Taoz

Yeah, we're getting a few more decent low-carb options and supplements available here now, it's just frustrating to see so many things available in the US, often with free shipping options etc, yet shipping anything here costs a darn fortune. I have already ordered bariatric multivitamins, but I was hoping to at least find some better tasting options for calcium citrate supplements (most calcium supplements I can find listed in chemists here are other forms of calcium). I shall keep looking though. And yes, it's 9:30pm, Wednesday night here in the land of Oz, and I'm a right grumpy **** today - probably a combination of VLCD, my kids being on school holidays and goading each other ALLLLL DAAAAYYY LOONNGGGG, and Aunt Flo being about due (hopefully to arrive and bugger off again well before surgery 2nd May!!!).

arghh... tried to load up "the big ward"... not on Australia netflix (even though it's on New Zealand netflix and apparently US. Also not on youtube. Aussie netflix sucks

Dammit. If I wanted to buy a 3 packs of calcium citrate chewy bites from bariatricpal store ($102), the cheapest postage cost to Australia is $62 Amazon doesn't post any here. I doubt I'm going to find an affordable way to get them.

Try not to panic. Some people have early problems with dairy so it may be the dairy in the cheese and then yoghurt that has upset your system. Call your surgeons office, as vomiting so soon after the surgery can risk a late leak or other damage to your still healing staple lines. Are you on medication for reflux? (my surgeon said they put everyone on medication for the first few months to prevent/reduce reflux and also aid in the healing of the stomach by reducing gastric juices) if you can't get support from your surgeon or the hospital where you had your procedure at this time, consider calling or going to your local hospital emergency department for advice?

Welcome to the forums! I am currently 2 weeks pre-op but have found the experiences and knowledge shared on this forum over the past month to be hugely helpful to me in my planning and preparations. There are a great many discussions new and old about so many dimensions to bariatric surgery and how it intersects with our varying experiences. I have seen mention of some people having worsening depression for a few months post surgery (possibly because of medications behaving differently and major hormonal changes with the rapid weight loss, however long term depression symptoms tend to greatly improve with the weight loss. Be alert to changes in your mental health and keep your primary physician in the loop, especially if you get suicidal feelings or anything similarly alarming. Also talk with your support team about your addictive nature and any tools they can put in place to make sure you don't move into other harmful addictions post surgery. Some people who have been using an addiction to food or eating behaviours can fall into other harmful addictive behaviours such as drug or alcohol abuse once their ability to medicate their feelings when food is taken away by surgical restriction. Keep being involved with your alcoholics anonymous support groups. I think there were some recent posts on here regarding alcoholism that may be useful, or at least put you in contact with other sleeve patients dealing with alcoholism. That's about all I can think of that might be relevant. But thank you for putting yourself out there with this posting and coming to these forums as they can be really helpful to pre and post op sleevers.

over the past 2 months I've watched quite a few episodes of "weight loss ward" and "fat doctor" just on youtube. Good to see a lot of the surgery, and the issues and success of other obese people. (lovely to see more doctors treating fat people as PEOPLE too)

Yikes!!! That sounds awful. Thank you for sharing! I have my post op bariatric multivitamin sorted, but still need to arrange the Calcium - am considering the caramel chews mentioned earlier as I think I'll do much better with those than the dissolvable ones that are similar to vitamin C tablets

Welcome to all the wonderful new people in this thread who will be joining us on the losers bench during May. Here's hoping for smooth sailing and swift losses for all of us! 💖💖💖

Congrats!!! I carry a lot of weight on my inner thighs so apart from knee length bike shorts (which I wear while swimming or underneath skirts/dresses to prevent chafing) I haven't worn shorts in forever too (they will ride up on the inner thighs). I look forward to the day I can comfortably wear shorts too!

As above don't berate yourself about the bad for, but please, please talk with your doctor if you are throwing up even with fluids. Fluids should be going down fine at this point and vomiting is something you need to avoid so soon after surgery. You might only need some IV fluids and a check that you don't have a stricture/narrowing causing the vomiting.

I can see the difference in your figure, but that may be less obvious depending on what you wear at work. You're doing great though hun! Having started the job so soon after surgery your initial higher weight may not have registered with people, plus they could have thought you were only temporarily larger or bloated due to private medical stuff going on. Occasionally we are lucky enough to work with people who don't make our weight/appearance a matter of public discussion.

