LindaD

You know what I love - people are willing to act as if McDonalds and Wendys and places like that are pure evil, but they will go eat at other "restaurants" that aren't fast food. Let me tell you - just because there is table service doesn't mean you're in the clear. WHATEVER you eat, and wherever you eat it from, you need to be aware of it, manage it, and (for me) track it. I can do that even with an occasional plain chicken sandwhich from the drive-thru or whatever. Whether you're making food at home, driving through, or sitting down with a menu and a server taking your order, you have to be responsible for your food choices. Period. In ANY of those situations, a person can make choices that are bad or choices that are good. The trick is to make the right choices, regardless of the venue. If you turn over the power to the establishment (fast food places are evil! they made us all fat!) you are not taking personal responsibility and claiming the power of your own choices. I mostly stick with whole foods and I have only had fast-food very infrequently. I've lost 76 pounds and feel great. I'm fine with my choices. No need for anyone to pity my poor, poor doomed soul. LOL I suppose if doing so makes you feel righteous, then go right ahead - it doesn't change anything with regard to me making my own path...

what are you most looking forward to?? I will be SO glad to get to a place where my shorts don't ride up between my thighs. I want to buy and wear cute belts. I want to be able to shop anywhere and not just plus-size shops.

My first food out when I was on mushies was guacamole. God, it was so good. :lol I love avocados and ate quite a few of those while on soft foods. Yummy. I do eat out, sometimes for pleasure and sometimes by necessity - either for business or because I'm away from home. I try to make good choices. I have ended up in a fast food place a few times. My last business trip, I walked to Wendy's - there was nothing else around. I got a plain chicken sandwhich and Water, no fries or anything. And I didn't eat the top bun. I have gotten teriyaki chicken with no rice at the mall - Sarku is the chain. It's dark meat chicken, very moist and when down well when I first started back on solids. I order it and eat less than half and get at least 1 more meal out of it.

It took a few weeks for my port site to really heal. It itched like crazy while it was healing. Also, at least on me, the port is stitched in where as the other incisions were just skin growing back together. So it makes sense that the port site has more healing to do. I recall feeling pain - nothing major, just niggling occasional pain - for about 4 weeks. (I was up and around pretty quickly too. Happy healing!!)

This is a sad thread. I really never conceived of this happening in real friendships. Heck, I wasn't even surprised by the surgery results ending in broken marriages (I can see that happening more easily, I guess).

The mirror - it lies. You are seeing a phantom image. Don't go by the mirror. Don't expect too much. Look for all the ways you life is better because of the loss. My surgery was just days before yours and I have SO many things that are better. THAT is what matters. F%#@ the mirror, ya know? It's not the boss of my feelings.

I occasionally sip something with my meal. I would say about 90% of the time I don't. I find it really easy to not have anything to drink with Breakfast or lunch. dinner, sometimes I drink. Not much - I've never been a big drinker in general. I've had some carbonated stuff here and there, sips. Mostly it's been in summer heat when that was what we had, like at Six Flags or the ball park. I'm not a soda person so it's truly an exception. And I've had a few drinks (libations) a couple of times. I will again on Friday too, probably nursing 1 or 2 beers over the course of the whole evening and drinking Water in between. I'm eating WELL and exercising like a mo-fo. I don't feel like I'm putting anything at risk by having a drink of diet soda or a few sips of water at a business dinner. I do have bread occasionally too, very small and well chewed bites. I tolerate it well. That's not really breaking the rules, though...

Oh, Samantha... that is so sad, almost tragic. :mad: I hope you two find your way back to each other. :wub:

Dropped a few more (was down, up, down) and hit a new mark - 210 this morning, 76 pounds gone! (most of it before surgery, but still a good amount since). I went in for my 2nd check up and we decided not to do another fill. So I'm at 2.4cc and will let it ride for now - I'm losing at a good rate and feeling good restriction. I can reevalute going forward and we'll change our minds on more fill if necessary. 10 more to go to get under 200 and 40 more to go for my goal.

