ouroborous

Well, my scars are still hard lumps of tissue at 16 mos. out. Everyone heals differently. Supposedly taking care to moisturize and massage the scars and the surrounding tissue can help to reduce scarring.

I think that the running may be making my knees sore, which makes me sad. If it's true, I'll probably have to stop running; it's GREAT exercise, but you can't mess around with your knees. Ruin them and you're in for (literally) a lifetime of pain and limited mobility. One piece of advice that I saw in re sore knees and running was to work on really beefing up the supporting muscles (quads, hamstrings, etc.) I may focus on that at the gym for a while, and go back to my recumbent bike for a bit. Maybe when I'm 10 pounds lighter I'll try again...

B12 is arguably the MOST important of the Vitamins that we take, so don't fool around with it. Unlike the other vitamins, B12 deficiency can cause permanent, irreversible neurological damage. So if it's low, do whatever the doctor recommends in order to get it back up. One suggestion is to try different kinds of supplements; not all bariatric vitamins are created equal, and if you use the cheap bulk stuff you may end up doing more harm than good. IMO, it's worth it to spend a few extra dollars on vitamins, especially as a sleever. They're essentially our lifeline.

You have nothing to be ashamed of. Instead of focusing on the 6 pounds you've regained, focus on the nearly 70 you've lost, according to your weight ticker. I find that redirecting focus from the negative to the positive is one great way to get back on track. I strongly doubt that the pouch "reset" does much aside from remind you how little food you actually "need" and changing your habits a little, but if it helps you, go for it. The BEST thing for you, I think, would be to focus on your goals and be task-oriented; instead of dwelling on what a "failure" you are (which gains you nothing, discourages you, and may send you into a spiral of emotional eating), focus on "what needs to be done." Doing this removes the emotional component and clears your head to let you figure out "what's next." That's how I (mostly) stay on track.

The hair loss will stop and (slowly) reverse on its own. All that these supplements will do is drain your bank account (and possibly make you sick if you're not lucky). Just like people who take zinc swear that it makes their colds go away (when in fact, colds go away on their own), people who take Biotin or silica (aka: sand; see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silica) will "swear" that it makes their hair grow back -- when in fact that's just the body's natural regrowth process happening. I know it's hard to be patient, but unless there is significant *scientific* research showing that it stimulates hair growth, you're better off just waiting and taking care of your general health.

Ascorbic acid is Vitamin C. Citric acid and ascorbic acid are both non-toxic preservatives and flavor enhancers, but they are STRONGLY acidic and will definitely make your acid reflux worse. And yes, OTC omeprazole (I get mine bulk at costco, and it works a treat) is identical to the much-more-expensive Prilosec. If prilosec works for you, Omeprazole will too. Expect to have acid problems for a few months until you learn what you can safely eat and get your acid-blocker regimen figured out. It's not pleasant, but (in my opinion) it's a small price to pay in order to leave the ranks of the obese... And it DOES, eventually, get better (although I suspect it will never 100% go away).

Well, I finally broke my six month stall around 225-230. I'm down to 222 as of today, and consistently losing about .5% body fat per week. The trick? Nothing really, aside from exercise. Around the beginning of June, I started going to the gym really seriously again, and for the past few weeks I've been walking about 2.5 miles per day (plus ramping up to a little running). It's paying off; along with losing a great deal of fat, I'm getting sort of buff! Anyway, looking at my body weight chart (if you click on my weight ticker you can see it) you'll see that right around the end of June, my weight curve starts dipping again. Now that I'm taking accurate body fat/skeletal muscle readings with the gym's body composition monitor, I can see that my body fat is decreasing and my skeletal muscle % is increasing about .2% per week. This is exactly the direction you want. IF I can keep this up -- continuing to lose .5% body fat per week -- I should be able to get to my "dream goal" of under 20% body fat by around December. That will put me squarely in the "healthy" range for both body fat and BMI, with a weight around 205-210. And by that time my muscle should be up 2-3%, which works out to around 5-10 pounds of solid muscle packed on (so actually my weight might not drop to 205 if I keep packing on the muscle; I might end up at 210, just buff as heck and relatively cut), which is damned good for a 41 year old man who was 330 lbs just over a year ago! Now I just need to figure out how to start changing up my gym routine to keep it interesting and challenging!

