BarbbeingBarb

I think you should do whatever you want to do as long as it's under doctor supervision. Your body, your health. I'm 4 years out, and what newer post ops don't seem to understand is that the benefits of the surgery wanes after time. I am hungry again. I can eat 12 oz of food on one sitting, and can eat again literally 10 minutes later. Snacking and grazing start to creep back in, and our bodies fight to get back to fat as our metabolisms start normalizing again. Statistically, around year 3 and 4 is when regain starts to happen for those reasons. After gaining around 10 pounds, I am considering phentermine just to get me back on track and give me a "jump start" of sorts. After that, I'll take it from there again. I look at weight loss drugs as just another tool we can use in this never ending fight against obesity, and find it ironic that people who have chosen to change their internal anatomy to lose weight look down on weight loss drugs. The further out we get, the harder it is to tow the line because frankly the surgery is less effective. Even after changing our eating and exercise habits, sometimes we still need a little extra help to win the battle. Nothing wrong with that. You do you.

I think a bit of relaxing and stretching is normal with time, but I don't think you can stretch it by simply overeating. Maybe consistently overeating to the point of throwing up I suppose? Dr. Matthew Weiner has a good video about it on YouTube. He doesn't believe it stretches too much, either. To put it in perspective, I will be 4 years out April 17. I can now eat up to 12 oz of food in one sitting (depending on what it is, really. Sometimes less). That's quite the difference from up to about 2 years ago where I started at a few ounces newly post op and went up to around 6 oz. Over the next couple of years, I noticed a natural progression of being able to eat more. I think it happens to everyone to a certain extent. I think I'm pretty much topped out at 12 oz, and that's still a lot less than what I could eat before! At this point it's quality, not quantity. I make sure I'm eating healthy, clean food 90% of the time to keep my weight off the best i can. I think when people depend on restriction alone is when they get into trouble, because it obviously wanes over time. It's the natural progression of things.