JennyBeez

I think like most things, moderation is key. I have a basement stash of UPF in the basement for quick fixes: shelf stable protein shakes (obviously), instant bone broth packets, and a couple of instant soup powders I bought from the BP shop. They get me through days I'm feeling low energy or have no appetite. Right next to them, I have a huge stock of SF FF pudding mixes that I bought pre-op thinking I'd need them for the first two weeks of recovery (spoiler alert: I didn't need 1/16th of the **** I 'prepared' with), so the greek yogurt recipe sounds like a fab way to slowly make my way through the stash. I've also got a SF Lactose Free chocolate ice cream sitting in my freezer for certain monthly cravings. Again, something I bought for recovery that just.... hasn't been fully used up yet. It's not awful nutrition wise, but I use it sparingly. I have a pack of high protein flatbreads in the freezer, some NSA protein pancake mixes and a few NSA flavouring syrups in my pantry. I'm not against sweeteners or UPF in general, it's more that it's rare to find any one pre-made food that hits all the macros for me, and my brain really likes when I follow a nice, strict, mathematical structure. The only thing I use more often than I think I should is probably the protein pancake mix? Twice a week I'll make a pancake in place of a more balance meal -- this week it's been three times already because it -- and oatmeal-- are one of the few things not pinging my nausea. (It's been a rough week) (@NickelChip That's good to hear about the yonana machine -- I've been eyeballing it for a while but even as a child I go through cycles of strong banana-aversion LOL.)

Good luck with your PCP today!

Your curls are Hair Goals -- I agree with your kids lol! Seriously though, you're looking amaaaazing ❤️

It probably hits everyone differently -- I know I was sleeping ALL the time post-op for a good couple weeks, and didn't have a lot of energy in general until I had been on the soft food diet for maybe half a week. Try your best to pause throughout your day / mid activity to take stock of how your body is feeling. Trust yourself to know what's right for your body. If it's slowing down or trying to keep yourself from overdoing it, great. But if you're feeling good while doing it, no pain etc, there's nothing wrong with having a few more power naps than you're used to -- especially in the first months following surgery.

Ooh, that actually sounds pretty good! You just reminded me that I have a nice NSA barbecue sauce (from whatever Guy Fieri's brand is, lol) in my fridge. I used to love bbq chicken pizza, I wonder what kind of bariatric-monstrosity I could come up with. I know I have some protein wraps from FlatOut in my freezer that I haven't worked up to trying yet.

You are looking so fabulous. Every time you post photos, I feel cheered up -- and cheered on in my own goals, you know?

I got my local Vietnamese restaurant to sell me a container of pho broth without any noodles, it was fantastic. Bouillon, or bone-broth (for the protein!) can satisfy that salt-craving. If you like creamy soups, cream of mushroom (with all the bits strained out). And honestly, all my life I avoided cream-of 'meat' soups but post-op, cream of chicken and cream of bacon were surprisingly good. Sometimes too, the abundance of post-op protein shakes and their super-strong sweeteners is just overwhelming. If you haven't tried it yet, try some unflavored & unsweetened protein powder with milk, and just add a dash of cinnamon or a drop of almond extract to get some non-sweet flavors hitting your tastebuds.

Ugh, I can only imagine -- waiting for surgery is tough enough, but having it postponed so suddenly must be really rough on the psyche. I'm an anxious person by nature, I totally understand how much this could be stressing you out. On the bright side, go you! Look at how much you lost already pre-op! ❤️

One of the things that I feel helped me the most was cutting back (or completely cutting off) some food/drink items that I knew I'd have the hardest time missing post-op. When I tell you I was addicted to sparkling water and diet soda, it's no joke. About a year before my surgery, I started a month-long test for myself just to make sure I could give up the carbonation -- and never went back. If you have any specific foods that are triggers for you, maybe try reducing them beforehand (or cutting out a few) just so you aren't going straight from your regular diet into the liquid diet.

I hear you! I feel like the social side-effects of my surgery have really taught me to tell the difference between truly supportive friends & family, and those who claim to care but seem to be more concerned about how my weight loss (& lifestyle) will affect their life. There are some I don't talk to about dieting/health of any kind anymore, and others I just don't talk to period.