I sampled it ahead of my doctor visit (and found I couldn't tolerate it because the artificial sweeteners triggered nasty headaches). If you look up the optifast website they have suggested plans for initial weight loss (replacing all three meals a day plus some salad/veggies) down to maintenance (replacing only one meal a day). If you can, check in advance with your chosen surgeons office what their required pre op diet is and go from there. Don't start a pre-op intensity very low calorie diet too far ahead of surgery date though, especially if your surgeons office require you to lose a certain amount of weight during pre op.

Cutting out chocolate is seriously hard. I found myself getting a bit addicted to ALDI white chocolate last year, and it took a few months of not having it to finally stop the urge to buy and eat it. I've now been fine with all the Easter chocolate floating about the house, and my husband is working his way through the couple of boxes of chocolate we adults received. Someone posted elsewhere that keeping some good quality 85% dark chocolate can be good, as it doesn't have a lot of sugar and tastes strong and slightly bitter so an occasional square can be enough when you really want some. I'll consider that when I get closer to goal though, don't want to be doing anything to derail myself at this point.

Looks like you and Jules have already found a similar US option.. yay! My surgeon has minimum 3 night stay in hospital, and it's usually 3-4 nights. They keep you on IV fluids the first few days until you are able to drink well enough to prevent dehydration. The bodie'z are a little sweet for me (like Gatorade) but with the unflavored powder I'll have the option of making it with half flavoured, half unflavored for a full strength but only half sweetened drink which should go down easily.

I think the fears are there for at least most of us, but we are here doing this because we know our own histories. We know how many times we tried so many things only to wind up heavier, less happy and less healthy in the long run. To be successful in the long term we need better tools than "willpower" and all the dieting advice in the world. Bariatric surgery is the only tool proven to make significant weight loss maintenance in the long term possible for obese people (though not without the determination to work with that tool effectively). This is not "cheating". This is finally getting the tool you need to succeed in weightloss and all the future benefits and opportunities that leads to. YOU CAN DO THIS!

I second this! I really hope you get your date and make it through to the other side with us May sleevers!!! You inject so much warmth and humour into these forums and deserve your day on the table ASAP!

I got to start immediately after my surgeon appt, as they scheduled me for 3 weeks later and would have wanted me on up to 4 weeks pre op VLCD. So no opportunity for a "last favourite food/meal" for me lol. Thankfully my surgeon still allows move normal meat & veg dinners until the day before surgery or I'd be going crazy I think.

I'm around 5'2", my heighest weight was 124kg (BMI 51, clothing size 24/26) early last year, i was 121kg when I made the decision in February this year that I I wanted to get a gastric sleeve. I'm currently 115kg BMI 46 and two weeks away from my gastric sleeve date. I hope to drop another 5-10kg in my remaining 15 days of pre op VLCD (hoping to match my 6'3" husband's 106kg by surgery day!) as I've heard the better you can do in the lead up to the op, the better you do with post op weight loss. My initial target is 60kg. That is just under half my highest weight! I think the normal range BMI for my height is 50-60kg but my genetics make for very solid thighs and calves and heavy busts. I'll probably be carrying at least a few kilos of excess skin at that weight too and will be looking at skin removal and breast reduction and uplift. Some non scale victories I have planned are fitting into my wedding dress (size 16) and my year 12 formal dress (size 12 I think) which my mum apparently still has. Plus I want to be at a comfortable size to get a fishing kayak and work to beat my severe sea sickness with perseverance and my love for fishing.

Best of luck for a smooth operation and swift recovery!

I'm getting the gastric sleeve 2nd may. Rny tends to lose weight faster at first, but by 18 months post op sleeve and rny loss is about the same. Most revisions from sleeve to rny that I've seen so far are people who developed reflux. Benefits of sleeve over rny are much lower chance of dumping, no malabsorption of nutrients, no risk of herniation from bypass intestine joins, and complete removal of the 80% of your stomach that produces most of your ghrelin hunger hormone. (I'm guessing sleeve would also do less damage/alteration to your "gut biome" too, which research is only now starting to show is massively important to health) If you are someone who still chooses to eat unhealthy foods / empty calories post surgery though, the sleeve won't prevent you from absorbing all of those calories like an rny would.

