sideeye

If your trauma comes with a side of PTSD, don't beat yourself up about suddenly having mood swings or crying jags. There are tons of insane little cues that your brain remembers from the time you were terrified and it hard-wires them into reactions (which makes sense evolutionarily, I guess). For me, the click of a door behind me or the sudden realization that there was someone with me in an enclosed space would instantly throw me into high-adrenaline reaction mode, even if I was in the safest environment in the world. It took a fair amount of EMDR therapy to rewire me. So don't be too harsh on yourself with involuntary reactions like crying. Sometimes your unconscious brain and chemicals just hijack you after trauma.

...why? It sure as hell sounds like he's deliberately doing everything he can to annoy you. People who eat pizza in front of you, don't take the baby off your hands after surgery and try to commandeer the TV when you're recovering are doing it on purpose. People who yell at you and call you stupid are not worth wasting your time on. For whatever reason, he's annoyed and making himself feel better by making you upset. That's not healthy, and it's his problem, not yours. Just think, would you hear a friend's on a diet and then when you come over bring a hoagie and say "Well, you wanted to see me but I need to eat, remember you can't have this"? No. Because it's mean-spirited and inconsiderate. You would eat it in the car, or you'd wait until later to buy it, but you wouldn't make a production out of it unless you were actively looking to torment the dieter. It's just awful. Let him eat junk food. When he arrives with it, head into your room and watch stuff on your phone or computer. But this sounds like a good time to really look at his behavior and realize that the people closest to you are not supposed to act like this.

I want lettuce. I want to make taco-seasoned ground beef and then I want to stick it in a lettuce leaf and eat it. I don't need much, just one. It's at least a week away and I'm starting to loathe cheese sticks.

People eat an INSANE amount of food, I've been to a couple of work dinners and it's crazy how your perception changes because I know I was one of the big eaters before surgery. I ended up going out and buying a new set of place settings for home because I now can't imagine ever filling up even a salad plate, so I've found a bunch of really small bowls, some of which are technically categorized as "sauce bowls" or "peanut dishes". Unexpectedly that's also helped when doing work events, the dimensions of the small dishes are now so familiar that I can eyeball what would fit on one, rather than trying to downsize from a dinner plate.

At almost a year out you should definitely be able to drink more than 4 oz per hour - that was the amount we were expected to drink within 24 hours post-op. If you're feeling restriction to the point that you're unable to drink more than an eggcup of water per hour, talk to your surgeon ASAP, but from what I'm reading in your post, it's just as important for you to step up the meetings with your nutritionist and I'd advise asking around about a counselor or therapist who can work on the mental side of this stuff. It sounds to me like you're blending head hunger, actual hunger and craving together into the same category. The surgery usually takes care of actual hunger for a while post-op because of the lack of the ghrelin hormone, but head hunger and cravings are more psychological and need to be handled that way.

Don't freak out, you and I are tracking almost exactly (similar start weight, similar progression, similar goal weight). You're doing fine. I'm about to hit the end of my 4th post-op week and I've lost about 19lbs, but over the past week and a half I've been losing 5 of those pounds very slowly and with lots of bumps. Sometimes you just have to ignore the stall. The fact is, if you're eating less than 1000 calories per day, there's just no way you won't lose in the long run. And we have a lot of months left on the honeymoon clock. If you find yourself getting fixated on the scale, try getting a smart scale that communicates with an app, it's really taken my mind off the incremental scale changes. I basically choose not to mentally track my weight change and instead let the app record it, so sometime later in the week I can pull out my phone and look not just at the day-by-day but overall trends. It's done good things for my sanity. Sure, I've only lost 5lbs in almost a week and a half, but the overall trend is still significant weight loss so that's good enough for me.

There's definitely stuff I wouldn't wear now, and which I probably wouldn't wear even when I'm closer to goal. A lot of my clothing is dictated by corporate culture to an extent, but not the uniform type - I dress to match client expectations/culture a lot of the time, which can mean some days I'm wearing a conservative slacks and high-necked sweater, other days I can put all my ear piercings in and wear jeans and ankle boots. More than anything, I think age-appropriate clothing for me is clothing that shows an understanding of what looks good on your body, an awareness of your audience, and an awareness of what you're projecting. For instance, tailoring seems to be key no matter what your size (which is of course difficult when you are never the same size from one week to the next), especially as you get older. I also did one of those hilarious color consultations a few years ago and now try to dress in the color palette that works for me, even if it means leaving on the rack some colors I aesthetically like. My clothing is part of my messaging to the client too; if they wanted someone organized and structured, that's what they get. If they're looking for a creative, what I wear can make them perceive my messaging more positively. One thing I've gotten much, much more careful about is holdover clothing and necklines. I think sometimes I remember what I looked like in a sweater more from 2015 than what I'm looking at in the mirror today, which can be problematic. As you get older parts of you get less, uh, perky? And really paying attention to what parts of that sweater cling and gape in subsequent years, that's pretty key. Just because you got tons of compliments in 2015 doesn't mean the cut of that sweater looks good on you years later. I stay away from most full-blown trends and fast-fashion stuff, overall I think that's best left to the 20-somethings. It might look fine on me, but it visually codes me alongside a bunch of 20-somethings and then I'm the odd one out.

