sideeye

Withings scale hooked into the HealthMate app on iPhone - all I have to do is step on the scale each morning and then I can look at weight, BMI and body fat in the app later. I really like the trend line, stops me from hyperfocusing on stalls. HealthMate also tracks steps and I could probably do more with it if I bothered to look.

Carry around a water with a lime in it and tell them it’s a gin and tonic. If rumbled, tell them you just read the huge article in Mother Jones about the links between alcohol and breast cancer and are abstaining. Then stare at them with a haunted expression.

Do not go to Italy and only eat shakes and jerky, that would be heartbreaking and tragic. I say just order whatever you want and then eat whatever portion you feel like eating. The good thing about vacationing is that nobody knows you, so who cares if the waiter is horrified there's food left on the table? Tell every single one of them that you're both just getting over a stomach bug but HAD to try their food because you'd heard it was so good. And if you go somewhere and eat at the bar, they're less likely to flinch at small orders. Client meals are a minefield. There's only so long I can con people into going to tapas joints. I'm finding I have more success with soups than anything else, because the plate at least looks big most of the time. And I've also been known to say "I'm just ordering something light because I might have to get back to the office for a call" which is a filthy lie but takes the spotlight off. Basically I'm saying bariatric surgery has made me into an unabashed, gleeful liar.

This week I made such a ridiculous, rookie mistake - I went out to a business lunch with a colleague and was so focused on other things that I ordered as I would have months ago. He noticed the prix fixe menu and said he was going to get it, and I looked and saw it was within reason for the price of a business lunch. I saw I could get chicken soup (I can eat that!), I could get a veggie dish (can eat some!), and I planned to get the dessert boxed and give it to someone in the office. And then the soup arrived, I took five mouthfuls and remembered: forget what sort of food I can eat, I CAN'T EAT THIS MUCH. Completely ridiculous. Luckily the coworker was completely unobservant, but how stupid. I ended up boxing up the veggie course too and now I've been eating it for a week. It was head hunger plus habit, but it's insane that after weeks of being hyper-alert to food issues it was so easy to backslide. Good luck with Italy (and Italian portions)!

About six weeks out and I'm probably averaging 1/2 cup per meal. I've been having a lot of ground turkey with taco seasoning - for an idea of meal size, I take an iceberg lettuce leaf, spread about a tablespoon of sour cream across it, then put in the taco meat and some cheese. Wrap that up, eat it and I'm done.

This happened to me the other week - I've lit up a scanner before, usually because of a bracelet or zipper or underwire, but this time it was pretty clear. Both flights, in an out, it was like someone took a highlighter and marked out my new stomach. The angle of it and everything! (And then obviously during the patdown there was absolutely nothing there, it's actually the part of my body least likely to accumulate fat so it was all sternum.) So I am officially onboard with the idea that the scanner can pick up the density of the staples, if not the metal.

I'm the reverse, went from awesome to fizzle. EXTREMELY annoying and hope it's temporary.

I'm going to guess it's the time travel. Temporal flux is hard on the body.

Oh, their behavior definitely won’t change. The difference will totally be within me - whereas before I wouldn’t complain out of some sort of guilt over my size/existence on a plane and not wanting to risk a smackdown response, now? Get your knee out from under my tray table or I’m going to KICK OFF. You know those times you would rightfully stand up for yourself and a guy would look completely affronted, as though how could a fat person possibly complain about ANYTHING when he has kindly not pointed out how offensively enormous you are? I’d experienced that enough to pick my battles. But now it’s all battle, all the time, you self-entitled blowhards!

Planning and measuring meals is a good idea. Helps when you move to solid foods too, especially since you’re going to be eating 1/6th of any recipe and that means scheduling/rotating meals to not waste leftovers.

Tea, audiobooks and crochet. Fills your stomach, mind and hands. And after a while it fixes the “I’m always cold now!” problem too, because now you have a blanket.

Coffee works for me. Not much of it (~3oz) and with a fair amount of milk, but it did the trick.

