keithf

Uh.. So I admit, I've been watching for that crossover to the under-300# realm: Weight at start (mid-April): 345 Weight going into surgery (30 Jun): 306 Weight @ 1 day: 310 Weight @ 2 days: 304 (dropping about 0.5# every couple hours) Weight @ 3 days: 301 (just measured), 299.8 (lunch) I seem to be losing roughly 2-3# per DAY. At this rate, I'll cross the 300# mark by the time I finish Breakfast. [### EDIT: I went back to sleep, so the best I can say is that I crossed it before lunch...###] This is not an exaggeration: I dropped half a pound yesterday over the course of *consuming* 16oz of Water. Obviously I had 4# of Fluid pumped into me at surgery. I've obviously lost that.. but I didn't expect initial weight loss in the 3#/day range. Honestly, I feel fine overall.. just hungry, not weak. I'm able to consume (water, yogurt, soup .. overall about 300 calories, with plenty of Vitamin supplementation) without difficulty, as long as I don't gulp things down. This, too, seems normal. Am I just lucky, or is this rate of weight loss actually not unusual? I cannot account for it on a simple calories in/calories out model -- it's as if the surgery has told my body to shed a lot of fat up front. I suppose it could be extra energy requirements during healing, but still -- a factor of 3x seems extraordinary. No complaints, of course. I just haven't seen this magnitude of response reported here before.

Woke up at 3:30 am for a 5:20 checkin. By 7:30 I was mid-prep and shortly thereafter wheeled into OR. I awoke at 10, listening to the techs comment to each other on how amazingly well things were going with me. Not a bad thing to hear. - I really hate not being able to swallow. Between a painfully dry mouth and throat, it was difficult to breathe for a few hours. My CPAP only made it worse, so I went without and forced myself to remain awake (itself somewhat painful). My oxygen levels were sufficient that this wasn't an issue. - I really hate IV.. The IV site was never comfortable, and it didn't get removed until about 7pm, when I was being discharged. - Yes, the port is sore. I had expected this. Thankfully, only one of the incisions are tender. I expect to remove the bandaids sometime today per the nurse's instructions. - I'm slowly able to eat more in a sitting. It took me about 6 hours to do 8oz of Water and maybe a total of 4oz of Soup yesterday at the hospital. Tasted good, and went far toward helping my dry throat. - I gained about 4# at the hospital. Considering the circumstances, there's no small amount of irony there. - Gravity is a harsh mistress. I'm now convinced that it's gravity pulling on my belly -- not liver size -- that is the true motivation for losing 40# pre-op. - In walking around the ward, I could see there were other people who needed this more immediately than me. This matches my surgeon's observation: I'm in the lower end of the population among his patients. That both concerned and relieved me, and I'm glad the others were able to get this surgery. - I'm hungry. Time to finish that Protein shake from last night.

I'm about 48 hours post-op. Honestly, my biggest fear was not coming out of surgery, but everything went fine. When I came out, my mouth was completely dry. I couldn't swallow the Water from the ice they gave me, because those muscles weren't awake yet. My CPAP just made it worse, so I had to force myself to stay awake. Then they rolled me into my room, and soon gave me lunch. That helped my throat a lot and things got a lot smoother from there. I'm quickly learning what the band considers a "sip" versus a "swallow" in my liquid diet. It took me all afternoon to eat about 4oz of Soup and 8oz of water the day of surgery, but I'm now approaching what I expect to be considered "normal" volume -- at least for liquids. You, too, will quickly learn that if it feels like brocolli is stuck in your throat, that you should wait until it's gone. I gained 4# during surgery from fluids. That's already gone, plus at least another pound or two. I haven't been this light in over 3 years. At the beginning of April I was 350. I should be 300 in the next few days. It's worth it. Absolutely. Except for hiccups. I hate those. :tongue2: And the residual pain from where the port is stitched to the underlying muscle. That hurts, especially when I do something that uses my abs, like getting out of bed or the sofa or the toilet. Have someone willing to help you do things that would require bending over, and swear them to secrecy. And definitely use the bathroom all you can pre-op. You're not going to want to .. tense up .. while using the toilet for a while. But compared to the aches, pains, fasciitis, knee troubles, and constant fear of a chest pain turning out to be something worse .. this is a cake walk.

I hate hiccups.

by "not skinny", I presume your husband means "not bony", rather than "well padded", right? My surgeon would simply say to listen to your body and it'll decide what's appropriate and healthy, regardless of what anyone else (including, perhaps, medical professionals) might say.

