(Deleted through replacement

Back last March, I got ESG (endoscopic sleeve gastroplasty). I had 6 weeks of a liquids only diet. I painstakingly tracked calories after that according to what doctors said to do -- a 1200 calorie/day diet. Yeah, I'm a short woman, but it sucks. But I soldiered on! I put myself on my home scale week after week, watching the number bounce around but generally trend down. I was so happy. I started at 251 post-colonoscopy-cleanse (since they have to remove all of everything in your gut before doing the procedure), and finally, after a year, I got to 215. I was so glad! And then I stepped on an actually accurate scale at work today, apparently. 238. Are you f**king joking? I said it had to be my clothes and stuff, so I went into the bathroom (single occupancy, thankfully), and stripped. Hopped on. 235. Dammit. Well, maybe it's not accurate. We have some weights around the office, I said. Let's put one on, I said. It claims to be 45 lbs. Scale says...45.2 lbs. Augh. So my bathroom scale is either 15 pounds off, the very concept of which is destroying me, or I've gained a whole ton of water weight for no reason. But I've taken tape measurements -- my waist is down 4 inches and my hips are down 5. I'm eating less in general. I really do think I'm making my calorie counts. My arms and stomach look more defined. That's got to be significant, right? ...Right? If all this adds up, I have not lost 14% of my body weight. I have lost 6%. And that means I am a severe outlier and a failure at the procedure. This was the last ditch effort for me after more than a decade of trying everything I could figure. Most weight loss meds haven't worked for me. Saxenda worked for a while and then stopped. Was the doctor's office scale wrong? It agreed with my bathroom scale at the time. Has my bathroom scale broken and I'm just fucked? Did I just gain a whole shitload of water weight? I don't have my period due to an IUD, so I can't imagine it's that. Please give me something that isn't "you failed." Please. Please.