I'm pretty sure that just eating lots of fiber won't damage your colon in ANY way, no matter how old you get. In fact, I have yet to see any indications that a high fiber diet has any negative consequences, aside from possibly a little flatulence at first, and in the specific case of someone with diverticulosis during a flare-up. That's it -- otherwise, taking lots of fiber (including "laxatives" like Metamucil that are just megafiber) won't hurt you in any way. In the short term, however, I wouldn't worry too much about not pooping unless you're suffering in some other way (pain, vomiting, etc.) Of course: talk to your doc

I've been at basically the same weight -- around 225 -- for six months now. Yes, focus on the positives, I've lost more than 100 lbs, my health is so much better, etc. But I still have this annoying, stubborn belly and body fat that I want to get rid of. At this point, I know it's all mental/vanity, but the problem is that I've been hitting the gym HARD for a while now, and the remaining thin layer of fat is smoothing out all the new muscle I've been packing on and making it harder to see. Some things I've considered: It's muscle! I'd love to believe this, but there's no way I've packed on 5-10 lbs of muscle. A lot of guys CLAIM to put on this much muscle at the drop of a hat, but they're fooling themselves; unless you're 6'8", going to the gym every single day for an hour and pumping HUGE stacks of weight -- and probably on anabolics to boot -- there's simply no way to put on this much muscle in the 2-3 months that I've been lifting weights seriously. It's water weight! Yeah, except that water weight fluctuations don't tend to stick around for six months. I'm snacking too much! This is a possibility, but I don't snack on BAD things, for the most part. It's not candy and sugary treats; it's mostly protein-based, or zero-calorie, or the occasional (re: one a day, max) 90 calorie high-fiber brownie. I know that I need to get back to watching my calories on Livestrong (or whatever), to make sure that I'm not fooling myself about how much I eat, but just from gut feel, it doesn't FEEL like that much. I'm certain that I'm not consuming more than 1500-1800 calories per day, and I'm walking about 2 miles per day (I clocked it... 2.2 miles in 30 minutes, roughly 3.7 mph) and going to the gym twice a week. At this level of consumption/burn, I should STILL be losing weight (doing the calorie math considering my age/height/weight/gender), but I'm not. I guess I know the responses -- track my calories, focus on protein, watch out for grazing, etc. -- and I'm mostly just frustrated, not looking for advice. I knew that the "honeymoon period" with the sleeve wouldn't last forever; I can't effortlessly drop 20 pounds anymore. But I sure hope that my current weight isn't my "forever weight" because it's still about 15 pounds above what I was hoping for! If you click on my weight ticker, I believe it will take you to a graph of my weight over time since the surgery, and you'll see that it fits a nice logarithmic curve. If you project it out, losing another 15 pounds will take me something like 3-4 years. Ack!

Thanks for the kind words, folks. I know what I need to do -- stick with it, count my calories, stay healthy, and exercise as much as I can tolerate. It's just frustrating that this last little "jelly roll" won't go away (and no, it's not loose skin, unfortunately, although that's a separate issue!)

Severe caloric restriction can reduce or eliminate menses, I know that -- anorexic women (and, I believe, some pro athletes) have this problem frequently. I don't know what effects it might have on menopause; if the amenhorrea is due to reduced estrogen, then I could see severely reduced caloric intake causing menopausal symptoms, too. But: I Am Not An Expert... talk to your doctor

Sure, all body types are different. Plus, generally speaking, limiting carbs (in fact, limiting ANY type of food) tends to limit calories -- which tends to produce weight loss. In fact, caloric deficit is about the only thing we know for sure produces weight loss, so anything that reduces calories tends to produce weight loss (whether it is healthy or durable weight loss is another matter entirely). There is zero proof that extremely low-carb diets are any more safe and effective for durable weight loss than there is for extremely low-fat diets. They both have been fad diets for a long time, they both have adherents who will discount any evidence that the diet might be ineffective or overly simplistic (see: the confirmation bias), and they both have little to no uncontested evidence (large, peer-reviewed, repeatable, randomized, placebo-controlled trials) supporting their long-term, widespread efficacy. They exist primarily due to word-of-mouth in forums like this, not due to scientific consensus. That's why my advice is always: talk to your doctor. If you don't trust your doctor, then you've got a problem, since you just had a major surgery...