Ugh, I definitely get the foamies from time to time (nice to know there's a word for it!) but a few times it's developed into all-around nastiness: sweating so badly my skin is wet and I soak all my clothes, bad cramping, concurrent vomiting & diarrhea, dizziness, and basically wanting to die LOL. I just assumed it was dumping, but none of those times have occurred with sugar -- and I'm pretty sure none of them were due to high fat content cause I've been ridiculously careful about that. (Other than the chicken, which was thighs cooked with skin on -- removed before eating though.) That said, most of the time it's also been with food cooked in a restaurant so who knows what kind of things they put on that they just weren't admitting too. At this point, I'm too scared to eat out other than at a few restaurants I know I can trust. :S

If you have a local Chinese or Korean restaurant, they most likely have a few tofu based dishes. One thing about tofu is that there are different firmnesses (soft, firm, extra firm) which really change the texture a lot. When you're new to cooking with it, just buying the wrong kind for what you plan to do with it can make your dish unpleasant. (Or not knowing how to treat it! I love stir fried tofu in restaurants but couldn't get mine to brown up nicely because for the longest time I didn't realize I needed to press the excess water out for a fair bit beforehand) The other thing is that tofu has a very mild flavour. It mostly just is a great protein with some nice texture variants which picks up other flavors. If you have a vegan friend, you might be best off just asking them if they can give you an easy recipe to try -- or see if you can wriggle a tofu-dinner invite from them one day so you can try it out 'properly'. One of my favorite new ways to eat tofu post-OP is in dips! It does kind of mask the tofu though, so I don't know if you'd get a 'tofu experience' out of it. I've done this one a few times with different variants of herbs: https://www.walderwellness.com/herbed-tofu-dip/ (I tend to skip the parsley and replace with fresh basil, and usually omit the vinegar entirely)

I don't know how other programs do it, but my 6 months of supervised diet was basically just a logbook of what I was eating, when, how much. My team didn't have me on any restrictions until 2 weeks before the scheduled surgery. They certainly followed up with me consistently, but it was more to suggest how I could adjust my food after the surgery -- ie, "I see you had 2 cups oatmeal for breakfast! After the surgery, you'll probably start at half a cup and go from there, you'll want to make it with either a higher protein milk like fairlife or even a protein shake, you'll want to use thicker oats rather than instant or minute-oats," etc I did lose about 20 lbs total pre-op -- just because having to measure my food made me more aware of how much I was eating. I don't want this to come off the wrong way, but I don't think losing too much weight before the surgery will be an issue for you -- or for most people approaching it as an option. If your BMI is high enough to qualify you starting the program, it's highly unlikely you'll be able to lose enough on your own to drop your BMI to a point that it would disqualify you. (I'm not saying it's impossible! But most people turn to WLS as a last resort after so many other methods have failed -- if we could successfully lose a big chunk of weight by ourselves just by being on a supervised diet, we would have done it without turning to WLS.)

I want to echo the possibility of reactive hypoglycemia -- I've a relative who suffered a long time before they figured out what it was. But it sounds pretty similar. The problem is, I feel like the symptoms of so many things are similar. If you're suddenly having 'low tolerance' (rather than outright intolerance) of lactose, or cacao, etc, it could manifest in the same way. It might also be a pre-cursor to dumping? Like your body telling you "Heck No, Stop RN!" before you have enough of something that would trigger a full-out dumping attack. I've had awful dumping syndrome four times now post-OP, but have had near-misses several times that I catch the warning signs early enough on that I'm able to prevent it. (I really have to get better at knowing what constitutes 'dry' food. Broccoli & Cauliflower steamed or in broth? Fine. Broccoli or cauliflower in a thicker creamy soup? Just kill me already. This is why I stick to leafy veg and green beans lol.)

Literally, this morning I just came out of a two-weekish stall with an abrupt 4.5lb drop. Stalls are frustrating as heck but as long as you keep doing what you know you should be doing, you'll come out of it ok.

I love how we all warn others to stay away from the scale for a while, even though few of us are able to do that either. XD Honestly though, it's like we've replace any food addiction with scale-addiction.

Do you measure yourself too? Is it plausible that with your workouts, you've started gaining more muscle than what you're losing in fat? Has you been bowel-regular, and your sodium hasn't increased? I'm nowhere near my goal yet, but I've heard / read that a lot of people gain back 10-15 after they 'stop' losing, whether they're purposefully going into maintenance or their body has told them to go into maintenance lol. It could also just be one final stall that your body is giving you as you near your goal weight. Try not to worry too much? I know it's hard -- and it probably feels even harder since you're so close to where you want to be. I doubt you're doing anything wrong, every post I see you make or reply too, you always seem to really be on the ball about things. As someone else on here recently said, give yourself some grace. And keep on keeping-on! ❤️