It has been 7 months since I had my ESG procedure in March. What a weird ride. I guess I'm just posting this to muse on the situation as a whole. Wall of text time! Six Weeks of Suck A six week liquid diet was awful. It went in 2 week chunks and degraded over time. The first two weeks, it was amusing. I got to tell people what was going on! The first entire week I was basically sleeping anyway and took sick days, so it was just me, in bed, playing Pokemon Sword. A weird sort of vacation, really, even if half of it was crippling nausea and whining to my husband. The next two weeks was boring and a bit annoying, but I at least got to sip chicken broth and relish the fact that my food tasted like actual food. (I bought a jar of low fat chicken gravy at the store at one point and sipped it in the car while feeling like some kind of jewel thief having pulled off a heist. It was the best food I have ever eaten.) The last two weeks, I just wanted to strangle the doctors for not letting me eat solid food. Six weeks! People who have literal stomach removal have less time than that! But no, the surgeon said that six weeks was because the sutures are internal, and thus are constantly disturbed, so in a weird twist they take longer to heal than gastric sleeve surgeries. Did I mention basic recovery sucked for the first few days? When I came out of anesthesia, the doctors said I had been under for a long time, because I was just too sleepy to actually wake after I was technically conscious. They kept me until I could walk, which was way longer than they thought. Even walking down the driveway made me so tired I had to lean on someone. Going to the bathroom and back to bed was enough to take a nap afterwards. I had to rotate constantly to stop feeling nauseous or crampy. I emergency-called the doctors for some more anti-nausea meds because the first ones just didn't work well enough. Then, like magic, around day 7, it all stopped and I could get up and do stuff normally. Not being able to lift more than 15 pounds or whatever the limit was, was almost a deal-breaker. I work with heavy machinery a lot, but I saw that problem coming. My long-suffering (but kind) coworkers carried things for me. But at home, do you know how many things weigh 20 lbs? Stuff full of liquid is right out. A gallon of water by itself weighs 9 lbs, heaven help you if you have to carry anything else with it. My husband had to haul our pet food and litter bags, which we buy in 50 pound sacks because we hate having to shop a lot. Even normal grocery shopping bags can approach 15 pounds if you fill them full. When I was still exhausted, I had to get a very confused Target employee to help me carry a single bag out to the car. I'm sure this guy had no idea what was going on, with a 30-something woman shuffling up to him like an old lady and holding out a fairly light bag and asking if he would be wonderful and carry this to her car because she had picked up too much stuff and now her body was saying it was time to sleep right here on the floor if she didn't hand it off. Did I Cheat on the Diet? Yes. 100%. I absolutely cheated. I cheated like a soap opera spouse. Honestly, the lesson I learned was that this really caused no harm whatsoever. Probably a bad lesson, but in the end, it made those last two weeks bearable. The doctor said clear liquids only, but I added in pureed chunky soups, Greek yogurt, and scrambled eggs. I chewed for a long time and made sure everything in my mouth was blenderized into pure liquid, and I still ate incredibly small meals. But really, anything to get me off those fake-ass protein shakes. I didn't tell my team the extent of the cheating, but I never felt any pain, and I still made my calorie and macro counts. The first day I let myself eat tuna from a can was the day angels sang in my ear. I furtively snatched it up at CVS, a tiny can the size of one of those Fancy Feast cat food tins. I snuck it in the car and dumped the can in a recycle bin before my husband could see it and wag his finger. Oh, it was good. What I'm getting at is that I was losing my bananas during the last 2 weeks of that dang liquid diet, and I needed something to eat that felt like real food, or I was going to crack. I think this worked out. Have I Lost Weight? 45 pounds so far. From what I can tell, there is really no way to beat the "1-2 pounds per week" rule. No amount of surgery was going to take my resting metabolic rate of 1800 and somehow get 5 pounds a week out of lowering it to 1000 cal/week. I think all the "omg I lost 10 pounds my first week" is water and glycogen, no matter who you are, unless you're very obese. Water weight will get you early on. If you gain weight or have not lost weight even 3-4 weeks after the procedure, it's probably still water weight. There's no way your body can retain fat on 1000 calories a day unless you have a disease/disorder. You will gain weight abruptly when you start putting food back in your body. I'm shocked at how much food in various parts of digestion weigh. That said, according to the Mayo Clinic, food takes about 36-48 hours from entering, to exit your body. Think about how much you eat in 48 hours. Let's say, for round numbers, you eat a meal weighing 3/4 lb, 3x/day. So that's 2.25 lbs a day. 48 hours is 4 days. Before the meal on day 1 exits on day 4, you've put a total of 9 pounds of stuff into your body. 9 pounds! That's like 4 weeks of weight loss, supposedly gone immediately! But it's not. If, like me, your last weight reference was right before the surgery, you fully blasted those 6 or so pounds of food out of your system with the absolutely awful colonoscopy cleanse they made you drink. You know how much you ate at each meal before surgery, at least ballpark. Add those "phantom" pounds to your hospital weight, and you have your "actual" weight. So my actual weight was really around 260, not 251, because it was 251 with my entire intestinal tract scrubbed to a bile-yellow liquid shine. (Ew.) Basically, expect water weight to cover up early weight loss and food weight to cover up weight loss about 1-2 months in, depending on when you're allowed to eat solids. Frustrating Points I am still not particularly lower in my dress size. I have absolutely lost some inches, but it seems to be coming off relatively evenly, so I'm still a 16-18 in a dress. I'm frustrated, because part of the point of this was to fit into my old college clothes, but I expected to lose a couple of dress sizes in 45 lbs of weight loss. I still have a bunch of clothes sitting around waiting for me to be able to fit them. That said, women's clothing sizes are stupid, and I really don't know what my dress size was when starting. I thought it was 18, but I gained weight over the pandemic, so I have no clue anymore. Awesome Points I can eat what I want. Seriously. The physical size of my stomach limits me from eating a lot, but I can eat single meals, and usually they last me the entire day. I routinely take home leftovers now. But in the end, the food I want isn't fast food and pizza -- though to be fair, I still do eat pizza. I just eat way less of it. I don't have to optimize now, and my body seems to actually obey calorie counts now without getting hungry. I still eat pizza every so often. I still have dessert. I had candy on Halloween. I still don't eat salad. In the end, I feel like this was what I wanted: the ability to eat the food I actually like, socially, while having my body go in a direction I don't hate. I have actual hunger cues now, and I'm not constantly thinking about food. Would I Recommend ESG? I will tout ESG from the tops of mountains now. Some suck early on for a feeling of actual control over my body and a sense that I finally obey physics as I know it? Yes. Yes, please. I should have gotten this years ago. When my parents offered to cover weight loss surgery when I was like 23, I should have said "YES NOW" instead of "ugh why would you offer that?".

