ms.sss

OMG. Hot Mamma Alert. Rawr.

My surgeon didn't have a goal weight for me, only that he said he would consider me a "success" if I lost 60lbs in the first year (This was calculated as 60% of excess weight, based on BMI 25 ideal weight). I had different ideas: I aimed for 120, which was just about the mid-range of "healthy" BMI for my height, AND was the weight I was when I met Mr. back in my 20's. I later changed this to 127 as I felt it was enough at the time. Anyhoo...I got to surgeon's goal at 3 months. I got to my revised goal at 7, then to my original goal anyway at 8.

@SanDiego Girl : Ok, first the disclaimers: Disclaimer 1: I am not a medical professional/nutritionist...just an avid reader/googler. Disclaimer 2: The values below are very generalized and assumes that you have more or less an average metabolism, average functioning insulin regulation, average body fat percentage for your stats, etc. etc. TL;DR: If you want to skip my very long-winded dissertation below, the gist of my message is this: you may want re-evaluate your calorie consumption-activity level combo, cut the sugar, and manage your expectations. Now, your weight today is pretty much what it was when you had your metabolism study, so let's assume you still have a BMR of 1486. This means that if you all you did all day was sit like a statue and breathe, then you would burn 1486 cals for just existing. Your reported exercise can be classified as "Moderately Active" (30-60 mins of sustained elevated heart rate sessions 4-6 times a week). Add this to the regular activity of every day living (i.e., just moving), and your daily caloric needs would be approximately 2150 cals a day to MAINTAIN YOUR WEIGHT. To lose weight, you will need to consume under this amount (or up your activity levels) CALORIES Without knowing exactly what's in your lunch salad, nor what consists of your meat/veggies dinner, nor what amount of each, I calculated the you are probably consuming about 1750 calories (I arbitrarily assigned 300 & 400 for each of lunch and dinner). This means, using the oft-used statistic that a deficit (or gain) of 3500 cal results in a 1lb loss (or gain) of body weight, you theoretically should be losing on average 0.8 lbs a week. This assumes that you NEVER go over 1750 cals a day, and you sustain your current activity level. Based on your original post, it sounds like you aren't. **Note that this is not an exact science, and I personally think 3500=1lb is an overly simplistic assumption, but for the purposes of this post, lets just keep it simple. I digress...** Soooo....if you would like to lose a bit more, a bit faster, try cutting your current cals by a couple hundred (your teams suggestion to aiming for 1200 is sound in this case). Your reported typical daily menu above includes 880 cals of JUST SNACKS. Perhaps try cutting out the Starbucks and 1/2 the nightly Dove chocolates. Doing this alone will save you 245 calories a day. SUGAR Another more controversial suggestion would be to cut all (or drastically reduce) sugar/sweeteners. Not only is sugar poor nutritionally, excess amounts causes spikes in glucose levels, which may to lead insulin resistance: which means the cells in your body aren't as efficient at removing glucose in the blood, so it will store it as fat. Which is weight gain. Further, it is theorized that sugar begets sugar. When you are eating it, you want more. So if you can white knuckle it for a few days and get it out of your system, it is suggested that you will find that your sugar cravings will subside. EXPECTATIONS Lets say you keep your cal level at 1750 & moderate activity levels (and do not deviate from it). This still means you would theoretically still be losing 0.8 lbs a week. This also means you would reach your 180 goal in 50 weeks. Are you ok with this timeline? Can you sustain at most 1750 cals a day for 50 weeks? If you go above this level you will extend that timeline accordingly. Edited to add: remember that this 1750 max cal level will reduce as YOU reduce! You are quite a ways out of surgery and unfortunately don't have the extra tailwind that recently sleeved people have. Its very easy to get frustrated and give up when your hard effort results in what is perceived as slow weight loss. The typical manifestation of this frustration is to eat (and usually its like pizza or cookies and NOT carrots and yogourt). If you can figure out how to deal with the frustration for just longer periods of time (I mean no one actually expects this to be completely solved immediately by sheer will), you will already be a couple steps up in the game. Good Luck! ❤️ P.S. Am really sorry that this was so long. P.P.S I think its worth noting here again in the postscript the Disclaimers noted above: Disclaimer 1: I am not a medical professional/nutritionist...just an avid reader/googler. Disclaimer 2: The values below (sic) are very generalized and assumes that you have more or less an average metabolism, average functioning insulin regulation, average body fat percentage for your stats, etc. etc.

