sideeye

I’ve been having the same meat issue post-Montezuma. I’m drinking a cup of strong coffee every evening to get things moving. It’s been almost a week but things are equalizing. Ive been using coffee this way since a month after surgery. I don’t drink more than about 14 oz per day so think it’s moderate. And effective!

Well, he does have an excellent point. I mean, I'm able to hold my breath underwater for an entire 90 seconds so based on that sample data, I assume I no longer need to breathe at all for the rest of my life and am immediately moving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Should be fine, right? Don't explain to him, don't qualify why you don't exercise, don't talk to him about your food. If he's been a d**k about it so far there's no reason he'll suddenly change, and in fact will likely get worse as he starts to dread the changes you're about to go through. Better to screen his input out other than the logistical stuff. He can catch up when you're post-op and suddenly doing a lot more active things all on your own and without his "helpful" input. People express a lack of confidence in all sorts of crappy ways, sounds like he's one of those. Bland then hell out of him and keep your eye on the prize. You're the Little Red Hen and at the end of all this he gets NO BREAD.

I lost the last 5 or so pounds from my face all at once, and my cheekbones have gone nuts. They haven't been this prominent since my late teens. Not only is it incredibly obvious to other people, but I keep freaking myself out when I absently touch my own face because the contours are so different. Even when I'm sleeping, the way my face presses against the pillow - totally different pressure points than I've had in the last decade. All of the fat underneath my cheekbones vanished, I now have a notable angle/shadow there, and my dimples have abruptly become really obvious. It's super weird.

Nine months post-op, I went to Mexico and lost 8lbs in 5 days (I do not recommend this). I followed medical advice, but I think being a bariatric patient probably complicated things. So! If you're going to Mexico post-op, or traveling anywhere prone to tainted water: As soon as you start feeling... liquid, go STRAIGHT to sports drinks/hydration fluids. Skip the water, it's not enough. I wish I'd had a bottle in my bag. From now on I'm going to pack the powder in my med kit, so I can add it to purified water in an emergency. You're not going to be able to leave the hotel room to get it yourself. Your stomach's going to be back at zero when it comes to tolerating content. Most people will be able to chug 20 oz of water and pass out in under a minute. You'll have to stay awake and really work at slowly sipping to get enough in you to make up for the periodic explosions, might take 15 minutes, 14 of which you'll be struggling to stay conscious. But skipping proper hydration for sleep will make things a million times worse. If you're still enjoying a lack of hunger post-op, this is a time when that's a BAD thing. When you can eat, EAT. Again, stomach is back at zero, so even when you're improved enough to start eating it's going to be tough. Half the stuff the docs suggest will not be manageable at first (dry toast, banana, flat soda). Don't postpone until you can eat those, which will be tempting because you won't have any appetite. You're going to need broths and soups (NOT ramen) and then can work your way up, but you're going to need those soup nutrients to get the energy to eat more robustly. Once you can eat, don't try to go back to any sort of caloric restriction/schedule until you're back home. Just eat food and drink Gatorade steadily, or you're going to pass out in the airport. You've been starving for days, any excess grazing is just making up for that deficit. You're not retaining as much as you think anyhow. Keep the sports drink in rotation for a few days after you're recovered. Can't hurt. One thing this entire experience has done is made me believe that the pouch reset idea probably works - after surviving on 5 liters of Gatorade for 5 days, I'm discovering that my stomach is a LOT less tolerant of quantity than it was before I left. This isn't the way I'd've wanted to uncover that info, but I guess I'll take it.

I dropped a butter knife on my foot and probably bruised the bone; took NSAIDs then. Also took some when I had a headache recently. My doc doesn't put them off-limits and I had no repercussions, but obviously stick to what YOUR doc says.

Make sure you're drinking a lot of water. Flavored water, Crystal Lite, whatever works - I'm not even talking about hydration here, just constantly sipping so that your mind and mouth register that you're "eating". That helped a lot with me. If I let my stomach get empty, it somehow got EXPONENTIALLY emptier instantly and made me ravenous. As long as I had some liquid sloshing around in there, it kept the edge off.

Yep, people can be snarky and rude. And online, even those who don’t intend to come across that way can because text strips tone. But honestly, it’s very liberating to just ignore negative people. They’re entitled to their opinions, they’re not entitled to your engagement. No one reading the exchange is going to judge you for not getting into it with a detractor, and if they start taking the “oh, too afraid to debate me, hunh?” route they look ridiculous. As for the friends thing, yes there are cliques and their habit of amplifying each others’ messaging is deceptive in its impact. But it’s another side-effect, not an intentional effort to shout you down (most of the time). And some people don’t understand quite how obnoxious the whole “you’re new and I’m a veteran” thing comes across, no matter how well-intentioned. Overall you’re getting a crash course in why many people leave this site about 3 months post-op. But if you can shrug off the stings and not engage, it’s endurable and you can continue building relationships with people whose style of communication is more in line with yours.

