sideeye

I’ve been drinking a protein shake each morning, and making sure I get protein in during the day. The soup itself is low on proteins and carbs - it’s more to give me a big meal so I feel like I’m eating a lot once a day. Mostly water though: probably 2.5 cups altogether, takes me a while to get through the whole bowl. I’m experimenting more with tofu too.

Vegan soups have been helpful for me. An enormous bowl of veg soup flavored mostly with the water from soaking dried mushrooms and a spoonful of miso and salt. Comes in at around 300 calories and is my big meal of the day.

Nothing off-limits or poorly tolerated, just quantity. My eyes are occasionally bigger than my stomach but my eyes never OVERRIDE my stomach. If anything, I found myself cutting out any “light” or “x-free” foods. I used to drink skim milk, and now I drink 2%. Post-surgery I realized that the “diet” versions of foods just didn’t register as “food” somehow; I could be satisfied with a cup of 2% milk but still feel deprived after a pint of skim (theoretically. obviously I cannot drink a pint of milk). The light bulb on all of this went off when I tried Halo Top ice cream, which tastes ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE to me and unsatisfying but I could work on a pint of Cherry Garcia for over two weeks and be fine. So now when I eat, I have a smallish portion of what I call “normal human food”. I buy the normal caesar salad kit, but throw out half the dressing... That sort of thing.

Wear a mask. And I know folks are out there who think they’ll get the second shot, rip off their mask and burn it right there in the clinic parking lot, but - STILL WEAR THE MASK. The science isn’t settled yet as to whether the vaccination means it also prevents you from passing it on. So there is a scenario where you’re vaccinated, you go to a large gathering maskless and YOU get everyone there sick because you were infectious and had no idea because the vaccine protected you from symptoms. So far, the one thing we’re sure of is the vaccine prevents cases from getting deadly, not whether it halts the transmission. And then there’s all the emerging variants stuff and please, please just mask up and stay away from other people. I am an exhausted, demoralized covid researcher and system designer and 2020 has been brutal for people being willfully stupid about a pandemic. It’s been sickening to watch people claim that “no one could have predicted this” when I know that’s bull because I told you in your office repeatedly what was going to happen and what you needed to do to mitigate and you told me it was too hard and your people would be fine. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for medical professionals.

My doc wasn't too fussed about multivitamins after VSG. Basically said as long as bloodwork remains good, there's no need. I don't have a very restricted diet, so everything seems to be coming through via food just fine. I do know that others have been advised differently be their docs - may be a case-by-case basis.

I can't eat solid food too late at night, it's like revving the engine and then I want to eat an entire loaf of bread. What's worked for me is an absolutely ridiculous array of hot drinks: teas, chais, coffees, Korean citrus tea, instant coffees... I'll also drink ice-cold water or low-cal lemonade mixes. The variety and sheer quantity on a nightly basis seems to work for me. Basically anything that is majority water and not too sugary, but I do take my coffee with sugar and half and half, and that will usually tide me over for an hour. During the pandemic I've abandoned some of the ground rules and begun including cocoa mixed in milk (no) and booze (I mean, OBVIOUSLY no) and that's caused a fair amount of regain, but I once I cut those back out I'm pretty confident that the flavored-liquids route will work for evenings.

I'd second the therapy, and add in a "medication". If you have depression or a mood disorder, don't hamstring yourself by drawing a boundary around medications. I'm not saying you HAVE to take meds - just don't start from a position of ruling them out. Keep an open mind. Stress is a huge regain trigger for me, and not in the typical comfort-eating way. Stress builds up in my jaw and throat, and is only minimally impacted by meditation and exercise. I find myself eating so that the action of chewing loosens my jaw muscles, and then the action of swallowing expands my throat. None of this is post-surgical in nature, it's all a weird stress-related physical tic, but it absolutely results in me eating more to alleviate pain but could SEEM like it's emotional eating. Alcohol relaxes those muscles too, and similarly adds calories. When I go on low-dose medication, those things are considerably reduced and I can manage the remaining stiffness with hot tea. Obviously this is one extremely specific case, but shows how completely quirky the causes for regain can be. I'd already figured these tics out with a doc a decade ago but if I hadn't, I'd want a therapist/doc to provide that outside-in perspective.