No problem going under, woke up nauseous and whiny but otherwise fine. I've been under twice and both times I've had weird work-stress dream transitions: the first time I think I was aware I could hear before I opened my eyes, and so for some reason thought I was on a conference call presenting a Powerpoint deck to my client. The second time I thought I was presenting a weight loss surgery tutorial in a meeting room, and then somehow I got sucked into the projected slide and became the subject of the surgery on the slide, and then woke up within the slide (which was when I was waking up in recovery), so that was extremely disorienting. Didn't freak out either time, but it's weird to think how your mind pieces together scrambled bits of sensory input and tries to place it in context.

NO! IT'S A TRAP! Seriously though, don't think this way. There is nothing rude about stopping when you're full. Eating to make other people happy is crazy and part of what got us here today. Wash that thought right out. Coping mechanisms: get smaller dishes. Eat with chopsticks. When going out for meals with friends, angle to make it a family-style restaurant or tapas place where everyone eats from communal dishes. If you do go to a meal-per-person place, aim for the soup. Ask the server if you can have their salad mains served as a side salad instead. And if all else fails, just don't care. Eat the five bites and when your colleague looks at your plate and asks if you didn't like the food, tell them you got hiccups halfway through the meal or got so focused on talking and now you're going to bring it home because you want to finish it later. They won't care past that unless you actually look sickly. The one exception I make for this rule is if a family member or friend is cooking for you in their house. In which case I make sure to tell them up front I'm not hungry/ate a lot beforehand/don't want to eat a lot, but that I do want one bite of the dish they slaved over. And when I eat that bite I make sure they know I loved it - most people don't care whether or not you ate in quantity, but that you appreciated the quality. So the compliment matters more than leaving a clean plate. If the other person is paying for your meal, tell them up front you plan to order lightly but deliciously and again, compliment and thank. I've also had a devious amount of success tasting something, saying "oh, this is so good! try some!" and then getting other people to snag bites off my plate. Magically disappearing food!

I scheduled my surgery for the window when I could ensure no international travel for 8 weeks. I'm on week 6 now and I'm really glad I didn't try to cut it closer - I went to the Midwest last week for a few days and honestly it's rough to line up the right foods when you're traveling. I'd packed cheese sticks and hummus and some other easily-transportable stuff, but at one point I had to eat in a canteen and even though I got a lentil burger to nibble on (it was the best choice available) it turned out the cook put some weird sort of oil on it to cook it and it made me feel weird all afternoon. Travel is not when you want to be doing food trial-and-error, especially with the side-effects the sleeve can have. It's not the risks of the flight I'd worry about, it's the difficulty sourcing the right amounts of the right foods at the right times that gets a little nuts. Eight weeks feels about right to me and that's what my surgeon indicated was the best timing; you've had a few weeks of trialing real foods so if you suddenly find yourself stranded in a foreign supermarket, you'll at least have a chance of picking out the right stuff.

Depends on what your job is like. Two days after my surgery I started working again part-time and remotely, then another week that was closer to full-time and part-remote. I was back at work full time two weeks after surgery. If I were doing it again I'd take at least that first week off entirely, then probably part-time or remote for the second. My job is pretty high-stress and while I sit at desks a lot, those desks are spread across a city and I travel between them a lot. I didn't properly take into account how much that would take out of me. When guessing how soon to come back, don't just think of the physical demands of your job, also think about the mental demands. You don't have to work in a warehouse to come back from work utterly wiped out.

I'm around the same stage you are and yeah, experiencing something similar. The first bite or two is pretty good, but then it's like my stomach and mouth team up and override my nose and I lose all interest in eating and feel something similar to nausea. It's very annoying, but I guess it also ensures I don't overeat? My nutritionist says I may just have OD'd on certain flavors during the pureed phase. But I had some zoodles and bolognese tonight and it was pretty much the same - liked the first couple bites but then meh.

If you’re having nerve pain, please do speak to your pain management doctor about seeing a proper neurologist. Nerve pain is miserable - unfortunately it runs right up against the opioid crisis in that it’s frequently hard to diagnose and doctors get very suspicious if a patient says the pain pills “don’t work” because it mimics the behavior of an addict. Personally I had a neuropathic issue that opioids couldn’t touch but synthetic morphine handled (you can imagine how reluctantly that prescription was given). But you need a specialist who really understands how screwed up nerve pain can be. The pain management specialist should be able to point you to a neurologist. I’ve been there and it’s the most frustrating feeling in the world. Good luck.