I cannot emphasize enough that brushing it off is the way to go online. There is no upside to getting into spats, there's no upside in "defending your reputation", and there's almost always someone out there who thinks that rudeness is something they should be congratulating themselves for because it's actually plain speaking. Those people exhaust me. Just shrug them off. Literally, don't engage with them. Talk about what you like and if someone starts needling you, just don't take them up on it. Address the point generally rather than to the person who's attacking you, reassert your view and then move the conversation along. You are not going to argue them into seeing the light, so don't bother. Just state your position and if they rip it to shreds, fine, that's their opinion. It does not damage you. Talk about the stuff that interests you with the people who either share that interest or meaningfully engage you. Don't engage or address the people who show up to shout or swagger. You aren't required to respond to people who talk to you, especially if they're being dicks. When they don't get attention they'll go away. Even easier than the same situation in real life, because they can't get in your face here.

You're good, don't worry. And definitely don't take things like tone on a messageboard personally - it's just a side effect of messageboard dynamics when you're dealing with an embedded community on a personally invested topic. Your first conversation is someone else's thirtieth about the same thing, and what they see as brevity or wisdom comes across as harshness or condescension, etc. It's really no one's fault, it's just how this particularly imperfect form of communication gums up. Even when people really ARE being dicks, just brush it off. There is literally nothing worth fighting about on a messageboard, and usually the fight's actually about face/reputation anyhow, which is hilariously irrelevant on an anonymous/alias-ridden site. Not worth getting exhausted over, just shrug and move on.

I'd been sending what I thought was a fistbump through Slack until a millennial told me it's actually a face-punch. So now I just send my team completely random and inappropriate emojis deliberately, screw it. Let them figure it out.

JOIN US. Seriously, something like 8% of SAD-susceptible people get it in summer. I'm one of them. At one point I moved from the Northern hemisphere to the Southern and timed it so I'd skip summer for an entire year and a half. I hate that it's brighter, that it's hotter, that there are more people and that they are louder and dumber, that people constantly try to get you out into the sun which does NOT feel good thank you, etc etc. Reverse SAD, it's a real thing and it makes you feel like a space alien because it's the complete opposite of how people tell you you're supposed to be feeling. Then the weather turns and it rains and you get to wear sweaters and drink cocoa and everyone tells you AGAIN that you're supposed to be mourning the end of summer. Whatever, you lunatics! I'm going to Canada for the weekend! In my case, a very low-dose depression med has been the fix. My doc has it on automatic: it shows up at the pharmacy in April, and I go off it mid-October. This prevents me from snarling at sunbeams and generally behaving like Nosferatu when people ask me to barbecues. I can only imagine it might do the same for someone with the more traditional SAD traits?

8 oz mug of hot chai or chocolate at night. I did try a small sweet thing as a treat initially (like a candy) but it turns out that it's over way too fast. I'm much more content when I can sip over a longer timespan. This also means that I've started viewing my coffee a day like a treat too. Little sugar, little cream, and I've apparently convinced myself it hits the same triggers as ice cream or candy used to. I'm not really restrictive about my diet in general though. I eat a little of everything, but it's a LITTLE of everything. No fast food joints or packaged stuff, but I definitely went to a barbecue place and got macaroni and cheese, a biscuit, and a ton of brisket. I just eat a really tiny portion of it and then ate the leftovers for another four meals or something ridiculous, balanced with small protein-heavy meals for the rest of the day. It makes for odd business lunches sometimes, but seems to be working.

About seven months out and I still get sick about the same amount. I think my teeth (which already had issues) are more vulnerable to existing weakness, like they get worse faster, so I'll have to go to the dentist more often. Still get post-nasal drip after a cold and have to knock it out with Flonase, just got the flu shot with no known after-effect. May be bruising more quickly, but then again I may just be turning into my mom. I was the only one who got Montezuma's Revenge while in Mexico last week, not that I think that had much to do with VSG - bacteria is bacteria. But VSG did probably make it a little harder to bounce back from that, largely because I was just unable to hydrate myself as quickly as before. On a sensitive stomach it was hard to take in anything, and I was just totally exhausted, so staying alert enough to gradually keep sipping gatorade was awful.

You can also try clicker training. In this scenario, you take her outside and walk around until she goes. Then quickly say the command word (mine is “hurry up”, my childhood dog we used “atta girl”), click, and give a very small treat and praise, then go back inside. Look up clicker training to get a better idea of how it works, there’s an actual process. You phase bits out so eventually all that’s left is the command and praise. You can use the clicker for all sorts of training, I highly recommend it - my dog is pretty eager to please to start with, but other people think she’s a saint and it’s mostly down to rigorous clicker training when she was a puppy.

I’ve been to lots of fancy corporate meals lately and brought back leftovers and tried to clear the remainer out of the fridge by eating them throughout today. This was a terrible idea and I knew it all along but it pained me to throw away really delicious fancy food So I have eaten WAY, WAY too much and now I feel grim. Ugh.