I dinno about restriction but def hunger. I don’t think I wanted to eat/felt hungry for like over a month. Ok, i just checked....maybe my memory is failing me..:MFP says I was ate within a range of a low-high of 1000-1400? Maybe i wasn’t as un-hunrgy as I thought....but i did lose 8 lbs (400g of it was from the surgery though), so i dunno 🤷🏻‍♀️ P.S. sorry, this post was kinda useless lol P.P.S Oh and i gained back those 8 plus some and then lost the some

Way to improvise! Lol

Went through the trouble of fixing this salad and logging the items in MFP, but then lost interest in wanting to eat it when I was done (i was hungry before i started making it, I swear! Anyone else find this happens to them? Its a regular occurrence for me). Anyway, its going in the fridge for now and maybe i’ll eat it later. (unless someone in the fam usurps it before I get around to wanting it). Romaine, carrots, cucumbers, feta, pan fried chicken chunks, and about 1/4 cup of leftover crustless quiche: 251 calories. Full disclosure: i opted for a martini instead: 141 calories (not shown).

Lol I think u meant to ask this (and quote from) @summerset’ post 😉

Some questions: 1) How tall are you? 2) Does your daily exercise include more than 10K steps a day? 3) Do you know how many calories you consume daily? (on average) 4) When you had the metabolism study done 10 yrs ago, do you know how much you weighed a the time?

I cant really eat ice cream either, but I still do sometimes. I dont eat whipped cream though, if i can help it...I draw the line there (dont love it enough to pay the potential price, but i like to watch others eat it, lol)

Regular sugar and AP flour and full fat butter all the way, hence the calorie count! Verdict: filling was delicious, crust nice and flaky, but the crumble top was a teensy too sweet for me. The fam however had no complaints. They did have theirs with whipped cream though so maybe that improved the sweetness? Anyhoo, I had equivalent of 1/4 a serving : 131 calories.

Today's baking effort: Apple Pie with Walnut Crumble. It's cooling off right now, so no one knows if its a success of not, bit it smells lovely. I just calculated the nutrition info breakdown, and: 1 serving = 1/8 pie = 525 Calories.....!!! Will let you know later if its any good....

K...I'm 2+ years out so alot of my surprises are long behind me. But here are some observations from the past year and a bit: I am no longer freezing. Yeah, i still wear socks year round and generally wear a sweater when others around me are not, but my temp regulation is waaaaay better. For instance, my thermostat reads 25C at the moment and I'm wearing a tank top...this would have been unheard of my first winter. All the hair that fell out is back and just as long as the hair around it (I've got almost-shoulder hair) My skin & lips are no longer as dry as the were pre-wls Its been over 2 years since I last broke out (i had a bad case about 2-3 months post op, none since then) My pits don't stink! I can get away without wearing deodorant (when I'm not running). My pee goes straight into the toilet...it barely touches any part of my body/skin that needs lots of tissue nor multiple wipes. Restricting carbs seems to actually have zero value-added effect in terms of losing actual lbs from the scale...but they do have an effect on my looks (they make me look puffier) My body strictly follows CICO. No secret tips or tricks. If I slack off on tracking my food or weighing regularly (i.e, every day), my weight WILL creep up. There is no glaring difference with how people treated me when I was fatter vs. now (well, at least not to my face, LOL) People no longer care how much weight I lost or what I eat.

You got it right, I think. Sizing/clothing manufacturing is likely based on the general size of a particular region's population for the most part. I imagine that a Small in say New Zealand or Bulgaria is like a Medium or Large in North America, not to mention the average length their inseams: if I buy pants here, I will always have to hem them, unless they are marketed as petite (which I still may have to hem anyway), or cropped (which end up looking like regular pants on me). Pants I've got from China/Korea etc rarely ever need hemming.

Ugh. I can't even watch the commercials of it...I will immediate change the channel or mute the TV and look away. Same for Dr. Pimple Popper. And that Financé one. But I do watch Jersey Shore, so...🤷🏼‍♀️

So I was told (and experience it) a little differently (p.s. I'm a sleeve): Its not that the liquids "wash down" food out of my stomach, and makes me hungrier sooner, its that when I have food in there, any liquids I drink will take up the available space and fill me up quick. So much so that I can't eat another bite...and if I do (or take another gulp of liquid) I can feel the material rise up in my esophagus or something and eventually barf. I have found that this phenomenon happens only when I drink AFTER I eat something (i.e., when there is something in my stomach already). But if I down a 500ml bottle of water before I start eating, there is no issue. So I imagine it as food blocking the way to my intestines, and then liquid just sitting on top of it. Anything more added until the food goes on its way will just come back up. For this reason, I don't drink until about 30-40 minutes AFTER I eat, nor do I drink during. But I DO drink right up to the moment I take my first bite. Which is why I rarely order/eat brothy soup with solid chunks in it.