I've had the GoWearFit for about a month. I like it - I like the tools and reports, I don't mind wearing it, all of that is fine. But I have concerns about its accuracy with regard to tracking my activity. For example, it will not give me "vigorous activity" for nothin... I do a brutal hour on the eliptical, pushing it at 15 crossramp and resistance of 8 or 10. The Precor machine at my gym estimates my calorie burn at 11 calories per minute (over 700 for the hour) and the GoWearFit does NOT ever show that as vigorous. It boggles my mind. I even changed my settings on the GWF tool so that any thing over 4.5 METS should be considered vigorous and it STILL doesn't consider my eliptical routine as vigorous. It does, however, log my teeth-brushing in the morning as vigorous. My teeth-brushing at night, BTW, is not vigourous. Last night, I did 1 hour and 15 minutes on the treadmill and it logged only 56 minutes of activity. When I do the weight machines, it barely registers as activity. And I do a pretty rigorous weight circuit - where I am working hard and sweating buckets. And when I upload my band, you'd think I was rocking in a hammock or something. LOL It acts like it wasn't hard work. So.... that's my complaint. I still appreciate it, and for me I just consider it "relative" and not accurate. I know much of my working out is very much vigorous and I don't know why the GWF doesn't read it as such, and that frustrates me. But at least it's under-estimating and not over-estimating so I figure in reality I'm burning MORE than it says. I still log my food on The Daily Plate and then once per day, I make one manual entry in the GWF food log bringing over my calories, fat, Protein, etc. The GWF database for food logging is lacking so I stick with one I like better.

I'm only about 3 months out but so far, I love it. I guess I'm still in the honeymoon phase, who knows. It gives me just the exact amount of "help" I need. I'm still working hard on my own, exercising nearly every day, yadda yadda. I only have 2.4cc's in my band and we're going to let it ride like that for now - I'm losing at a good rate and I feel like I have restriction, but I can still eat most things - just slower and less. I couldn't be happier. I hope when I hit the 4 year mark and beyond that I can continue sharing my success story, but I do realize that issues could come up with time. Right now, I've lost 70+ pounds. I'm sleeping better. I have tons more energy, my sex drive is back. Mentally I'm feeling better. I'm doing a lot better at work. It's just such a huge positive thing in my life. (And I realize all these results can be had with other forms of WLS, too.)

Today, I had a pretty typical day... Breakfast: 3/4 cup of Archer Farms Cinnamon Protein Cereal (I eat it dry, no milk... it's pretty yummy!) Lunch: 1 cup pistachios in the shell (maybe 1/2 cup without shells?) eaten over a period of time Dinner: fish filet with cheese on toast My dinner varies but I usually have similar breakfasts and lunches... I mix it up a little, but I rely on my favorites.

Mine was way easier than I expected too. I thought the healing phase would be harder. I thought the liquids/mushy food phase would be harder. I think the hardest part for me was the pre-surgical diet. Anyway, CONGRATS!!

You are very mature and well-spoken for your age. That had to be said. :lol I told my parents and my family that I was going to have it done, but then I didn't tell them when it was scheduled. I called them that evening and said "Guess what I had done today?" Everyone worries about the patient croaking on the table (though I had a c-section and don't remember a single person panicking over that... Hmmm...) Anyway, perhaps that's another way. Go through and do what you need to do, and then tell them as a fait acompli. The fear-of-death will be mostly past and it might be easier for them to accept.

I haven't lost any friends... my friends and family have all been very supportive. My husband was a little worried about the impact this would have on us - like, would we be tied to home eating scrambled eggs every day. Now at a few months post-op, he's ecstatic. It hasn't disrupted those parts of our life we enjoy, and it has enhanced some parts of our life which were a bit of a struggle. However, I KNOW that this has changed me. Some days, I feel like a different person, physically and mentally. I have to keep myself from talking about it too much. I worry that even when I keep myself from talking about it too much, I still may be talking about it too much. I have had friends before who suddenly found religion or true love or whatever and it can be quite tedious. This may be the same. I'm never jealous of someone who found God or true romantic love but I still don't want to hear about it every flippin' minute. So that might be how some people feel about us gastric surgery people. I guess it's a fine balance. We want people to share in our success, but we don't want to be too much "in their face" with it.

I'm not even 3 months out, and I'm down nearly 75. Of course, most of that I dropped prior to surgery. If we're just talking post-surgery, I guess I'm down about 28 pounds since surgery. I have embraced working out. I started last October at 3 hours per week and now I am up to 7 hours per week - trying for an hour of activity per day (on average). I recently bought the GoWearFit armband and it helps me track my activity - I have a goal of 7500 steps per day, 1 hour of activity per day, 1500 calories intake per day, 2500 calories burned per day. These are all targets and I do average pretty close to my targets. I also log every bite I put into my mouth to make sure I'm keeping in check with regard to a calorie deficit significant enough for loss. I am still in the honeymoon period and I hope it never ends.