Almost a month out and I'm feeling it too, but not badly. Mostly stuff like I always go barefoot in my house but for the first time I've actually bought wool socks because my feet get cold now - not all the time, but enough to have bought socks. Everything else is a bit random; for instance I've been comfortable wearing my huge down coat in warmer temperatures than usual, but then again I only wore a fleece in 40 degree weather this morning and ended up getting a little overheated by the time I was in my office. So it seems to happen on and off. I read somewhere that one of the ways the body dumps excess energy when you're consuming too many calories is by making you warmer overall. Pretty sure I didn't read it in a medical journal so could just be someone's guess, but that would at least explain the cold extremities. Organ repair is probably doing something in redirecting blood flow as well.

The incision recovery's not what'll get you. It's the lack of caloric intake and large-scale internal repairs being made (a long incision and staples down your stomach) that will completely sap your energy. Not the case for everyone, but for me it was sort of like pregnancy brain - a huge amount of my energy was being redirected to organ repair. And then layer on top of that no calories.

The category "desk job" can be deceptive. I thought that because I'm not doing physical labor in my job and could do a lot of it remotely , I could go back to work part-time about two days after my surgery and then be back almost full-time the following week. What I DIDN'T take into account is that my job is at multiple desks across a city and highly strategic/stressful, so I was absolutely wiped at the end of each day even when I was just holding calls and emailing from my couch. I'm three and a half weeks out now and find that by Wednesday night, I feel like I could sleep a week. Overall I feel like I'm still playing catch-up and probably should have checked out of work for 1-2 weeks. So I'd suggest take at a week off. If you have a job that's particularly physically or mentally taxing, maybe two.

When we were talking about seafood that I can eat now, my nutritionist called out shrimp in particular as the devil. Apparently very dense, the size of them makes you think you should be able to eat the whole thing (and encourages to you ignore warnings from your stomach), and it tends to land in your stomach like a rock. I don't really eat seafood, but it stuck out to me how vehement she was about shrimp!

Your psych was massively inappropriate and you absolutely should write a letter. Don't spare any detail. Go ahead and attach some references like this: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/12/7/16587316/bariatric-surgery-weight-loss-lap-band. Your psych is not giving a medical opinion, she's giving a layperson's opinion, and that's ridiculous. "Save you from being chopped up"... good lord. And I have no bloody idea what you're meant to do in a week of Weight Watchers other than learn how to fill in your booklet, and if she's trying to get you to learn about nutrition? That's what the mandated nutritionist visits are for. Don't go back to this woman. Find another person to conduct the psych eval. You don't like her, she's cold, she's wrong, and she's apparently trying to make you a regular client by steering you towards a weight-loss program with the stated intention of you NEVER getting the surgery. That is not the intent of the eval, it's supposed to be a single visit to gauge whether you're in a good mental space to have the surgery, NOT to try to brainwash you into doing what the clinician wants.

Getting extra ear piercings. I was going to do it anyhow but now my face is thinner my ears stick out more, so time to bling them up a bit.

Out of curiosity, what was your surgeon's pre-op diet like? And how quickly did you move to puree after?

Trader Joe's has chicken in a can that is really, really good for making a really soft chicken salad.

Try going by weight rather than by cup size - I've found measuring out 2-3 oz is a lot better indicator than volume.

I'm not giving contrary medical advice or telling the poster to ignore the advice of their surgeon, just pointing out that there's not universal consensus on this topic, so eating a couple of chicken nuggets during pre-op is not worth ginning yourself up into a tizzy. Be 100% honest with your surgeon at all times, but don't freak out about cheating just because some people on these boards have gotten dire warnings from their surgeons that if they break the pre-op diet they'll go into surgery and come back out with a couple of holes in them and no procedure done. The poster's initial concern was the level of strict adherence they saw advocated on this board - I saw the same thing pre-op and it's why I quizzed my doc about the lack of pre-op diet and the size of my liver. From what I've heard (and the heavy implication from my doc), the liver thing is mostly a scare tactic. It also makes no logical sense - there are plenty of ways to gauge liver size without booking an operating room and team and putting someone under anesthetic and cutting into them, all enormous risks compared to an ultrasound. My doc said he'd never closed a patient due to liver size after thousands of procedures, and seemed to think the entire question was a bit ridiculous. Clearly from what I read on this site, for most people who heard it the scare tactic was effective. Moral of the story being: don't freak yourself out because of what people on the internet say about their experience. Talk to your surgeon, be 100% honest and get the facts.

