2 c berries or less a day. You don’t ever need fruit while you are losing weight. It’s a great opportunity to reset your diet. The gut bugs who love sugar will die out and they are the ones who give you that craving. Take advantage. Another diet thing I learned from keeping meticulous track of what I ate was that 50% of my diet was fat. Healthy fat. And I continued to slowly lose the weight, almost daily, by eating the meats, eggs, dairy, and butter that I ate. All from healthy, Grass fed, pastured animals. Raw whole milk. A very clean healthy diet with a ton of fat. I just steadily kept losing. I’d heard fat doesn’t make you fat, but now I KNOW it. Good luck to all. One of these days I will post my before and after pics and measurements. Sorry such a novel here,

I’m glad I react to msg so I can’t eat it anyway, but even if you don’t react to msg, it is addictive and makes you want that next bite. Best to avoid anything with that strong umami flavor of msg. Most chips have it, goldfish and cheezit crackers have it, all packaged or canned soups have it. Msg can hide under many names and is often in products that actually say No MSG on the front. Legally it can hide under the words “flavor”, “natural flavoring,” “spice” “yeast extract,” etc. I can’t eat any product with any of those in the ingreds.

I almost want to forget there is protein in cheese! Because even those solid cheese snacks like Parmesan crisps don’t fill me up st all. One year out, I need to stay with those solid proteins to feel that fullness! Cheese doesn’t do it enough, sadly!

Let me add another angle to this, for all formerly obese here who had wls. Did a doctor talking about your obesity lead you toward getting the solution you needed?? Because I was the only one who had to get around to deciding this. No doctor helped me decide. Maybe 2 out of a zillion doctors mentioned my weight, in indirect ways, and I was nothing but offended. For a different problem one doc suggested a pharmaceutical that “people love because they lose weight on it.” The drug had ghastly side effects. i think that if the patient has a condition or symptom that would be helped by their losing weight, IT MUST BE MENTIONED. As in “here are some of the things you can do for your [knee, blood pressure, whatever]: rest, exercise, lose 10 lbs, ...” etc. Work it in and make it easy. Sure, they need to lose 50-100 lbs. No one can face that. But if you suggest losing 10 lbs, maybe they can do it. If I were a doc or nurse and I’d HAD wls, I’d sure as poop tell everyone all the time. I talk to people who happen to be obese and DO casually mention I had wls last summer, and move on, but they often do ask me about it, and I RAVE. And I answer their specific questions. I am one of them, I was one of them. I want to share how kind of easy it was to get healthy, how good my experience has been. I used to dream the excess fat would melt away, and now it actually did. So sine you OP had this surgery and had success, you can talk about YOU and maybe you will stimulate more discussion. Not “you might like to hear about weight loss surgery” but “omg, I need to run out and have a bit of my peanuts, running low on protein” and follow it up with how you keep up on your breaks because you had wls and you need protein every few hours, say. Make it totally about you and see what happens. It works for me, out in the world. Then pretty soon usually we two are “together” as obese only my obesity has recently slipped out. If that makes sense. no doc or nurse would have had the right affect on me if they’d been heavy handed (whoops pun) with me on losing weight. It was when my blood pressure went sky high for several months that I came around to what I needed to do.

I’ve gone a year now since surgery and haven’t tried alcohol. Besides surgery, I reset my diet to not include sugars, or very very little. If I were ever to have a drink at a social gathering, what would be the least sweet at all? I couldn’t handle straight up scotch or vodka, I am not a drinker. Obviously no beer or wine. What cold be diluted with lemon juice and water, say? Just wondering. If I don’t find anything palatable and not sweet, I might never drink again. Oh, maybe a Bloody Mary. Sounds yuck though.

Improvement over hip aches and back aches definitely. Haven’t been dx’ed With arthritis but that is probably what it was. Being lighter is so amazing for the body. I care for my mother with Alzheimer’s and she is obese at 85. The heaviness makes life so much harder than the age.

The hunger part is legit. The craving part is fairly wrong. Cravings come from the intestinal bacteria, the bad ones who want us to eat sugar. They are extremely powerful. The only way to shut them up is to kill them off by not eating anything that tastes sweet. In fact, they are so powerful that most people won’t stop eating things that taste sweet. Me included, up until surgery. Since I knew I would be stopping eating for a while, I made sure I reset my intestinal biome. The only sweetness in my diet after surgery was raw milk, which isn’t very sweet, and inulin powder, a prebiotic to feed the good gut bugs. The good ones like fiber from veggiesand potatoes, and since we couldn’t eat anything like that on our water plus liquid protein post surgery diet, I just added a tbsp of inulin to my protein drinks. I used unflavored natural whey protein, drank water, mixed the whey with either raw milk or water, and eventually when I started eating ate only proteins, and a bite or two of veg. No fruit for 6 months. No grains. Some seeds, some beans, nothing sweet. Now I eat 1/2 c fruit a day, a year out and pretty much near goal. No breads or sweets. 92% dark chocolate is my jam. So I don’t crave sweets at all. When I am hungry it’s because I need my protein. Or the guts bugs needs some seeds, or some cooked and cooled potato (can be reheated before eating). No cravings. And it is effortless because I took away all sweets. If I Taste something sweet (I tried a few times) it makes me feel sick, makes my vision blurry. So I don’t even try. If you haven’t had surgery yet, I wholeheartedly advise you to stay away from frankenfoods with fake sugars and anything that tastes sweet. It will help you in the maintaining phase to no longer have those same gut bugs begging you for sugar. Mine beg me for roasted root veg or toasted pumpkin seeds.