If you set unrealistic expectations, you will fail at meeting them. Research and set reasonable expectations. Expecting to have some change when you're only 2 weeks post-op, in my opinion, is unrealistic. Do some see a loss then? Yes, but MANY do not. Do the work, the tool will hopefully do its job helping, and you will see results. If you expect too much, you'll end up self-sabotaging and that is counter-productive.

I'm down 3.5 this week, and I dropped 3.5 last week. WOWOWOWOW. So I'm at 212.5, down over 70 pounds altogether. :sneaky: :thumbup: I knew this would be a good week - no business travel and I got to the gym 3 times for a total of 4 hours of working out pretty hard, not to mention just keeping more active during my regular day to day life. I am no longer a slug. :thumbup: 12.5 more pounds and I cross over to a place I haven't seen for almost 15 years...

Last night, my husband and I went out. I dressed in a shortish dress with my hair french-braided and cute shoes and I felt so good about how I looked. But that's not the NSV... We were out sort of late. This morning, I heard the dogs and thought I'd let my husband sleep in so I quietly got up and grabbed my jeans and t-shirt off the chair and snuck into the bathroom to get dressed. When I put on the jeans and buttoned/zipped them, they were tight. I was all "WTF?" because my jeans have been pretty loose - I need to wear a belt with most of them. So I was surprised that the jeans were tight. I looked in the bathroom mirror and sort of turned a little and noticed that the back pocket had a faded square that was perfectly the shape of a wallet. I HAD PUT ON MY HUSBAND'S JEANS BY MISTAKE! And they fit! Oh, they were a little tight but I could wear them!! What an awesome feeling. I had a bit of a whoosh these past few days, so I'm down to 215.5.

Way before I went the surgery route, I was a believer in low-carb. And I dont' mean "eat a bunch of bacon and no fruit" LOL which is what many picture when you say that. When I'm doing low-carb, I usually stay about 100g per day or less. One woman laughed and said "THAT'S not low carb." Well, it's not Atkins-induction low carb, but it's about 1/3 of what the US guidelines recomment, so I would say a 66% reduction is low. I find that even now, post surgery, when I'm eating well, it comes to about 100g. I track my food on thedailyplate too. And while I started believing in low carb around '99, it was only last year that I read the Taubes book, but simply further convinced me that this is something to embrace. Keep in mind, what we call "low carb" today is probably pretty close to what a normal diet was for 99% of the duration of human kind. Also, Taubes does cover all the science behind why one does NOT need carbs for proper brain function. I know that even our most prominent experts aren't in agreement on a lot of this stuff. You can talk as if it's documented fact just because it's in a textbook, but I can go out and find another textbook that has documented fact that disputes your documented fact. It's just not as cut and dry as people like to make it out. We all have to choose our religion on this stuff, to some degree. I think that 80-100g of carbs per day is plenty for my brain. Then again, my brain did fine when I was on 20g a day during Atkins induction phases back when I did that for a few weeks as I kicked off the low-carb way of eating.

I have been looking at pictures in this thread for well over a year and this is my first time posting any. I'm pretty happy about it. For now, I'm just posting face pics - it's amazing when I see the changes reflected in my face.

5 pounds a week is awesome - I'd be a bit afraid to have it go any faster than that. Congrats on your loss!

Had a little whoosh and am at 216 now. :thumbup:

My mantra is "this is a marathon, not a sprint. this is a marathon, not a sprint." I tell myself all the time. I've posted it here even. Mostly, I'm willing to be patient. I really am. And when I screw up - make poor choices on food, skip my exercise - I'm willing to take my lumps. But when I eat well and get my exercise in - when I'm operating at greater than a 1,000 calorie per day deficit - then I don't like to take my lumps at all. I DON'T LIKE THESE LUMPS!!! I was out of town this week again. I had my GoWearFit on, I exercised, I logged every friggin' bite of food. I should have lost. But the scale read up 1.5 pounds today. And I'm pissed about it. So I keep reminding myself "this is a marathon, not a sprint. this is a marathon, not a sprint. It should make sense. A 3,500 calorie deficit should be a pound of loss, not a 1.5 pound gain. Blah.