I think you’ll get different answers here from different people, but for me three years out? No. I could not plough my way through my pantry anymore, not without a lot of pausing for digestion. You’ll have a much better internal brake, which will hopefully make you consider what’s happening instead of the headlong rush you used to be able to do. For instance, if you cooked half a pound of pasta and tried to eat it in one sitting, you probably wouldn’t be able to. You’d maybe manage half of it, feel uncomfortably full, and then have to either put it away or slow waaaaay down and eat the rest of it over the next hour or so. So you become very aware of binging tendencies (at least in my case). This is where it becomes important to understand there will be a “WHY” you’re overeating, and to get ahead of that by lining up a therapist. For some people, the absence of hunger pangs is like flipping a switch - that hormone is gone, and now they’re good! For others there is a real need for a certain taste, like fast food fries or ice cream, and that craving is very difficult to snap because of the “just one taste” impulse. Some people are emotional eaters whose overeating is prompted by an emotional state change. And for others the act of overeating itself created an endorphin feedback loop, so overeating actually rewarded you by making you feel good, sort of the opposite of the emotional eater (I was this kind). For me, the endorphin rush is gone now and so I’m not chemically rewarded for overeating, even a few years out. That chemical hit just isn’t possible anymore. My stomach is around the same capacity as it was 9 months out, I can only really eat a max of 1.5 cups of food in one 20-minute period. My pandemic problem has been grazing (2.5 cups of pasta, snacked on during a day around other meals, for instance) plus a weird stress reaction where I pack all of my tension into my jaw and mouth and guess what alleviates that ache? Chewing and swallowing actual food, not gum (dammit!). I maintained for two years with little problem. The pandemic knocked me for a loop. Am relatively confident I can reset (if I can get this damn jaw thing under control) but I’ve come to think a LOT of success in WLS is getting to the root of WHY you eat. That will help you in deciding how to manage the rough spots, and will prevent you from getting blindsided as much.

Quick update: September to December was not good to me at ALL. Not sure if this happened to anyone else working on covid-related projects, but in August I was quite optimistic that months of research and development and discussion would result in common-sense public health policy. So when it turned out that NONE of those measures were adopted (and this is after 16 hour days for months developing low-tech mitigation strategies specifically to head off an autumn surge), I and a lot of people I know absolutely hit a wall. Cassandra-like, watching predicted disaster unfold and all of these people we’d been talking to for months then publicly claiming they’d had no idea it could get so bad. It was like watching a series of tsunamis. Went into a massively depressive funk until mid-December and focused on nothing but keeping immediate family safe. Was weighing myself the whole time on my wireless scale and it’s really obvious that the gain is related to the (totally foreseeable and effing avoidable!) reopening and holiday spikes. Of course, gained a lot of weight. About 25 lbs in three months. Caught myself and plateau’d around New Year. So I’m rebooting now. Not wildly concerned about the reboot, but looking forward to just spending the next few months focusing on getting ready to reenter society. In jeans. Preferably the jeans I was wearing this time last year.

