elforman

First initial E, middle initial L, last name Forman. Put it together and you get elforman. Also, my initials are ELF, the first joke my mother ever played on me and far from the last. Many people just call me ELF, especially at work when there are others who share my first name.

While I admit I haven't had it yet, don't sweat the psych exam. Here's an excerpt from the site I linked at the bottom. Unless you're concerned that one of the bullet items applies to you, it should not be a problem. If one of those does apply to you, you likely have bigger problems than your weight. https://www.gastricsurgeon.com/articles/the-psychological-evaluation-for-bariatric-surgery

Here's the origins of "Bye Felicia" explained in detail. https://www.bustle.com/articles/52505-what-does-bye-felicia-mean-why-are-people-saying-it-all-of-a-sudden

Well, I've been married for 23 years so I can't say I remember all that much about dating, but there usually comes a time when you start getting more comfortable talking about personal issues. Granted, with my wife and I that time was about an hour into our first date, when we covered politics, religion and our respective previous marriages. It was more a matter of trying to scare each other off and failing, finding out we were perfect for each other and getting engaged two months later. You look kind of young and didn't mention anything about previous dating or relationship experience at any weight level, so I don't know what you've got to compare this new guy to. The bottom line is that you'll know when you know. Regrettably, there's the possibility of finding out he's attracted to you because of your size and will not be excited by your plan to lose weight. You should certainly make sure of that before saying anything. Good luck.

It sounds like your nutritionist should not have had you start the new plan and eating habits immediately. Remember, the stomach is elastic so it may take several days of eating less until it gets to the point where it takes less food to feel full and your body adjusts to the lower calorie intake. Going from one amount of food every day to just half that amount the next and every day after doesn't seem smart. You should be able to ramp down slowly, decreasing the amount you eat each day for four or five days until you're at the level they want for you. The same goes for caffeine, just cut down your intake gradually over a few days to help with withdrawal. I suppose I'm lucky. I met with the surgeon for an initial consult then the nutritionist who'll supervise my three month pre-op diet three weeks later. We reviewed my current eating habits then she told me to do the following: Carbs only in the morning No soda or beer More proteins and veggies at lunch and dinner No junk food Drink lots more water No more than one coffee in the morning, no problem since I rarely have two I'm not even two weeks in yet and the only thing I'm not doing is weighing myself. I'll find out how I'm doing when I go back in three weeks. She didn't set a goal for me to lose in this first month, just to do the best I can since the only person I'd be failing is myself.

Don't sweat it. You spend enough time on the internet and you learn how to translate typos in the fly. Sent from my SM-G930T using BariatricPal mobile app

Actually, I'm just a week and a half into my three month pre-op diet and haven't had the psych evaluation yet. I was just posing potential issues your psychiatrist may have about you since you did not give a lot of information about your previous attempts at weight loss. I didn't even know there was a psych requirement until a month ago and my surgeon explained it was to ensure that the patient has the proper mental outlook to handle the lifestyle changes the surgery will require. Someone deemed too depressed might not pass the evaluation out of fear that he/she won't make the proper effort to follow the post-op diet. The same thing could apply to someone who has a history of making empty promises. I wouldn't worry about being declined due to having had problems sticking to a diet though, since that's a common element among everyone seeking WLS.

You don't say what other alternative weight loss methods you've tried before and what kind of success you've had, if any. Part of the psychiatric evaluation is to ensure you have the proper mindset to be able to handle the drastic lifestyle change that WLS will require. Perhaps she has concerns in that area? Also, note that you don't have to have approval from your psychiatrist, but rather any psychiatrist, preferably one who does know about WLS and its requirements. Most people don't see psychiatrists regularly, so my bariatric surgeon referred me to a psychiatrist who specializes in this type of evaluation. Your surgeon should be able to do the same.

Did you have an overnight sleep test with your sleep doctor? If not you may need to. When I got my recent CPAP, the insurance company would not pay for the overnight test and just approved the machine for me and the doctor could only pretty much guess what the settings would need to be. It's only when the doctor told the insurance company that the guessing waan't working that they approved the overnight test, but once he found the proper settings I've been sleeping great ever since. You need to contact your sleep doctor and check into either having the sleep test or getting your settings adjusted. Also, talk to your weight loss surgeon and let him/her make the determination regarding whether you need the CPAP in working condition before the surgery or not.