I recently discovered that planes are all issued with uniform-length seatbelts, but as the ends fray and get damaged the airlines just trim them down and then reattach the buckles. So you're not crazy - the seatbelts really ARE all different sizes. I've never had to use an extender (though in the last few years it's been pretty damn close), but what I am looking forward to is no longer feeling weirdly guilty towards a seatmate for taking up space. I've never overlapped my seat, but a number of guys flying next to me have seemingly decided that if I'm going to be fat then they're just going to take the armrest AND manspread halfway into my knee space. Next time a guy tries those shenanigans, he is getting a guilt-free elbow right in the ribs.

This is incorrect. Doctors are businesspeople, and businesses do not shed customers easily. A client saying "one of your doctors talking to another and referring to me having "just" had the sleeve done and that's why I didn't lose as much weight really bothered me, and I wanted you to know" is valuable feedback. Bad word-of-mouth is a significant factor in public reputation, and comes with a similarly significant price tag. A client saying "I'm going to sue you because a doctor said that" or "fire that doctor" or "I want you to compel that doctor to apologize to me" is over the top, but that's not what we're talking about here. Simple feedback about an event that was distressing is reasonable - it's not "nothing", not by a long shot.

Two sides to this. One piece is that the assistant is correctly telling the baby doctor that the procedure you had done is not the more complicated procedure, and that's why your weight loss is not the same as what would be expected after a full bypass. That's just accurately informing the baby doctor as to the medical variables in this case. THAT SAID, while the assistant is teaching the baby doctor in an acceptable way when it comes to outlining the medical particulars of the situation, he is failing miserably at modeling bedside manner. He's talking like he's in a lecture room discussing a case, rather than standing in front of a patient who can bloody well hear him. And that's pretty poor form, and not doing the baby doctor any favors. Go ahead and tell your surgeon about this. The surgeon does not want pissed-off patients in his practice because his assistant is treating them like a powerpoint slide rather than a human. The assistant needs to hear that feedback and adjust the way he's teaching his charges when interacting with patients.

Don't worry about it - pretty sure your surgeon would say the same thing. I'm starting week 5 and at week 3 I stalled at 17lbs lost. The next 5 lbs came off with a lot of ups and downs. It's frustrating but not unusual by a long shot. There's a lot of unknowns still in this surgery, and you really can't apply the old calories in/out principle on a short timescale like 3 weeks. I'm able to plot my weight loss on a graph and surprisingly, when creating a trend line, it's actually a pretty smooth slope. So even though it feels to me like I'm stuttering, I'm really not. Talk to your doc if you're really worried, and maybe take in more calories to see if you need to convince your metabolism you're not accidentally starving. And also remember that everyone's post-op meal plan is different, so while some people are eating refried beans by day 3, others are on liquids for a month. That's the downside to sharing limited information on this site - you can end up comparing yourself only to the people who drop weight like crazy (outliers) and against people whose diet is completely different from yours.

I'm doing lots of wrap dresses, flared if possible, which tend to bridge a lot of sizes.

Anyone else experiencing this? I was able to drink milk 3 days out of surgery and had no problems, but over the past week I've been feeling a little odd and yesterday and today I did a bit of a test - sure enough, dairy seems to be the trigger to causing a bloated, gassy feeling. Which is an absolute pain in the neck, since cheese sticks have been such a handy on-the-go workaround and pre-op I included a lot of dairy in my meals. From what I read this sometimes goes away the further post-op you get, but right now is a real wrench in my protein intake plan. I can switch sources, it's just that lentils and chicken salad aren't anywhere near as conveniently portable as cheese and yogurt. Damn. Any suggestions for good, non-dairy protein that can travel? I've found some 2oz tubs of hummus, but could do with a little variety.

I'm one month today and have been seeing a VERY incremental loss over the past two weeks (<5lbs over 2 weeks), a lot of little up-and-down flutters. Annoying but not the end of the world - I'm not going to worry until my surgeon starts worrying.