I’ve had about 35 lbs of regain, all during the pandemic. I am not mad at myself about this, and I wouldn’t want anyone else to be mad about their pandemic regain either. Motivated to lose it? Absolutely, yes! But we’ve just been through a societal upheaval that disrupted almost every pattern and STARTED with repeated panics about food scarcity - hardly normal for your brain to deal with. I’ve been weighing myself throughout, so I loosely knew what was happening. It was all grazing, plus some higher-calorie indulgences (like cocoa instead of tea). A considerable amount of it is likely related to going from one glass of wine every week to up to two glasses of wine per night - stress relief that never got dangerous but absolutely got fattening. About three months ago I realized I was at a point where things were getting dumb, and plateau’d. I’ve been in the same 5 lb band since. Yesterday my parents got their first vaccination, and today is the first day I’ve coordinated jewelry in probably 6 months. Some switch has flipped to make me remember that I’m actually going to have to reenter society soon, and I’d prefer to fit into my nice jeans when I do. I’m going back to shakes and string cheese and peppermint tea, all the baseline stuff. I don’t get hungry anymore, which is great, but this is going to be a big reorientation. But the time feels right, and I’ve seen too many people on this site follow exactly this path and get back to their goal weight to beat myself up about it. It’s a pandemic. We all ate more, we all drank more, the entire population carb loaded on sourdough for the first two months! But now the winter is over and hopefully soon the pandemic will be too, so the time feels right to get back on track. We can all do it.

@Circlesis I had surgery over two years ago and didn’t experience this the first summer, so I don’t know - I’d be inclined to attribute it to 40 more than the sleeve. @waterwoman I’ve spent a hilarious couple of weeks with my summer-attuned parents, and every time they sighed about it being cloudy or cold I would follow up “...YESSSSS!” I do have some sympathy for those who get depressed in winter, but then I remember that they have NO sympathy for me in May, so.... Another interesting pandemic feature? Pre-surgery I was completely disassociated with my body - not only could I not predict whether I’d gained or lost weight by general sense, I also couldn’t tell by looking in the mirror. It was on the level of body dysmorphia, honestly. That TOTALLY went away after surgery and I was sensitive to as little as a two pound shift, but I think that faded over the pandemic months. Being with my family this month, I suddenly started feeling a lot heavier both in “sense” and in mirror-view, but there was no scale for validation. I’ve just gotten home and it turns out I’m exactly the same as when I left, which tells me that my sense of my weight somehow reverted during isolation and then weirdly caught up as I was around my family. weird, right?!??

No worries - easy to get lost, and it’s tucked up in the main thread header but none of the subthreads. See you in April 2021, and good work on the progress so far!

N&I, it looks like you had surgery in Oct 2019 - the Vets board has an 18 month post-op requirement.