You look great. How has it been, how much help do you have and need? How is the pain factor? What made you decide to do all that together, and do you still think that was a good decision? I’m planning how I will divide these things up,and I appreciate the feedback. As I now see it, and being scared, I am planning on starting with only the boobs.

I stopped all foods that had any sweet taste post surgery. I wanted to reset my gut bugs because sweet cravings come from the bad gut bugs who insist you continue eating sweet things. So my protein was NorCal organic grass fed whey powder, PLAIN. I missed it with raw milk (something I am used to, not for starting anew right after surgery, but it was so good for me and has some probiotics in it naturally). You can mix it with water. It wasn’t about tasting good, it was about eating to live. after a while though I found it was best to mix protein powder with plain full fat organic Greek yogurt. A very small volume gives you SO MUCH PROTEIN. And now almost a year later, it is my go to way of getting in all my protein. Sometimes I will with in some prebiotics like a tbsp of flax seed or inulin. Perfect food that tastes plain and not sweet. You eat it for what it does for you. Gives you strength, gets rid of your hunger. You know how good it is for you.

Enough wonderful, supportive messages are here but I just wanted to add one tinything: some nutritionists don’t emphasize the gut bugs and their effect on our moods and minds. This is newish science so they might not be taught it in school, but mental health studies are starting to come around. All of us after weight loss surgery have thrown our poor gut bugs to the wind. Good populations might have died out from our lack of food for them. Bad might be growing, or just different species are starting to war for control of our immune systems. What you can do to encourage the good populations are maybe some children’s chewable probiotics in tiny quantity, and a teaspoon or so of inulin (powder from Jerusalem chokes, not to be confused with INSULIN) or potato starch in each protein drink to feed the gut bugs, even in the after surgery days. See if chewable kids probiotics plus prebiotic powder doesn’t lift the mood more. We can’t survive without gut bugs and when they are happy, we are happier too. and once we get into eating real foods, while we definitely have to concentrate on protein, we must always feel the gut bacteria with the starches they like. They don’t need much. So if you have 3 tbsp of scrambled eggs say, add a tsp of cooked and cooled potato to it. (Once it’s cooled it can be rewarmed as well, but cooked and cooled root veggies have a lot of the resistant starch the gut bugs need) They are using good gut biome care to help treat schizophrenia and bipolar. It can help everyone.

This is just me but I would never supplement calcium because it once gave me a kidney stone. But I drank raw milk (did not tell doc) within days of surgery, little sips with my unsweetened whey protein powder. I did have the calcium patches but I never used them. I did not supplement iron because I don’t believe in supplementing iron unless you are anemic. And I did weekly IVs at a natural doctor’s office - meyer’s cocktails. For the first 4 weeks. So I wouldn’t get depleted of vitamins and minerals.

Right now, tasty food is not important. Rest, and getting those sips of water, are. Put some unsweetened protein powder into water (I used raw milk because I love it) or something not sweet. Try sipping warm bone broth. Fluids, a bit of protein, rest. I promise you one day you will enjoy food again but this is your MOMENT TO RESET YOUR EATING. Eating got us into trouble. Now you are starting anew with a new stomach and you get a reset. If you do this right, you won’t be craving sweets any more and you will spend the next year just losing weight and getting into shape. sweet foods used to be our friends but we have new friends now. Rest and get ready. It’s going to be a good year for you, but you’re recovering from major surgery so go easy on yourself. I couldn’t get enough water or protein in at first. It gets better. Distract yourself with shows and books and walk your hallway and sip your water. Im almost one year from surgery and I promise you won’t have any regrets. It gets easier and life gets a lot nicer. And you’re on your way.

Wow! Congrats! Weight just flew off of you. I’m almost a year out and lost 60 lbs!

Definitely notice and do cringe at how it is so, that people interact less and compliment less with people who are fat. When I was young, I was thin and shapely. Then the kids and the obesity-making prolactinoma (a pituitary tumor that has a side effect of obesity, yay). Now it’s almost a year out and people are definitely nicer to me 60+ lbs down. And it does kind of hurt to think fat people aren’t getting a normal amount of attention from the world. So I’m choosing to turn it around and give heavier people I see more eye contact, more smiles, more interaction.