This is what I'd say: the surgery is relatively easy. The weeks (and months and years) after are not. I see people freaking out about following their pre-op diet and that their surgeon will just zip them back up again without doing the surgery, but given the huge variation in surgeon's advice (my surgeon: no pre-op diet, 24 hours of fluids ahead of time and he didn't even have to use the liver retractor) I wouldn't dwell on that horribly. What I WOULD dwell on is whether or not you feel able to resist nibbling on a muffing at 6 days post-op, or thinking of your first McDonald's shake after surgery as a "goal", or planning out how you'll pace Christmas cookies so you can still eat them all even with a small stomach. If your fear is of the actual surgery, the risks are pretty few and well-documented. But if your fear is the thought that you will sabotage yourself afterwards through eating choices, then that's a different topic and might mean that cancelling the surgery and working through food addiction issues with a psychologist would be a better use of your time.

Eggs can feel pretty bulky during puree, they were tasty but did not great in my stomach after I'd swallowed. Tuna was pretty good (I put greek yogurt and milk in mine to thin it down). I also ate blended lentil soup, and you can also try a small amount of cream of wheat.

For the sake of portability, I've been making a lot of meatballs - I have some baking right now that are taco-flavored and stuffed with cheese. I've also made some that are like mini stuffed burgers with a chunk of babybel cheese in the middle.

I've been packing the 2oz containers of hummus, applesauce in a squeeze pack, foil packets of tuna, string cheese, laughing cow cheese, and also tiny mason jars of sous vide coddled eggs. I also always have a shake in my bag. And if all else fails me, I go into Hale & Hearty and pretend I want to taste the lentil soup (around 2 oz sample cup), then just buy a water.My meals on the go are not fancy at all (except for the coddled egg) but I'm kind of enjoying the food-strictly-as-fuel thing. For the other stressors of work events: I went to a work buffet the other night and when everyone was getting their first plate I just took myself off to the bathroom, then when I returned grabbed a napkin and a vegetable dumpling in a pair of chopsticks. I nibbled at the veg a bit while talking to people, then binned the 2/3rds remaining of the dumpling. They all assumed I'd already finished a plate, no one noticed a damn thing. I've also been using the Starbucks mobile app to preorder a short steamed milk with one pump of sugar-free vanilla syrup whenever we go out for coffee. If we go somewhere else, I just order a peppermint tea. And if we go out for drinks, I already have a reputation for drinking gin and tonics, so I just get water with lime and no one knows.

No intention of kicking you while you're down - just in the queue of things we should be eating right now, there are a lot of items that make good sense (don't drink caffeine because it's a diuretic and dehydrates you, don't eat carbs because you're trying to stay below 1000 cals and get protein, don't eat sugar because it makes it hard to control blood sugar spikes) but other than regular overeating, bread/grain is the only one that my surgeon identified as "this could damage your healing stitches". If we're going to show fanatical willpower in any category, "things that could rupture my sleeve" would be the one I'd pick. Do you know what prompted you to eat the pretzels? Was it habit, head hunger, someone bringing temptation to work when you didn't have something to substitute? I know you mentioned you were curious about dumping syndrome, but we're going to have plenty of time to figure out what we can't eat via trial-and-error in the regular food stage, so there must be something else at play to make the attempt less than two weeks out from surgery. And if you think it's more of a psychological thing (like an almost unstoppable drive to eat something and casting around for a rationale to excuse the impulse) have you brought it up with a counselor at any point?

I guess everyone's surgery really is different - I had mine a week before you and can't even eat half a cup over a two-hour span. Literally, I just hit my limit and no matter how much I want to eat the last tablespoon of chili, no go. One word of caution: from what I understand, bread in particular swells once it's in your stomach, so even if you initially fit it in it may expand from there. We're both in the very early stages of healing and even when diverging from the meal plan, there are probably certain things we shouldn't eat because it's an actual risk to healing. Bread and grains likely fit in that "absolutely no-go" category. (full disclosure: I had a mini Cadbury Creme Egg today. No one's perfect.)

That's a quarter cup of sugar, plus carbonation, plus caffeine. Kind of the axis of evil right there. And no nutritional benefits at all. Why are you hoping for that particular food?

Based on past experience, the most frustrating piece of losing weight is your perception of how other people treat you/are attracted to you as you lose weight. This can be a massive mindfuck. Suddenly friends who you had slow-burning crushes on long ago are cropping up again and claiming they've had a crush on you since high school. You become more and more aware of how many people are checking you out on the bus. When a totally new person sidles up to you and shows interest, your brain kicks into overtime to try and game out how they would've treated you 100 lbs ago. It's all in your head but so is food addiction and we all know how powerful THAT one is. Personally, I'm going to therapy to tackle this one before it gets its hooks into me. I already know that my reaction to the changes above can be a desire to become "invisible" again, which prior to surgery usually meant regain. I also know that my view of humanity takes a massive hit because with the increase in approaches, flirtation, invitations - it's flattering, but I can't hel but think "why didn't you act like this with me last year?". You start to see what fat bias is like from the ranks of the skinny. You end up feeling really bad for the person you used to be and sometimes angry and bitter at the people who are suddenly being so much more welcoming and in some cases hitting on you. Someone out there will like you, don't worry about that part. MANY people will like you. Just get yourself in the right headspace to deal with that influx.