Your situation is precisely why there is a psychiatric requirement before being approved for weight loss surgery. It's to ensure that you will stick to the post-surgical regimen, and that's all about discipline. The difference, of course, is that if you diet on your own then go back to eating poorly, you'll just gain the weight back. With WLS, if you go back to eating as you did pre-surgery, it could quite possibly kill you. That's exactly what the surgeon told me during my initial consultation, and I replied that if I wanted to kill myself I'd certainly do it before surgery like this, not after. So it is a legitimate concern that you will not adhere to the post-surgical requirements and that's something you should be prepared for. There's no shame in having to go to a psychologist or psychologist, since discipline is a mental/emotional issue. If you break a leg you see an orthopedist, if you're having a baby you see an obstetrician, and if you have mental issues you see a psychologist who may help you identify if there's something blocking you or if it's some form of self-sabotage.

Your body doesn't store fat in the stomach. Your stomach is essentially a bag of acids that digest your food. That bag is elastic to handle when you eat too much, but after years of overeating the bag is stretched so much that it takes a lot of food to feel full. That's why the gastric sleeve procedure removes 80% of that bag and forces you to eat less. Body fat is stored everywhere in the body where there are fat cells: Your trunk, your limbs, your chin(s), etc. So there is no significant weight loss as a result of removal of the excess stomach from your body. Think of the food you eat as energy for your body. When you eat more food than your body can burn off, it stores the excess energy as fat throughout your body. After the surgery, you simply won't be able to take in enough calories through food, so the body starts burning off the extra energy it's stored, and that's when the fat will start to melt away from your belly, legs, arms and chin(s). Hope that clears things up.

If I start feeling cold all the time, or even just normal at room temperature, my wife will be thrilled. I'm the kind of guy who's always warm and she's just the opposite. I keep the AC set at 70 or lower in the heat of the summer and almost never turn on the heater during the winter. My wife can always put on a sweater while I'm not about to sit around without a shirt. Granted, I live in SoCal (San Fernando Valley) where summer will average in the high 90s and peak over 110 and today, in the middle of "winter", today's will be 83 and the overnight low will be 58.

Just be blunt and honest. Assure them that you wouldn't be doing something drastic unless you had no other choice. As for spring break, remind them how lucky they've been in the past to be able to assume there'll be some grand family event while most kids just sit around the house for that week, and that things will be back to normal next year, but this year you're going to need their help. If they push back, remind them about all of the potential health issues you're likely to have if you don't have the surgery, up to and including a fatal heart attack. Regarding your concern about their own body image, be honest about how you got to the weight you did. Also tell them that weight issues are NOT hereditary (actually, they may well be in some cases, but let them google it themselves). My kids are 21 and 18 and when I told them I was interested in surgery, all my son said was "Let me guess, you're going to schedule it for after we get home from school in May so we can take care of you, right?" All of the care and concern were just a given, since they know I would never do anything significant without meticulous research and preparation and I never make an uninformed decision.

Hi there. Just hitting on a few topics you mentioned: First, I'm jealous you don't have that waiting period. I used to have Anthem BC but the company switched to CIGNA in Jan '17, so now I'm stuck with the three month supervised diet. Next, as far as what to tell co-workers and clients without lying: Tell them you've had some health issues and you're now on a very strict medically-supervised diet. Even post-op, that's the absolute truth. If they inquire more just use the schmoozing skills you've likely picked up in sales to change the topic, like saying you'd rather talk about your product or the client's needs instead of some medical condition you're tired of talking about. If you need an excuse for not drinking, then go ahead and lie and tell them you can't mix alcohol with your medications. Or if you're OK drinking but need to lower expectations about how much you can consume and you want to stick with some truthiness, tell them since you have limited food intake your alcohol tolerance is very low and the doctor has limited you to one small glass of wine or whatever your drink of choice is.