It sounds like a lot of people have that 10-15-20 lb rebound after they stop losing, so that sounds kind of natural. Don't sneer at your 70lb loss though -- that's the average / median weight of a 10 year old girl. You have lost the equivalent of an entire child's body weight. I definitely second the therapist / group counselling route. I personally think therapy is good for everyone, anywhere, anytime -- but for things like ED it can be a game changer. Also? This forum. Come here often. Make it a point to log in at least two times a week, even if it's just to say hi, or grumble about your new protein powder tasting like saccharine-dipped-shite, etc. Honestly, reading other people's trials & tribulations reaching out and interacting on the regular with other people who are on similar journeys can be such a great support.

That is phenomenal! Holy crap, look at your BMI! That's such a big change!! ❤️

Goodness yes. I am incredibly emotionally reactive right now -- and prior to all this, as an adult I've always been very non-reactive, to the extent that I used to wonder if I was a sociopath. The past two-ish-weeks I've been on a rage bender, and now I'm starting to see that ease but now instead I get teary when I tell my dog I love her, etc. XD

Maybe, willpower / motivation isn't what your problem has ever been. Maybe this is that point for you when you begin to realize that whatever shame you've internalized over the years, your weight is not your fault. There are always, always, always so many different things at play: hormones, body chemistry, mobility / physical limitations, mental health, self-sabotage, camouflage, etc etc. I mean, at what point in your life did you choose to be fat? Did you sit yourself down one day when you were feeling in perfect health and say," you know what, I'm going to eat and eat and eat until I weigh 304lbs. I want to hate myself or feel shitty about myself." Cause I bet there are very very few people who can say they made obesity or being overweight a conscious decision. Are there times in all of our lives that we've made **** decision, knowing how unhealthy they are for us? Oh gods yes. Plenty, I'm sure. But did we make those decisions coming from a place of balance and peace, or did we do it to punish ourselves, or sooth ourselves, or because this is the way we were taught to deal with any negative emotion? Did / do we all exacerbate the issue with our choices? Most definitely. I'm not saying we're all innocent lambs. But if it were just a matter of willpower, of not wanting to be unhealthy or overweight, etc, we would all already be at our ideal weights -- we never would have left that weight to begin with. It's definitely important along the WLS journey to hone our willpower, to make healthier choices for our own benefit, etc. It's still going to be hard. For some of us, it might always be hard. But it's not that it "takes WLS to motivate" ourselves -- it takes WLS to give us that needed jumpstart into our weightloss journey. It takes WLS to change our hormones and gut biome. It takes WLS to give us physical restrictions --or to give us a clean slate when learning how our body physically responds to certain foods / nutrients etc, and re-teaching our body what 'enough' feels like. It takes WLS for many of us to, I dunno, learn how to prioritze ourselves? How to give ourselves the right kind of self-love -- like NOT eating the cake if you don't want to just in order to be polite. Like setting the boundaries we need -- and/or desire -- in order to stay in a healthy mindset.

I've tried them in the past but also post-op. I'm working on a Chai flavoured one right now. Like many syrups, they're super sweet. Some flavours are more potent than others -- I remember having the banana one in the past and it was so lightly flavoured there wasn't much point. The chai has been nice and strong though. I think most of them are sweetened with sucralose, so if you've been able to deal with other sucralose sweetened things you're good. (Honestly, other than direct lemon juice I've never found a lemon-flavouring syrup/crystal that I find authentic or strong enough, other than baking extracts. And even then, most brands get close but not right enough for me. I'm picky about lemon, I guess? I like Watkins and Simply Organics lemon extracts.)

Ooh, nice and soon now! The waiting can be rough -- but hang in there!

Make yourself down a protein shake, even if it's half in the am and half in the pm -- just until you're more able to get the protein from food sources. (Or even then, if it suits your needs). It doesn't have to be delicious, it just has to be nutritious -- at least while your body is still recovering (6-8 months?) and trying to establish a new regime of what it can eat. A protein shake, a bar, sip some bone broth -- whatever you need to do to get that protein up. ❤️

I've been really into A&W sugar free rootbeer drink crystals, but I really have to water it down so the sweetner isn't too overpowering. I also like pretty much any strawberry flavoured NSA drink crystals mixed with a few fresh basil leaves, or frozen blackberries / raspberries tossed right into the water with a spring of fresh rosemary. For on the go, I love to stop at a local convenience store for Flow's alkaline water in Cucumber + Mint, or Strawberry + Rose.