I'm New York, and within the past few months - bleh. The lockdown didn't bother me so much as a concept, weight wasn't a problem for the first two months. I was VERY involved in a virus-related contact tracing effort that has basically consumed all of my time, and obviously the status of healthcare in America means that I've spent since mid-Feb bashing my head against a wall to try and make things happen and hitting political and insurance roadblocks and let's just go ahead and agree that being 20 feet away from the kitchen during 13-hour days when you can't leave home without wearing a mask is... not ideal for maintaining weight loss? Long story short, I am a whopping 30lbs up on my lowest weight right now. It's reversible, and in fact with some of the virus-related work finally getting traction (Americans finally stop living in denial, hopefully?) and being parceled off to other teams I'm actually seeing work hours go back down to a normal schedule, but I'm rebooting starting this week through Orgain protein shakes twice a day and one carefully planned meal, plus coffee, water and a cheese stick. I've deliberately and proactively sectioned off my calendar to make sure I don't keep working until 8pm every damn night anymore. I have done terrifying things in Salesforce so now all of my spinning plates are in view at all times. How did I get here? Well... Stocked up in late-Feb when I realized that this was going to be a pandemic. Then tried to order once or twice a week from restaurants when it was clear they'd otherwise shut down, which meant a single dinner lasted three nights. Two months in, I started going to the store occasionally for simple human contact, usually ended up buying stuff I didn't need as an excuse to make the trip. By the end of the spring, the stocked-up stuff started to reach the end of its expiry date, which meant I had to eat it... You see how this spirals. I hate summer. Hate it. Seasonal depression (yes, it does exist for summer). Oh, and then this year it turned out I developed a sun allergy. So even if I did go out to exercise, I risked days of an itchy, poison ivy-like rash. Pool closed, obviously. Work stress. Firstly, trying to make sure I kept my team employed and occupied and engaged as they ended up stranded in apartments and parents' spare rooms in rural towns and assure them that layoffs aren't coming to get them. Secondly, all the virus work. Work happy hours at the start of the lockdown. I had maybe 3-4 drinks every MONTH before lockdown. But then everyone started having happy hours to stay connected, and about three weeks in I think the cocktail started representing the time you officially stopped work so we were all starting making it more of a daily ritual. And once you're having a drink every afternoon when you shut your laptop, you start having two on the days things are particularly rough, and now it's August and I have consumed a remarkable amount of calories via gin, tonic and cider and definitely need to change that pattern. Pandemic stress and constant, haunting thoughts about why I didn't get New Zealand citizenship when I lived there and could do it, dammit. Stopped wearing proper clothing. I vowed to keep wearing my jeans and nice work tops, and stuck to it for about two months. Then I realized that wrap dresses worked great on calls and were cooler. Then started wearing yoga pants (but not doing actual yoga!) and a nice top on calls. Over the last three or four weeks, I've worn zip-up hoodies on internal calls. So it was easy to ignore the weight gain. My wireless scale broke and it took me three months to buy a new one. Anyhow. The pandemic sucks, so many things about living in the US reality distortion field suck right now, but one thing I very much can control is my food intake so it's back to basics on that count. The grocery supply chain is just fine, I've bought a projector TV so I can lock my dog out of the room and do yoga with an image projected on a wall instead of trying to contort myself to do yoga via computer while battling weak wifi, and IT'S GOING TO BE AUTUMN!!! Also I'm taking a week off. Also one of my NZ friends is now living in Sweden, so we spend a lot of time WTF-ing at each other about our situation compared to our friends' situations. How are all of you doing? Working parents, I am not one of your number but know that as one of your colleagues, I do not mind seeing your kids onscreen, totally understand you can't make that deadline, and basically just want to make sure you can make it through the week with 50% or more of your sanity intact. This pandemic has not fallen equally across all shoulders by a long shot, and anyone who's trying to make you stick to a Before Times schedule or gets ratty about "unprofessional" childcare complications can go stuff themselves. **definitely not looking for any advice or encouragement here, and am in fact allergic to both unless expressly requested - just figured since this is a check-in I’d update on current state of play for anyone interested in comparison.

As @FluffyChix stated in the original thread: Not a Newbie but not yet a Vet - Sophomores have different challenges and are coping with an awkward middle stage, so please only post if you've passed the six month post-surgery mark!

January sales. I have been able to buy so much at January sales, and I have been able to be PICKY. I bought a freaking ball gown! (There’s a purpose, this isn’t rechanneling food bingeing into shopping.) It all fits, now it’s a question of does it look awesome. And just the purchase of the gown is novel. Before I would have (rightly) assumed the quest for a dress would be maddening, that I’d end up in something that made me feel acceptable at best, and even if I went to the event I’d have to gin myself up for it. There’s a fair chance I’d skip the event. But now I’m looking forward to it!

We all have our own standards for what we think is appropriate and that’s fine, but I can tell you that tone-moderating is an unproductive line of discussion that eats up entire threads on this site. Assume good intent (tone is notoriously hard to detect via text), and if you think someone’s crossing the line, ignore them. If they’re truly breaking the rules, report them.