I suppose I’m lucky in that I’ve never really cared much about what others think. My mother disagreed with me on so many things when I was younger. For example, I’m an atheist, she took that as a personal insult; I moved in with my girlfriend before we married, she was not supportive of that, and so on. I’m not happy that she died nearly 22 years ago, but if there is a silver lining it's that we’d have clashed so often on how I raised my own kids that I’d likely have had to cut off contact with her anyway. The only person whose opinion matters now is my wife and we’ve never been less than fully supportive of each other. My wife has seen me balloon up and down with my weight and while I know if I worked my ass off I could lose all the weight on my own again, she understands that it’s gotten harder with arthritis and other physical problems I’ve developed. Plus, she was in an auto accident and been on disability since December 2016, so I’ve been the one to take care of her and I trust her to return the favor without criticism. My surgery will be about six weeks after she has a knee replacement, and the kids will be home from college at that point, so they’ll be able to pick up any slack that she can’t handle. Anyway, the moral of the story is the only approval you need is from the person who’s going to be helping you through this and everyone else is irrelevant. I’ve seen stories about wives who say their husbands won’t support them and vice versa, and in those cases I can’t help but think that marriage is already doomed. If a spouse announces in advance that they’re not going to be supportive of their mate going through a major, life-preserving procedure, then just what will they support? I can imagine having told my wife she was on her own after the accident and I still expect her to continue doing her share of the housework…

I had trouble adjusting to a CPAP after getting one. I was usually partially congested at all times, which made using the CPAP during sleep even more difficult, so I went to an ENT who said I had a rather severely deviated septum. One septoplasty later and I'm breathing much better all the time. I was told not to go back to the CPAP for six months after the surgery but once I did it worked fine, though that was after another overnight sleep test and a few adjustments to my machine. Now I almost always sleep through the night with no problem. I can't say I feel more refreshed in the mornings since I'm still far too overweight and won't be having the sleeve surgery until May or so. But that stats from the machine show I'm having many fewer apneatic events each night and the snoring doesn't bother my wife any more, so it's still a win.

I'm not planning for surgery until May but when I had my initial consult a few weeks ago the doctor said that when the time comes he'll be setting all sorts of dates and goals for me. Then he added that it's just as likely that I'll meet them as I won't because it's all a calculated crapshoot. There are so many factors, such as sleep, stress, exercise, nutrition and how your body handles the surgery that as long as I do the best I can, I'll be fine regardless of whether I meet the goals or not. Plus he said he'd rather issue harder goals than easier goals, because if the goals are too easy to meet the patient may not try as hard.

Well, everything has been set in motion for me. I saw the surgeon for the initial consult for a gastric sleeve last year, but it turned out my insurance didn't cover it. I lobbied the HR/Benefits team at my company to fix that oversight, and they did, so I'm covered effective 1/1/18 and saw the doctor two days after that. I know everyone's process will vary, but for me, after seeing the surgeon it was a visit with the nutritionist at the hospital (already done, and that covered pre-op and post-op habits mostly), the dietician in his office to supervise my three months of dieting (she put me on a low-carb and then only in the mornings near-Atkins plan, which I can stick to easily) plus I'll need to have an endoscopy done by the surgeon and a consult with a psychiatrist before they can schedule the surgery. I'm planning on late May, since it'll be after my daughter graduates college and my wife has her knee replacement. That way both kids will be home from college and can help both of us recover. So what if it's their summer vacation? We're sending them to a great private college and they owe us! I knew all sorts of questions to ask the surgeon thanks to this site so I knew much of what he told me ahead of time and I learned that he does not require a liquid diet ahead of the surgery. That's in contrast to what the nutritionist at the hospital told me, but I'll go by what the doctor says. Provided I meet the three month dieting requirement and it gets approved and scheduled, I can eat whatever I want between then and the day of the surgery. So no beer, soda, bread, pizza or pasta for me for three months, then I can binge a little, then comes the knife and the lifestyle changes. I know I was at 275 the day or the visit with the dietician, though that was fully laden with two cell phones and other equipment weighing me down, but I don't much care about the numbers. I'm not going to weigh myself until I see the dietician again next month. And that's all for me. Looking forward to participating more as the date gets closer...