So, here I am 2 weeks out from ESG! Sometimes I feel like I'd slap my own mom to eat a piece of chicken. But I've held meticulously to the diet, and I've been doing what moving around I can. No weight loss. None. Zilch. I'm no smaller and no lighter. Everyone with their "I instantly lost 5 pounds" even, is like...depressing. What's going on? How am I breaking physics? I'm eating around 700-900 calories a day -- surely that HAS to do something? If weight loss is at the beginning, what's wrong with me? Yes, I'm getting my 64 oz of fluids. Yes, I'm adhering to the diet. No, I'm not snacking. Yes, I'm keeping meticulous track of every single thing I eat. What's wrong?

I do exercise. I don't eat big desserts and meals anymore. The point of this procedure was to make things go from "awful" to "bearable." Anyway, I'm not sure what else to say. I'm a person on the end of my mental rope near constantly. I barely have all my adult stuff together. This is one more burden. I'm doing what I can. I think most people don't quite understand the razor edge that I'm on. One thing going wrong and my entire existence falls apart. It's what I can to do keep things together. That's the last I'll say in the thread. Thanks to the nice folks, I know lots of people here mean well. I should never have looked at that damn scale at work. Good luck with stuff you're doing, and have fun around the internet.

Did everyone just ignore that I said I did make the changes? I don't eat desserts anymore except on like, Christmas or whatever. Things like that. But surely people understand that sacrifices suck and that I hate this? Is there no sympathy for "this is a miserable experience"? Because it is. I can't magically decide to like something. If I could, I'd have decided that I hated reading books and would rather hike all day every day instead and I'd be super ripped. Basically it's awful to watch everyone having awesome things and not being able to have them. Is this not a human emotion? That people can offer comfort/solidarity about? I feel like I had y'all on my side and then everyone just went "oh wait nope." I do think science will just fix all of this one day. I'm a pretty strong believer in technology over biology. It's just not here yet. Dammit, I can't delete my account. Apparently they don't let you do that. I prefer to wipe all traces of myself when things go wrong online.

So you're boiling all this down to "just try harder"? ...Yeah, ok, maybe I shouldn't have posted here. I have tried my ass off since I was a literal child and got made fun of in school for being the chubby kid. I have been on like every diet ever. I have done sports. You seem to think I'm being lazy, and that, frankly, is a pile of "stuff I can't say on this forum apparently because it will get bleeped." I was hoping people who got these procedures would understand that "suck it up and try harder" hasn't worked for most of the population and sure won't work now. I have zero shame at doing things for vanity. I'd rather be gorgeous and depressed than, well, me and depressed. It's like they say, money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather be sad on a yacht. Can we delete threads? I'd like to delete this whole thing.

Thank you for the data. That's a lot of encouragement, actually. ❤️ I'm the worst because I absolutely freaking hate salad. And anything that is a leaf. It tastes so bitter. Cabbage is basically the only leaf I consider edible lol. I miss two things in my life, and I'm not sure there are substitutes, but maybe you have ideas? 1. Restaurants. I love being catered to. It's nice to just go sit in a booth and read my phone and stuff. I also hate dishes and cleaning, so takeout was a staple before I got ESG. There's little more sad than sitting around while your friends are eating and realizing you have to go hungry on a tiny appetizer or take a whole ton of food home. It's...it's just...I don't go out to eat too much anymore. More than I should, but way less than I did. You guys will get me to ditch my once a week Indian food brunch over my cold, dead corpse, though. No way no how. 2. Desserts. Holy cow I have a massive sweet tooth. I try to satisfy it with diet soda and some sucralose in my tea, but I was raised in the South by family who asked kids if they wanted ice cream the moment they got bored. I had to kick that habit a long while ago, but it kills me that I've had to cut back even more. I would shiv somebody's grandma for chocolate cake, and it has to be in quantity to be satisfying. A teeny sliver of cake is a joke -- you gotta have one of those big slices you could use a doorstop. When I was a kid, I could do that. I miss going to a local seafood joint that had a slice the size of my kid hand. Cubed. Like a hand on each side. Slight exaggeration, but it was heaven. I'm sniffling just thinking about it. I have cut out like 98% of desserts in my life and I still cry inside when my friends get a milkshake and I'm not allowed any. It feels punitive. To me, nice food is as good as sex, easily. I wish I could make myself hate food, so much. I'm so lucky because my husband is a god in the kitchen, but I'm unlucky because he wants to make all the things and I have to go "...nope, can't have it, but now I can SMELL IT ALL DAY."