Okay. First -- don't panic. Weight is just a number. BMI is just a number. They do not actually matter. What matters is your ability to function and live a healthy life. You *can* start doing that without WLS: I just had surgery yesterday morning, after spending two months losing about 40# or so of my excess. That in itself improved my quality of life significantly -- increased flexibility, endurance, bloodwork, you name it. The surgery is simply an (expensive) tool to help you maintain the healthy habit which comes from your own efforts -- not the surgeon's. If you can in fact do it on your own, you'll be a few thousand dollars richer. If you can't, you'll still have bought yourself time to accumulate the money and credit you need (eating less, and being more healthy, costs less). As for credit? Good credit takes time. Better credit (no-cosignor) takes even longer. Here are some things I learned on the way: - Credit must be active. This was mentioned by someone else. You need to have live accounts that *demonstrate* you are credit worthy. You must be willing to use credit while maintaining a good buffer between your balance and your total credit available. - Credit needs to have longevity. You need to have several years of credit in good standing to get full benefit from it. Young accounts with high limits and low rates help, but older accounts help more. - *STOP SHOPPING FOR CREDIT!* .. Each application you initiate drops your credit score by about 2 points or so for a temporary, but measurable time, as I measured by watching my score on Experian. This includes inquiries for credit cards, loans, utilities, housing, et cetera. What lendors will see is that you're shopping around, and they'll wonder why: are you desperate for credit, rather than interested in a good rate (in which case why don't you just cut for the chase and apply for the one good card after responsible research?). They'll wonder why you're being denied. That doesn't look good. Of course, this doesn't apply for simply checking your credit history, which you are entitled to do for free once a year by law. Just do it through the credit bureaus. - Verify your credit history at the bureaus. Each of them. Different lendors use different bureaus, and as I discovered to my horror, the information in each can vary wildly. Sometimes credit history gets reported multiple times due to shoddy work on the part of creditors (for example, my college loans were in a bad state once -- long ago, thankfully -- and reported *three* times due to sales of the note, even though by law they could only appear once, and only as the original loan, not a new loan dating from the sale date). You must check and correct this: it has the potential to greatly increase your score. This is what "credit repair" shops do, only many of them do it by disputing every credit line whether legitmate or not. Disputing legitimate credit could potentially do more harm than good. Naturally, if you have had a bad credit experience in the past, potential lendors have the right to know that when taking you on as a credit risk. - Credit scores vary by credit bureau: Experian, Equifax, and Transunion all have slightly different calculations they use for determining credit score. You should get the scores from all three in addition to verifing your history. I myself actually subscribed to Experian so I could pull my credit report as often as I like with no adverse effects. I still do. Remembering this, you can ensure your credit rating reflects just how good a risk you really are. But, again, that takes time. I started around the 15th percentil for credit. I'm now around the 99th. hinting to my bank to increase the credit limit on my existing cards was a good start. A few of those and my credit buffer became quite large. That little trip took less than ten years of being clever: if I hadn't sent a lot of letters off to clean things up, it would have taken longer. Good luck on all accounts. In the meantime, consider mimicking how you might live leading to surgery, and you ought to be able to slow the upward trend on the scale long enough to get that loan. You've already shown the motivation, right?

Consider it an automatic exercise coach? :rolleyes2: That, or motivation to take up SCUBA. Seriously, though... I wish they could have told me more than the day before that I had to check in at 5-fricken-20-A-M. Let's be realistic: I will be out of surgery and awake, awaiting discharge by the time I normally awaken. Guess it's an early night for me. 2 hours of liquid diet to go.

I'm with everyone else here. These people are *not* medical professionals, aren't they? They have no access to your medical records, right? Tell them to bugger off and leave your poor, concerned husband alone. Then take him to visit your doctor, and let him have a heart-to-heart talk about what constitutes "healthy", with someone who knows what they're talking about.

It's a mechanical device. Shifting your body can change how it levers against the spring or the sensor, and that can make all the difference. It could also be catching on something internal or external -- is there a bathmat? a countertop? a wall? This is part of why they'd *like* you to check only weekly. I admit I check most days, but I usually only record once or twice a week unless I'm noticing a slow-down or nearing a milestone (like now, in both cases). I have a nice spreadsheet modelling an idealized weight loss, and I'm checking against that just to see how good it is. Seeing the fluctuations against the whole trend should be good at keeping perspective. :thumbdown:

You need to calm down. Nobody was putting down anybody's age here; but there *is* something to be said after being involved in long-term successful relationships(say, 10 years+): One thing I noticed in college was that the friends of mine who were dating, even over the course of years, had an all-or-nothing mindset. They indulged in hyper-romanticized notions of how relationships worked out in the practical sense. This is something fairly well-described over the centuries, actually. Shakespeare wrote some of his best works on it. Invariably, they broke up with much pain, angst and (the worst, IMHO) drama. Invariably, at least one party would be so self-righteously traumatized that *obviously* I was expected to sever all ties to the other party. [Yeah, right -- if you enter my house, and Satan is there, you either leave, or say, "Why Mr Beelzebub! How delightful to see you are well! How's tricks?". I alone choose what company I keep.] Of the relationships that lasted, though, there was always the blind eye when it came to attraction. That is, the parties involved don't feel threatened by talk -- they know, at some level, that it's a complex play that works itself out, and can often serve useful purposes: reduced stress, inspired late-night acrobatics, the cheering-up of someone who could use some flirting. To be sure, one of the most stable "couples" I know is actually a triad. So while I agree with you that what "rules" are broken is entirely up to the specific players involved, it's just as true that flirting or outright lust after a 3rd (or 4th) party is hardly in itself cause for alarm. What (if anything) arises because of the situation, of course, may well be, depending on the nature of the relationship in question. Monogamy is something of a rarity in this world. The human norm is only that way because of historical quirks that managed to spread themselves into our legal system. It's perfectly natural to discover your sweetheart's eyes undressing something walking down the street, and more often than not you'll find them turned right back at you with a wicked glint in them. I'd go so far as to consider it a warning sign of an unhealthy relationship if eyes *didn't* wander. Of course, if I find myself surprised at more than 3 occupants in my bed when I crawl into it -- two of them being cats -- I expect a full explanation. But then, I also know I'll never have that situation. And so, as regards the OP's situation, I think the only healthy response is as suggested by others: talk to the other party. Discuss your response to the situation in its unexplained state. Accept the response, and gauge whether you trust it. If you don't, you have a decision to make. If you do, no harm done -- maybe a warning about how best to care and feed for your hurt feelings. No need for drama or suspicion, nor need to live as or with a lie. If one likes flirting innocently, but the other is very bothered by it, then affair or not it's not a healthy relationship, and maybe they'd make better friends instead.

For what it's worth, calculate how much money you *won't* be spending on other foods. I estimate my pre-op diet is saving us about $600/mo. Which is good, considering we have home improvement projects in addition to the Keith improvement project.

All the fill can do is adjust how quickly you can load up on solids. It doesn't force you to choose solids, nor does it force you to choose appropriate solids. Do you have anyone there to hold you accountable? Perhaps you should empty your house of inappropriate food, restock it with the good stuff, and only eat from your own pantry for a while? Something to remove the temptation for pizza, ice cream, and the like. If the kids don't like it... tough. :grouphug: (Insert scenes from "Gremlins")

I agree... as WLS surgery patients, the last thing any of us needs is a chaser or, worse, a feeder. If he's either, I'd consider this a change for the better, even if it doesn't feel it at the moment. If he simply discovered he couldn't cope with the adjustments he has to make in continuing his life with you, he should talk to a therapist about how he views his role in a long-term relationship. But whatever personality changes you may undergo through all this, your health is the most important factor -- not his comfort.

Keep things in perspective. Look for longer-term trends. If you're like most people I know, you're supposed to be drinking 64oz or more of Water each day. That's *4* pounds minimum. Were you potentially mildly dehydrated? Also keep in mind what the other poster said -- you're probably putting on muscle. Muscle is not light. Two years ago, I had more than 200# of lean mass on my body, and I was lighter than when you started. If you've plateaued, you can always talk with your surgeon -- perhaps you're at the weight you should actually be? They can measure what your composition is, rather than rely on that BS BMI figure. If you continue to trend upward, definitely talk with your surgeon. But, overall, I wouldn't fret until then.

Part of the purpose of a pre-op diet would be to reduce the size of the liver so that it's easier to work around your stomach. I suppose if your liver were known to be not-over-large, you *could* skip a pre-op diet. The other purpose would be to start getting you into the sort of habits you'll need post-op in order to succeed. Even if you're not prescribed such a diet, I'd probably recommend one in principle.