Reading so many clothes ones, I’ll add: I have bought a few nicer smaller pantiesover the last year as I lost. But my old cotton ones still sort of worked so I didn’t overhaul them. Now that I can wear actual dresses without longline “shorts” under them to protect the chafing thighs, I PUT ON ONE OF THE OLD PANTIES AND IT WAS FALLING DOWN under the dress! So I ordered as a surgiversary gift a whole set of new undies and the others are trashed as soon as the new ones arrive! Another NSV from today: I found out that working out flattens the earth. I walked my daughter up to her first day of camp. Same place as last year. I had to hike up this hill to her group. Same area this year, but no hot sweaty hike up the hill.... I didn’t even realize it was slightly uphill. It was Everest last year; this year it’s as easy to walk as a flat sidewalk. Yeah!

I eat low carb and no “non-healthy” carbs. I mainly eat carbs for the gut bugs because they keep us healthy and they need starchy veg carbs. Go for clean, healthy versions. Potatoes and other root vegetables. Seeds (and nuts which I am allergic to). Beans. I do put some oats into my homemade granola. And of course all veggies, cooked and raw. That is all the carbs you need. first you eat your protein, then you add to each meal something from that list. Cooked and cooled starchy root veggies are very good food for your gut bacteria and will keep you healthy with good moods. We can’t forget to feed those critters. I don’t really count carbs per se but I don’t eat more than 60g roughly in a day, around there. i eat a lot of healthy fat. For 9 months I lost my weight so steadily no matter that every day over 50% of my calories was fat. And of course 60-70g protein. i don’t eat breads or pastas or baked goods or even tortillas. I didn’t eat fruit for the first 6 mos after surgery. I didn’t eat any sweets or things that tasted sweet. It was a great reset for someone who used to have a terrible sweet tooth. Now sweet things make me sick so I don’t even want them. I eat 90% dark chocolate. That is my treat now. clearly, for me, fat never made me fat. Sugary carbs made me fat.

Totally. This was me. I somehow didn’t see how fat I was. I knew I was fat but I didn’t really think I was really obese, but I was. I would see my reflection or shadow and actually think I wasn’t seeing it right, I couldn’t be THAT round. Here’s the clincher for me. My mom is obese plus she has Alzheimer’s. Every so often I do have to tell her that it is her weight why she can’t fit here or go there or why something is difficult (like getting in dan out of bed). And when I tell her what she weighs, or gently say she is very overweight, she (ok to smile here, it is so cute) looks down at her little wrist and says she’s not fat!!! She doesn’t have her marbles, so it’s kind of cute she does that, ignoring her enormous middle, but aren’t we all a little like her? How fat could I be with these lovely wrists?? Ha Ha Ha. Slightly OT but maybe our seniors here can agree: I see every day that for normal daily function, obesity makes life much harder than old age does. By far Mom’s obesity is more of an hindrance than added years. She’d be quite mobile if she weren’t obese.

What an a hole and your husband is a wonderful guy!! that place deserves a bad yelp by the way. There are so many people for so many reasons who need substitutions. It doesn’t take much for a restaurant to be kind, and those establishments get return business!

I honestly thought when people said they loved exercise they were lying. Exercise used to feel so horrible. And it was hard and not fun and you just want it over with. now almost 11 months out from surgery, I honestly wish I had more time to exercise (I have very little time, 4 kids and full time care of mom with dementia). I peer into gyms and wonder about learning new kinds of workouts. No ****. I really love my little workouts and want to do more. I am not lying to y’all. I can’t believe it myself. I can’t believe I can feel some muscle definition under my loose skin, still a little chubby arms and legs. I get into yoga and kettlebell conversations and I actually care. This is a huge change for me.

Maybe I shouldn’t even say this. But my diet was an unsweetened protein drink for two meals, and a dinner of a good protein serving and veggies. I felt like I was literally starving every day though the second week was easier than the first (2 total). I did it to shrink the liver, I forced myself because I had only one small window of time last year to have the surgery. Then when I flew up to meet the surgeon the day before surgery I told him how hard it was and how hungry I was all day and he said, “oh, then you could have added another protein drink!” File under the Now You Tell Me page.

Pre op diet was the only time this last year that was hard. It was like starving. But I did it just to make sure my liver would shrink enough for the surgery. You got this. Finish strong. Good luck!

I feel like I’m following you with this. I’d like to be the same size as “now” (though “now” may still be in flux) but not saggy droopy bags of skin, but 32dd actual, up on the chest, boobs. My cleavage now is wrinkled like a prune. I think my first surgery will be the boobs and I am looking for SoCal surgeons who do the implants at the same time as the lift. Right this second i am wearing 34DD and thrilled to get out of the ddd size so I can buy bras in a regular store. However, I measure under the boobs 31 inches, so I know I will end up at size 32, which is what I was years ago before the fat. I will always have the natural big booty, so even at goal weight (where I almost am) I can carry off the DD cup size.

I have the Freya Sonic. It’s amazing. Hook the back straps together in back to each other for even more strong support, and it is so comfortable I can forget it’s on and wear my workout clothes all day some days.

I lot a ton, and by 6 months out my hair was this and sparse and just horrible. I did take all the vitamins, I took vitamin IV cocktails, but I hated how I looked so much I got extensions. I love them. I might need them for many more months, though now (10.5 mos out) my hairdressers says I’ve got tons of new baby hairs growing in, but it will take months to get them long enough to be “hair.” So I am loving my fake hair.