It all depends on intent. Being accepted for who you are is important, and without this surgery I would still be an obese person. It’s not like extreme fatness was a choice, which is something fundamental thin people don’t understand. People telling me that they were worried about my weight sometimes meant it kindly, but it had absolutely no value to me, it was just another way of saying “this thing that plagues you daily, makes you a social outcast and literally impacts your health? The thing you have been trying to change for decades and can’t? Well, since I’ve decided that’s not weighing you down enough, I just want you to know how it impacts ME”. I had enough to worry about without shouldering that burden too. Does anyone truly think we don’t KNOW we need to lose weight, that we would be healthier and happier? I always took the “you look great” in context, as in “you look like a great version of you”. Not as in “compared to Cindy Crawford”. The people who say we don’t need to lose weight, I tend to look deeper there too - is it because they’re also overweight? Is it because they know every other message in this world is telling me I’m not good enough? Do they want me to just have a mental day off from the constant monitoring? There were people in my life who were positive weight loss influences, but they came as supporters, not critics or anxious onlookers. My brother in law constantly invited me on bike excursions, and I suspect when I accepted he picked a smoother road and shorter distance. He always made the invite casual, and always knew when to drop the subject. My sister, a cooking magazine maniac, bought Cooking Light for her own family use but constantly involved me in test-cooking new recipes when I was over, and sent me home with low-cal leftovers. I’ve described before that my mother had a wholesale reformation a decade ago when, reading a book about parenting for work, she realized that the entire eating disorder section listed all the things she’d imposed on me as a teenager under the “don’t do this” list. She called me and apologized, and she’s been incredibly supportive ever since. Having one person tell you that you’re okay just the way you are hardly cancels out the messaging the rest of the world sends you that you are not. And if it weren’t for this surgery, I can’t stress enough: I would still be obese. It’s not like it’s one of many options that would work with enough effort - it’s THE solution that is most empirically proven to work in the long term. The presence of more people in my life “kindly” informing me that I’m fat and should do something about it would have had no impact at all, other than more yo-yo dieting. ...if in the other hand you’re talking about enablers who seem to want you to STOP losing weight and angling to keep you obese through flattery, then yeah, that’s effed up. Might be health concern (rapid weight loss having powerful subconscious connections to deadly illness), might be jealousy, might just be someone unconsciously wanting a reliable thing in their life to stay stable. But I’d still put them on a different level than fat-shamers.

I’m almost two years in and I’ve been stable at this weight (plus or minus five) for over six months - I went on holiday last month and saw a bunch of friends and family who hadn’t seen me in years, and I hadn’t actually thought at all about whether or not to tell them, but in the moment felt totally comfortable telling them all. but I think that’s largely because I’m past the “new” phase of things, when literally everything is changing: your body, your habits, your appetite, your clothes, the way you fit in the world, the way society treats you... that is a lot to process! And it’s not a short processing time, either! It’s taken me a while to mull over all of this stuff and speak confidently and with authority about the real differences between living in the world as an obese person and living in the world as a person who that world was literally modeled around. I likely wouldn’t have been able to answer some questions at six or twelve months, because I was still learning how this particular surgery worked for my particular body. The level of confidence I have now probably stops some opinionated people from even thinking of undermining men in these conversations; and when they float half-formed opinions? I’ve had almost two years to think through that opinion and am WAY ahead of them and can hold my ground confidently. All a long way of saying: tell who you want to tell, when you want to tell them. Your decision about telling/not telling may change as you change, because you WILL change. Just do whatever is going to work best for you. The one caveat I’d throw in there is if possible, try not to lay groundwork that will reinforce the idea that this sort of change is possible through pure diet and exercise. It’s not. And my nightmare scenario is some idiotic skinny person sees me, watches me limit my food intake or flat-out asks if I’m dieting, and then goes and berates her obese sister for not dieting. That’s why I’ve tended to go for evasion with those types of people rather than outright lying (“I’m feeling great, thanks, but don’t really want to talk about that stuff”) - I’m all too aware of the knock-on effect. But again, it’s a fine line and if a pushy gossip is making you feel cornered, do what you have to do to stay focused and get her out of your orbit. Considering consequences and other people is a good thing - prioritizing them over your own well-being is usually not.

My cheat is, now and forever, sweet creamy coffee. It’s been almost two years since surgery and I now recognize that this is my off-ramp for times of high indulgence: every time I get head-hungry rather than genuine-hungry, I make myself a cup of strong coffee with a heaping spoonful of sugar and half & half. My brother-in-law calls it “dessert coffee”. It takes me a while to drink but hydrates me, fills me up, and apparently scratches that sweet/fat itch. I’m a caffeinated maniac for a couple of days, but on the other side of it I’m not eating Trader Joe’s Cheese Straws at an alarming clip anymore.