I told my husband about the weighing thing and he is SO ON BOARD so if he does it for me I'll have the data lol. I just feel like it would be crossing some threshold I'm not ready for to be one of those people tweaking tiny amounts of food onto a postage scale...

Revision: it takes a month to recover from an actual sleeve, and I have way too fast-paced a job to do that. I'd probably have to take unpaid leave or even quit the job. I can't. ESG was only a thing I could do because it had a week recovery time tops. If the sleeve had a week recovery, I'd have done that instead. Regarding vanity: They know. They have all my medical stats. They know my blood pressure is something that people aspire to, that my labs are clean as a whistle, and that I can drag a kayak a mile through choppy waters to shore or walk 10 miles straight for 3 hours. They know I have major psychological issues surrounding my body. I've seen a therapist for over a decade for in part this reason. It hasn't made me like how I look whatsoever, just helped me cope enough to have a reasonable life. I'm on several psych meds. As it stands, I have a view on this that is similar to transition. When you have gender dysphoria, people who are any kind of sane by modern science don't tell you to suck it up and go to therapy to embrace being your birth sex. They tell you to seek hormone treatments and transition, because transition works. I don't think that trying to love being fat works either. You change your body if you want to change your body. I'm going to cut back to 1000 cal/day goal and hate my life, but I guess it's something. And I mean technically I guess I have lost like 30 lbs worst case. I'm just so pissed and dismayed that I haven't gotten below pre-pandemic weight before my wedding. I want to be Internet Hot (tm) at my wedding.

Actually, I did say what I wanted to hear. I said, please tell me I haven't failed. It's literally in the title. Making a passive-aggressive post over here about my thread is kinda rude.

true facts?! how do you block people

Also other meds have not worked. Phentermine didn't work, Metformin didn't work, the Phentermine-Topiramate didn't work, Qsymia didn't work. Nothing but Saxenda put a dent in this, and my insurance stopped covering it. I did change jobs and thus insurance recently, so I'm going to see if anything has changed. I'm an annoyingly difficult case.

Also, did you see he made a passive-aggressive post in the Rants area about this? Ugh. I'm already screwed up enough. I don't need anything more to make me sad. I need scraps of hope and happiness.

God forbid anyone post for encouragement and comfort. Go away, please.

I have an appointment Tuesday. I'm terrified. I'm probably just going to get told I'm not doing enough. I want Wegovy, because apparently it hella works, but there's a shortage. No way am I getting to 200 lbs by October for my wedding. I'm starting to get desperate and look around to see if I can get something faster online...

I say "think" because I'm not like, weighing my food. That makes me neurotic and ain't nobody got time for that level of panic. I do record what I eat and drink. I have to balance absolutely hating myself whenever I think about weight (and yes I'm in therapy, this hasn't gone away despite like a decade of work on it) with actually managing to count calories. Your earlier post: Is it really "fatphobic" to not like the way fat looks? I really don't think so. People have preferences. You can't be attracted to everyone. I have zero health issues related to my weight (several doctors can attest), and so if it weren't about vanity, I wouldn't be doing any of this, I'd be eating a damn cupcake the way I want to. As for timeline: My doctor says if I haven't lost at least 15% in a year, it's not enough. I see a dietician monthly. The thing is, since my scale kept showing slightly lower numbers, and they were good lower numbers, we all thought what was happening was fine. I actually settled into a life that I liked, even eating less food. But I can't really go any less, or cut out any more things I like, without running into "now this is a drain on my daily mental resources," which I can't afford to have. I already have depression and anxiety going on. I have a difficult career. I can't do much more.

I'll be straight up with you, I have never found a fat person pretty. I'm sorry. I've tried so hard. (Really -- I did my best to date fat folks a couple times because otherwise they were super cool, but my sex drive just cannot work with that. Fat is the opposite of hot to me. I feel bad for those folks having to deal with me. It was over a decade ago haha.)

251 is the post cleanse weight, meaning I had everything purged from my system to prep for surgery. My home scale agreed with that. Idk what my "has food/waste in system" weight was. My scale said 210 when I had food poisoning a week ago, so I guess the work scale would have said 220-225. So that's like, 32 lbs to be charitable, under the same conditions.

For all the "1200 calories isn't a deficit" -- holy cow, I can't go any lower. I already am too hungry if I don't make 1200. I enjoy food. I am distracted to the point of total non-productivity if I'm too hungry. It's miserable. I don't eat processed stuff usually. I focus on protein because carbs leave me too hungry. My team has been virtual due to Covid so they just know my personal weigh ins. I regret all of this. I shouldn't have looked at the scale at work. I was so happy. I thought I was pretty at last. I have a wedding in October and am going to look awful...