I’m six months out and was going pretty well, weight loss has slowed but not stopped, I’d mostly put it down to some stressful work situations and losing control of some food choices due to a lot of travel. Still, was looking forward to the fall to get back on track. Then, disaster. One of my best friends experienced a freakish, frequently fatal complication during the birth of her first child and is in a coma. She has been for weeks. We’re now well beyond the time she was expected to come round and it’s becoming increasingly clear that intense damage occurred. She lives in an area far from family and friends, I’m one of the closest but still hours away. I’ve been taking time off work to go care for her as her husband deals with the totally separate medical emergency that is their newborn. I feel like my brain’s been puréed, I can’t focus on a damn thing and am in a constant hypervigilant state. I don’t sleep much anymore and I’m a zombie at work. It’s taken me three weeks to notice that I’ve totally stalled out weight-wise (I suppose I noticed day-to-day while weighing myself, but then didn’t chain the days together). And I know why: I’m grazing, I’m not prioritizing protein, I’m not drinking enough water. Worse, some of the habits I’ve kept at bay for almost half a year have come roaring back, including stopping by the local CVS to pick up junk food. I ate half a packet of Oreo’s, for pete’s sake. I don’t even like Oreos, at all, never have. I’m going through the house this morning to throw out any junk food I’ve mindlessly bought, but I can also feel that the need to have quite literally anything make me feel slightly better is translating to the old emotional and current chemical boost junk food loans you. I know I’m going to have to just be more aware of all of this, now I’ve spotted it. But my entire life feels like a bomb went off at its center, and given how hard I’m finding it to focus on ANYTHING, I’m going to have a hard time being mentally guarded against lifetime habits creeping in again. This sucks. THIS SUCKS.

I’ve seen people on other threads say that if their surgeon is an ass so what, surgeons are known to be assholes and as long as they’re good at their work who cares about bedside manner. What you’re experiencing right now is EXACTLY why it matters. I hope you find a great doctor to take his place, and I hope bariatric hopefuls keep in mind: this is going to be a long-term connection that lasts past the surgery, if your doctor is someone you wouldn’t want guiding you through a worst-case scenario? DITCH HIM.

This isn’t precisely a NSV, but - everyone hugs me now? EVERYONE. It’s fine with me, I’m cool with hugs, but I am also onto you people: I know you’re partly hugging me to see if I’ve actually lost weight or if I’m just wearing optical-illusion clothes! They're not being mean or weird about it, and half of it is they’re happy to see me looking so much more confident, so the hug is genuine exuberance - but I know you’re feeling up my rib cage for scaffolding, friends. ...and the heels in the airport were totally worth it and surprisingly comfortable. Also I ran out of room for them in my suitcase and had to wear them to meetings, so what the heck.

220 for me and I’m thinking the same thing about set-points; this is actually my Goal 1 weight precisely because it’s been the stage I bottomed out in previous diets. It’s going to take a bit of work to convince my body I can actually go below this, but all the positive feedback after making it to this point softens the blow.

I have a scale, one of the WiFi ones that reports to an app on my phone. It’s made it possible for me to obsess a lot LESS. I’m 7 months out and have experienced a bunch of nonsense that all impacted weight loss, but because I was able to leave all the record-keeping to the app, I could wait until I was in a good headspace to look at it and analyze it rationally. Knowing that it was being tracked somewhere automatically made it stick in my head less. I’m not freaking out about stalls, but if I see my trend line going flat for two weeks, that tells me I have to try changing something up. It’s a good statistical baseline to have, when so much of this process is emotional or perception-based.

I’m skeptical in general, thus: sideeye. Avatar was originally Daria.

Flew all over the country this month, all in coach, walked miles through airports from the last gate in every terminal in 3” heels and none of it was any problem at all. I can even cross my legs in coach and shift around to different positions during a 5-hour flight. I don’t have to keep my arms tightly crossed to make sure I’m not touching the person in the middle seat. Unreal. The way I pack for trips changed too. I never realized how much mental math went into calibrating all the different permutations of event/activity/weather. Now I just bring a few things that look good, and I can mix and match on the day. I used to have to bring whole outfits the were carefully coordinated to hide problem areas, and if the weather was too hot or cold it ruined that plan. Now I just wear what I’ll be comfortable in, which also happens to all look good on me no matter what.

I found a pair of jeans in my closet - size 14, still in the plastic wrap. They fit. I’ve worn them at a conference all week and they look f**king amazing. Yes, Spanx are still in play to control the muffin top effect, but I look leggy and well put together and people’s reaction is significant.

I found mindful eating helps - the meditation-while-eating kind. Then I did an assessment of all my behaviors and realized I was allowing a 10% of variance across the board - an extra bite of lunch when out with coworkers, an extra piece of cheese, a bigger mug for my coffee, more frequent errands to the CVS where I just happen to pick up something slightly sugary, a shorter walk with the dog... Realigning all of that helps, and the mindful eating part made me really focus on “why am I eating this, is it fulfilling my expectations, is this really the taste I wanted”. Backsliding blows.

Claire Danes, used to get that. Awkward during my last trip to the Middle East, actually. And weirdly, someone named Sarah? Not a famous person, just a ridiculous number of people have told me out of the blue that they either thought I was their friend Sarah or I look just like their friend Sarah... these are people in different cities all over the globe who don’t know each other. So i guess I have an infamous evil twin named Sarah. (Or Claire Danes does.)