Thanks!

Yay! @Sophie7713 is back! We missed you ❤️....lookin' as adorbs as ever.

I'm another!

9 days from the hospital? Do you have other symptoms that may point to Covid? Edited to add: sorry, I don't mean to freak you out if I did, just doing a process of elimination...

I'm one of those people who never got rid of clothes, whether I got bigger or smaller (unless the clothes were like too tattered or too used). So as I lost the weight after surgery, I had a whole bunch of clothes to "fit back into" at my disposal. As I sized out of my stash, I started buying new stuff, but didn't get rid of the bigger stuff. Hanging on to them was probably a combination not wanting to waste perfectly good clothes and sheer laziness from having to clean out my closet. It wasn't until just last September (one month prior to my 2 year anniversary, which was almost 1.5 yrs into maintenance) did I finally bite the bullet, cleaned out my closet and donated them all. It was alot. Good riddance, I say. Frees up room in my closet for new clothes. On another note, that giant pile of clothes that I donated included clothes that did in fact still fit me, but I got rid of them because I didn't like them anymore. Which is just one of the other beauties of being smaller: I can wear clothes that I actually like, not just because they fit.

Well, I farted lots too, but mine definitely had a smell to them (you're lucky yours are odourless!!). I burped lots too. Eventually, the increased farting stopped, but the burping is still around (not as much as in the first months, but def much more than anyone else I know personally).

Hi @ASampson...i can definitely do that, but I would need to know your Lean Muscle Mass (either in lbs or as a percentage of total body weight). Do you know it?

@OAGBPal: Oooooohhhh....MATH & SPREADSHEET time! I'm not an engineer, just a comp sci geek, but I love me some math & spreadsheets (don't judge me). I always sorta cringe inwardly when I read posts of us comparing number of calories consumed and total lbs lost without taking other factors into account....specifically BMI (there are other factors, but those are beyond the scope of this post). Long ago I tried to push the math of this but I sensed all the virtual eyes of the collective glazing over, so I didn't push it further. But since you seem data-friendly, I present to you this (the fruits of my anality and boredom): I took the liberty of pulling your stats from your profile, and looked up my stats at 2 months post op to do a side by side comparison: **note: my LMM data was recorded at 2 months, 3 weeks...but close enough!) First the obvious: You are a good foot taller than I am, and weighed roughly 30% more than me on our respective surgery dates (Plus you're male and I'm not) While we started off at at a 5-point spread in BMI, at the two month mark, we were reeeeeally close in percentage of BMI points lost (m-17% vs o-16%) Your lean muscle mass percentage at 2 months vs mine at 2 months is higher by 13%. So technically, I was fatter than you. Now, what's not so obvious is that while I was consuming 500 cals at two months and you 1200, if we factor in just total LMM, the difference of calories per lb of LMM is 1.3 calories. Which, when applied to our respective spread in LMM, amounts to 133 calories a day. So that means, based on our makeup of LMM, I was just eating the equivalent of little over 1 tbsp of butter a day more than what you are eating. And when you take into consideration the fact that you are bigger/taller/higher LLM than me at 2 months, that difference of a tablespoon of butter is all but eliminated (if not more) as your BMR is likely way higher than mine was. You burn more calories just existing than I did. Plus you're a man and your metabolic rate is likely more efficient than mine. Sooooooo....when people are shocked with the number of calories me and others eat/ate, consider the context. Context is KING. QUEEN. Ta-da! Added Notes: of course, this is a very simplistic view of it all and assumes that we have the same BMR, exercise habits, medical conditions, etc. etc., But you get the point, I hope. P.S. I also hope I didn't make YOUR eyes glaze over...lolololzzzzz

Interesting! @kristieshannon, @S@ssen@ch, what amount/dosage are you taking?

There was another thread on this topic just the other day...i’d include a link, but couldn’t find it quickly so gave up... In any case, I think the cycles/phases of not wanting to eat/food aversion/disinterest is common (for those that have instances of not wanting to eat...some don’t). I’m 2+ years post op and I still go through it sometimes (sans the nausea though, cuz i wont try to eat if i don’t want to). In fact, i just went through several days of it a couple weeks ago, and after my appetite went back to my “normal”