And now I just want to give up entirely. This is the opposite of helpful. I guess I'm really just bad at everything.

I'm so absurdly furious about all these people who are like "yeah I got a procedure and lost 10 pounds immediately." I *hate* how I look. I am adhering so pristinely to this diet after ESG that I could be a monk. And yet, not a single damn pound lost. Not one! THIS IS NOT EVEN FAIR. When do I get to look okay? When do I get results? Do I magically break physics? What the hell is wrong with me?! Am I just one of those magic people like PCOS folks whose bodies can survive on like 500 cal/day and still be fat? Bodies are awful, and I hate mine.

I sort of weigh my food. Mostly I get food in a known weight quantity and eat a known fraction of it. So, if I get a pound of pork tenderloin, and cut it evenly into quarters, each is roughly a quarter pound. I'm at least eating an accurate weight over a few meals. I probably need to get a food scale, but I've always balked at that because it feels a bit obsessive and sucks the fun out of meals a bit. I might still try. I do keep track of calories and macros on MyFitnessPal. I tend to do pretty well, though anytime I ever dare to have a sandwich I kick myself because bread is so dang caloriffic. I try to eat mostly meat dishes, skipping the bread and pasta and such. I'm not keto, though. (If I were keto, I'd totally weigh like 10 pounds less, though honestly it doesn't make a single difference in my inches it seems.) Yeah, I definitely need a new scale. This one is screwy. I've been procrastinating lol. Yup, I've had my thyroid tested like five times over the past five years. Keeps coming back "fine, not quite low." I did go on Synthroid once and it made no difference, so it was discontinued. I'm eating 1000-1200 calories a day, with occasional mistakes. I know I'm not perfect, but I'm doing my best. My guess is I need to have more NEAT (non-workout exercise, basically), but I have a sit-down computer job, and when I get interrupted, it's hard to focus. That puts a bit of a damper on walking around a lot. >< I'm trying, at least, and my clothes fit some better. Notably, I don't get food cravings nearly so much. I used to be the sort of person who could never eat just a couple pieces of chocolate -- I'd eat the whole bag, so I had to never keep sweets in my house whatsoever. Now, I can actually do stuff in moderation. I also don't eat when I'm bored almost at all anymore, and I don't get random sugar cravings every day. I don't get nearly as hangry, though now I get physical stomach pains from being hungry if I don't keep up with meals. I'm guessing this is a hormonal change from part of my stomach having atrophied due to being folded up and unusable.

I started out with BMI 41-ish, and I'm at about your pace. My doctor says I'm a bit slow. IDK what yours says. I'm not sure why we're like this. Maybe body variation, who knows.

I've stopped losing inches now. Everything has just come to a total halt for the past 3 weeks or so. I did go on vacation week-before-last, so that particular week is a wash. I didn't eat everything in sight, but I did decide I could have dessert and drink wine with the husband. That said, me eating a lot now would probably hit 2000 calories -- it's so hard to overeat. I get full for an entire day on what would have been one standard meal out of 2 or 3 before. I have to break this stall naturally eventually, right? Physics says so? My bathroom scale is irritatingly unreliable. I can stand shifted to my right foot and gain 5-10 pounds, to the left and lose 5-10. It's obnoxious. I think I'm around 230-235 right now. It makes sense with how I'm fitting into my clothes and how the scale has wobbled around. Dishearteningly, that's where I was before I gained the pandemic weight. So really, I look no thinner than I did before Covid. Ugh. That said, I did lose 20-30 pounds in 2 months, which is astounding compared to past progress. That's about 3 lbs a week, which IIRC is considered really dang good. Maybe time is just going slower since the ESG than I think. I know I'm slipping on drinking water. I don't like having to pee frequently. That said, I'm sweating more, which is a good thing considering I'm just about anhydrotic most of the time. Maybe I've just been dehydrated my entire life. I picked up weightlifting again. I started out pretty weak, and I've had to skip some days because of the extreme heat (no AC in the gym aaaah) and work stress. That said, I'm up to 185 lb squats and 95 lbs bench-press now. That's something.

My clothes fit a bit better, but IIRC it's very hard to gain muscle mass? Like people bust butt in the gym for it, and I haven't been working *that* hard.