I just got hold of the bodie'z protein waters available in Australia and for me they are much easier to drink than regular meal replacement shakes. They taste more like Gatorade. Thankfully the Aussie ones are sweetened with Stevia (aspartame causes me nasty headaches). I'll be taking few bottles of ready to drink protein waters into hospital with me and probably some of the clear unsweetened and unflavored powder to include in any hot drinks/broth I have (bodie'z can be added to hot liquids under 80 degrees C).

I just got hold of the bodie'z protein waters available in Australia and for me they are much easier to drink than regular meal replacement shakes. They taste more like Gatorade. Thankfully the Aussie ones are sweetened with Stevia (aspartame causes me nasty headaches). I'll be taking few bottles of ready to drink protein waters into hospital with me and probably some of the clear unsweetened and unflavored powder to include in any hot drinks/broth I have (bodie'z can be added to hot liquids under 80 degrees C).

I think I'd really struggle on full liquids only diet for weeks of pre op. I'm lucky my surgeon found that too many people fail an all liquid diet and the stuff they fall back on is generally worse than including just a meat and veggies real dinner during pre op. Only my final day before surgery is all liquids. I didn't really get to have any food funerals. The bariatric physician wanted me on a pre op diet for 4 weeks ahead of surgery, but when I saw the surgeon a few days later there was a theatre opening only 3 weeks later that he was happy to book me in, so my pre op began immediately lol. I'm still not tolerating a meal replacement shake in the morning, as it makes me feel queasy for at least an hour. Most days I've been having a single scrambled egg and a coffee with 200ml 1% milk as my breakfast (is less calories than the VLCD shake, and once my protein water powder arrives I can include an extra 15g protein in my coffee so will be about equivalent protein). After that I can bring myself to spoon-eat/drink a protein shake make with lots of ice for lunch and don't get queasy. If I get hungry mid afternoon I have some homemade veggie& chicken stock soup while I look forward to a relatively normal meat and steamed veggies dinner. I've been dropping a half kilo a day on this so I figure it's working ok.

I had to think on this a bit more today when I finally tackled the clothing fallout in my room from the past few weeks of being busy with other stuff! We here in the upside-down (shout out to all the "Stranger Things" fans) AKA Aussieland have finally hit Autumn weather. Any shorts in my current size or next size down is going straight into the donations pile. Same with a few pairs of jeans and work pants that are current size or near it (or are kinda my size but the waist gapes badly or whatever). I was happy to find some lightweight yoga pants which might be good in the interim. Dresses I'll hold on to until I'm definitely too small for, as I'm short and large busted (had my fingers crossed I'd wind up smaller post babies and breastfeeding, but only dropped back from a H to a 16G - if I don't wind up below a DD at goal weight I'll try for a reduction along with uplift surgery - I'll probably be hanging to my knees by then anyway ) I'm going to see how much my size changes over the next two weeks as I approach surgery day, and might at least pick up a few pairs of cheap comfy undies 2 sizes down in case I need them in hospital (I figure my current 24's will still stay up ok while I shrink through size 22). Once I get more than a week post sleeve I should be functional enough to go try on a couple of low-price pants at a local Big W, target or K-mart while the kids are in school, and pick up a few things to carry me through winter. I"m short and I carry a lot of weight on my arms and legs as well as my tummy and butt, and often need to size clothing to my thighs (which with many styles leaves the waist to large or gaping at the back) so I don't really trust trying to buy any pants ahead of time. It will be lovely to be able to start buying (or at least have the OPTION to buy) stuff at the top end (18/20) of the standard ranges offered by department stores like kmart and target here, rather than the minuscule range in the plus size section. I'm not working at the moment, so at least don't have to have "professional" clothing as I move down sizes. I'm glad that I never got around the donating my couple of nice (acrylic because wool makes me itchy) knitted jackets that are about size 18/20, mostly because I wanted to wash them first before donating and never got around to it. Given I'll likely be swimming in my size 24-26 jackets by mid-winter the knitted ones will be very handy to have (and can then be washed and donated in spring since they'll likely be too big for the next winter).

Ooooh, and I just noticed in my info on the left that at 115kg I've now dropped down to BMI 46 (much better than the 51/52 I was sitting at early last year. Oh, and hubby just laughed at me telling my little swan to hurry up and get to surgery date already Best wishes and positive thoughts to all my May buddies!!!