I'm a husband and yikes, this is not a good situation. I don't think I saw anywhere how long you've been married, so that may play a factor in it. But certainly, it's all about control. I got married the first time when I was 23 and over the first couple of years I didn't realize just how co-dependent my wife had become. She'd gone from living with her mother to living with me. When she was with her mother, her mother made all the decisions, so when she was with me she deferred to me a lot. At first I was flattered, thinking she trusted me that much as to let me make all of the important decisions. I'll admit it made me feel powerful knowing that almost whatever I said was how things would be. It took a lot of self-introspection to realize how unhealthy that was and we ended up divorcing over other issues soon afterward. But my point is that I could see how such power can go to a husband's head. It was to the point where my ex would not make any decisions, even about things like her own hair and clothes without checking with me first, and quite frankly it was intoxicating and can certainly be addicting. On the bright side, once I was ready to start dating again I made a list of qualities I wanted in a woman and qualities I wanted to avoid. The most important qualities were independence and the ability to handle everything on her own if necessary instead of relying on me for anything. The first woman I met matched my list almost perfectly, with the one difference being our outlooks on religion, and we've been married almost 23 years now with two great kids. I told her up front about the whole controlling/co-dependency issues I had in the past and she promised she'd never let that become an issue with us. So please don't get the idea I'm trying to excuse any of your husband's behavior, I'm just giving one possible reason for it. I hope things work out for you.

Thank you. Assertiveness has never been an issue for me. Plus, as I demonstrated, I sent in prepared. However, I will point out that I am male. I'll try to add more testosterone to my future posts to avoid any confusion. Or maybe I'll just leave the toilet seat up... Sent from my SM-G930T using BariatricPal mobile app

I've been meaning to share this for a while. For a long time I'd been under the impression that bariatric surgery was covered by my health plan through work. Someone else in the company had it and said "Yeah, CIGNA covered it for me." Well, what I didn't know was he had the CIGNA *** plan and I was on the PPO. And when I compared the exemptions between the two plans, the only difference was that the *** covered weight loss programs and bariatric surgery while the PPO didn't because it was classified as "cosmetic." Switching to the *** plan was not an option for me or my family. So I went to our HR department and explained the situation. They contacted our insurance broker and the got bariatric coverage added to the PPO plan effective 1/1/18. My appointment with the doctor is 1/3/18 at which point I'll kick off the whole process. But the point is: If your insurance doesn't cover what you need, just ask about it. More and more companies are covering weight loss surgery when there is a demonstrated need. I actually work for a health plan and I know that the numbers show it's much more cost effective to help the member lose the weight than to pay for all of the medical complications that will arise if obesity is left untreated. Here's the letter I sent to our HR director that got the ball rolling. Feel free to edit it and send to your own HR directors if you think it will help:

No, if I see the nutritionist before Jan. 1 I'd have to pay for it out of my own pocket. The only reason they paid for my initial consult with the bariatric surgeon is because he coded the visit as severe GERD as the primary complaint. But I don't mind waiting until the start of the year as I've got enough stuff going on at the moment. And while I don't care one iota about the holidays, I do have a tradition of cooking up a nice, expensive feast for the family on New Years, so that will be my last hurrah.

This is interesting... Looking back at my post I can see that the three letter acronym for Health Maintenance Organization was censored out. I know many people consider it to be a four-letter word, but really, replacing it with asterisks?

Hi all, First post time. For background, I have an initial consult on Jan. 3 because the coverage for weight loss services doesn't kick in until the new year, so that will be considered my official kickoff. I had an unofficial consult with the same doctor a month ago as a favor to my PCP, knowing I had no bariatric coverage at the time, so I've already had the recommendation for the gastric sleeve. Given the three month supervised diet requirement, that would put me into at April at best, and considering I want to be available for my daughter's college graduation at the end of April, I figure I won't be having any surgery until mid-May at best. But here's my real issue: I can't exercise. Physically, I'm a wreck, head to toe, and I mean that literally. I've got a bad neck, arthritis (frozen shoulder) in both shoulders, bad lower back, one bad knee plus every problem imaginable with my feet short of athlete's foot, including bone spurs, previously broken bones and plantar fasciitis. So I'm not kidding when I say any attempt at extended physical exertion usually ends in severe pain or injury. I can walk for maybe 15 minutes at a time, far less than the recommended 30-45 I've seen discussed. Sit-ups and weights are off-limits. I used to be able to use an elliptical to some success but that just getting harder and harder. So, the question is, just how much will my lack of ability to exercise affect my weight loss? I'd like to hope that exercise will become easier when I don't have to lug as much weight around, but right now, and until I drop a good chunk of weight, it's pretty much out of the question. (And since I'm new here, if this is not the appropriate forum for questions at this stage, please direct me to the proper one.) Thanks!

Gave up both for about three months, didn't seem to have any effect besides me sleeping through early morning meetings. But now I still limit myself to two cups of coffee before noon and I only have non-caffeined carbonated drinks with dinner.