It took a few months to even out, but my full trigger is in my throat - I literally feel like I’m hitting capacity. It means I can have pretty much one more bite (if I really want it) then I’m done. If I try more than that, it’s right in the edge of regurgitation. What’s most remarkable to me is that other people have a “full signal” from birth. No wonder average weight people get frustrated and tell overweight people they should just stop eating - for them it’s not just a natural feeling, it’s UNNATURAL to keep eating past that trigger. As it is for me now. So they just think overweight people are uncontrollable gluttons who perversely eat past capacity even though it’s hurting them. Very odd to realize that what I used to think of as casual cruelty (“well if you don’t want to be fat just STOP!”) is actually more like someone getting irritated that another person can’t differentiate blue from green, and assuming that person is just being stupid or stubborn, that they WON’T admit there’s a difference between the colors. But neither party realizes that it’s possible to be color blind.

...oh, HA. Have just remembered that I got SPECTACULAR food poisoning in Mexico 9 months post-op, so I have definitely experienced vomiting. Five days in a row. Stomach was small so little to bring up even at the start, but after that just cycles of goo and bile. I don’t remember there being anything particularly notable about the sensation though - certainly nothing like “this hurts more than usual” or “oh my god am I going to pop my seam with all this hurling”.

I have a virus right now and while I haven’t vomited, I am snotty and headcoldy and miserable, and the big difference pre and post VSG for me? Liquid intake. I used to be able to drink three pints of water and then pass out with tissues stuck up my nostrils and the humidifier going full blast. I’d wake up 10-18 hours later mightily improved. But now I just can’t get that sheer amount of liquid in. So I wake up and then have to stay up for an hour slowly packing a pint of water in, and of course I fully awake during that time, and then my throat hurts and my mind races and I can’t get back to sleep no matter how much I want to. honestly that’s the only thing I can think of as a drawback. I don’t think I’ve vomited yet, or if I did it was so minor it barely qualified. Diarrhea is more common now, but usually directly related to coffee intake or something, and a one-and-done event.

I think the oral fixation thing is probably a good place to focus (also talk to your dentist and find out if you clench/grind your teeth - the clenching action can sometimes be an unconscious tension reliever, though also ruins your teeth). But I’d go in a different direction with the candies - I don’t think you need to find a low-calorie candy substitute, I think you need to ration. Portion out a reasonable allotment of one week’s worth of candy into a mason jar or other glass/transparent container, and then put a bag of grapes in the freezer. As the week goes on, every time you eat a candy, remind yourself that this is all you get this week, and eye up the jar to see if you’re cool with the pace. When your craving is low enough to be diverted, grab a grape out of the freezer (or a cherry, or something else of similar size). I practice what I preach here, I have a candy corn fixation and filled a mason jar with corn mid-October vowing this is all I have until NEXT HALLOWEEN. I’m maybe 1/5 through it. Somehow just knowing it’s there and that I’ve already accounted for it in my diet makes it less of a guilty pleasure/cheat and I don’t need it as much.

My sister gave me a structured dress for Christmas that’s a size 10 in a non-flexible fabric. It’s one that goes right up to my neck and has long sleeves. I took it out of the bag and thanked her, all the while thinking there’s no way this will fit. Well, it does. PERFECTLY. I’m kind of boggled. I also went on a two-week business trip with only carry-on luggage. I’ve been able to do this for vacations before, but never for a business trip. My clothes are smaller, I pack far fewer sweaters, and everything is interchangeable as long as I pack carefully - this used not to be achievable, since Slacks 1 only looked good with Sweater 3, and Skirt 1 could only be worn with Top 1... both my problem areas and the weird quirks of plus sized tailoring really made mixing and matching difficult. Now I can pack a pair of black jeans, and because they’re pretty high-end and I’m not overweight anymore, they just look great when paired with a sleek top and jewelry.