10 weeks of pre-op nutritional counselling, and restricted to 1200-2000 cals/day, plus exercise (currently at 45min/day). A couple Protein shakes, some lean cuisines, and some 5 servings of veg. Keeps me pretty full, actually, and I estimate I *had* been doing a good 3400+ before. Lost about 30# in the past 5 weeks, though 8# of that was .. not fat. :thumbup: 3 more weeks to go, though the loss is getting a little slower than it was earlier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_fat_percentage The first time I had it done (when I was about 9), was hydrostatically. I put on swim trunks, and was lowered into a giant tank of Water and had to expell all the air from my lungs. The skin calipers are the "can you pinch an inch" test. Whee. What I've had mostly is bioelectric impedance. In that, they attach a couple electrodes across your body and measure how much your body acts like a resistor -- fat vs non-fat have different resistances. That's what those Tanita scales you can buy for home do. You can refine the measurement by providing additional information about the shape of the body. I don't think it's likely to be as accurate at a hydrostatic tank, but it's definitely better than calipers, and probably good enough to determine where a true healthy weight is. And it certainly is more widely applicable than either BMI (all men must be within this density range) or pure weight (all men must weigh 170# no matter how tall or muscular). Of course, these are all tools. My surgeon, I think, doesn't really care. He seems to have the attitude that the body will know when it's happy about its balance of lean vs fat. If, with exercise and healthy eating habits, my body decides that 20% body fat is exactly what it wants (or, conversely, 7%), instead of the 10-15% I might want it to have, who wins in that fight? :blushing:

The last time my body lean body mass was measured, about 2 years ago, it was 215#. I'm 5'10: you do the math and discover what BMI I would have with zero fat on my body. BMI is a useless measurement for me. Weight, also, is questionable since lean body mass can vary with or without weight gain or loss. I certainly can lose weight by consuming muscle mass instead of fat mass (and if I do, someone stop me). I'm hoping, once I get around 240-250, to have my lean body mass updated, and use that to decide when I should be working on the transition to maintainance.

This would be Overlake Hospital in Bellevue, WA. Group Health has a facility on the same campus, and uses it for their bariatric program. My surgery's 30 June. I just had my pre-op visit/Q&A/exam with the surgeon (Bock), who says it'll probably work out well for me (which is good, since I already paid for the required nutritional support program). I've already met the other requirements, including the weight loss so, as he puts it, anything I take off between now and then is gravy (an amusing way to put it -- I don't know if that was intended).

If the surgeon put it around her neck it'd solve two problems at once. :wub:

By now we're all familiar with Dance Dance Revolution and the Wii Fit software. Here's a video worth watching. Xbox.com | Project Natal Of course, I don't think I'd install this in my bedroom. It could get.. complicated.

Kinda solves the whole throw-the-wiimote-through-the-tv problem. Of course, it introduces punch-your-tv and roundhouse-the-toddler. The added freedom for control would probably make for more effective exercise software as well. I can't wait for Richard Simmons to sponsor a title. I think it'd be right up his alley :frown: I love my xboxen, but I've already ordered my better half that we'll be acquiring this thing should it hit the shelves.

Dang.. Makes me look forward to my local hospital. They've actually dedicated a wing for WLS patients: single rooms (except a couple reserved for couples going through surgery together), suitable furnishings. I can't speak on the food yet, but I'm expecting it to be appropriate. But as for this idea of "priviledge" obesity.. in what sense is it any sort of honor? I'd have been hard-pressed to not call that nurse a fat cow to her face. It would have been ironic and cruel, but sometimes people need to get slapped into doing the right thing.

It's probably best not to confuse "no fill" with "no restriction" or "no weight loss". Some folks need more, some need less, and sometimes the band itself is sufficient to achieve the desired effect. As for me, I've lost 30# in the past month, and I'm still a month pre-op. I'm already preparing myself for the possibility of that rate increasing dramatically if my body continues to respond well. Then again, I could also hit a plateau. We'll see. Either way, I haven't weighed this little in over a year.

Having done this sort of thing in the past, there is a big difference between locating *a* gene, finding *all* the genes it interacts with (it's rarely if ever just a single gene you ever deal with), and successfully turning a set of genes off. Imagine, if you will, a panel with four billion switches. A few million of these actually differ from person to person. You don't know where these useful switches are, though you can, with effort, find out. You don't necessarily know which switches are wired to which other switches without, again, a great deal of effort. You don't really know even then what the overall effects of flipping them will do. In the simple cases, involving re-engineering e.coli, for example, there is a high failure rate. Failure often means death of the organism. Recall the one young man about 10 years ago who underwent gene therapy? Unfortunate, that, but it demonstrates how much we value a human life over that of a bacterial colony, or seed corn. That was the state of genetics when I was involved in it about 6 years ago. About the only thing that seems to have changed since then is the speed at which they locate new switches. I think it'd be safer to estimate on the order of 50 years before we can achieve halfway "safe" genetic therapies for, well, anything. However, locating such genes enables us to detect early whether a child might have a tendency toward obesity, and under what conditions the child is vulnerable.