Well I'm going back to calorie tracking. Every time I've done that rigorously, I've found some source of "hidden" calories.

This is why I'm always careful to say that "carbs aren't necessarily bad, as long as they're healthy (ie, complex, non-sugary) carbs." People seem to want to lump things like Pasta and ice cream (simple, unhealthy, "bad" carbs) together with things like vegetables, multigrain bread (complex, healthy carbs). They are not at all alike, from both a caloric and glycemic index perspective, and the end result of eating the same amount of calories in different types of carbs will be very different; you can eat 80g/day of simple carbs and gain weight, or 80g/day of complex carbs and lose weight. Same body, same metabolism, different nutrient. This is why I hate the overly-simplistic "carbs are bad" thought virus that floats around just about every weight loss community. It just isn't that simple. I blame the Atkins craze (which has shown tremendous success at helping people lose weight, and not so much success at helping them maintain their weight loss, which is the really important bit).

I don't think you have to wait "a few minutes" after each sip. As long as you're not feeling any discomfort (pain, reflux, etc.) I'd wager that you can sip all you want, and thirst is nature's way of telling us to drink more. Of course, I'd check with your doctor if you have any concerns, but I don't think that throttling Water intake is super important. As long as you're not gulping and not in any discomfort, even at 11 days out I'd bet your doc would be thrilled if you could drink more water. Just out of curiousity, how much water are you getting in per day? You should be tracking it at this point, and it should be from 60-80 oz (says my doc and my nut.)

Eat lots of complex carbs (whole grains, vegetables, some fruit). Be sparing on simple carbs (sugars, refined white flour). Eat a lot of Protein, and eat it first. Drink lots of Water. That, plus keeping your calories down and taking your Vitamins is all you really need to do. Please folks, can we dump the "carbs are bad" mentality? It's just not that simple. If you carb-deprive yourself, you'll end up tired and grumpy. If you protein-deprive yourself, you'll waste your muscles and eventually your brain. And so on -- we need EVERY nutrient, including carbs, especially when we're in deep weight loss. There's actually nothing really wrong with 80g of carbs per day, especially if they're good carbs -- complex, non-sugar, high Fiber carbs -- not junk. Just keep your diet balanced and healthy and your calories down, and you WILL lose weight. Please listen to your nutritionist, not random people on the Internet. Otherwise, why are you paying for her expertise? I've lost >100 lbs following this basic advice, so clearly you don't have to be overly miserly with carbs to lose a great deal of weight.

Post surgical regret about 4-8 weeks out is very, very typical. Stick with it -- it will get better, and before long your biggest regret will be that you didn't have the surgery sooner. Trust me on this; many -- most? -- of us went through this. It gets much, much better.

The fact that we do not have single-payer is what causes this; the loop between the billers (hospitals, mostly) and insurers causes rates to soar. The fact that for the most part, insurance "just handles it" causes most of us to not notice -- until the first time you need medical care when you're uninsured. Then all of a sudden, a relatively routine medical treatment can bankrupt you (medical costs are still the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, and will be until we fix our crazy patchwork of for-profit, insurance-based medicine). And all of this is because all of the billing and payment goes through a web of middlemen, each extracting their cut. The same situation can be seen in all industries where there is "mandatory" (or effectively mandatory) insurance. Just look at how expensive it is to get bodywork done on your car; this is the same situation where most people never get the sticker shock because if they're insured, insurance "just handles it." Thus there is no popular anger, and no consumer search for competition forcing the prices down (you know, how capitalism is supposed to work, when the politicians watching the henhouse aren't bought and sold by the very people they're regulating). Did you notice that one of the parts of the health care reform law that the insurance companies fought so very hard (and very successfully) to keep out was the simple provision that revoked their anti-trust exemption? In theory, why should they get this exemption -- if we're going to have anti-trust laws, everyone should be governed by them, right? It's only fair play. And yet, for some reason, insurers are allowed to monopolize local markets, with the predictable result that there are very frequently only one or two (colluding) insurers in any given market, and consumers have no real choices... no way to hop to a different insurer when the extortion of Aetna or Cigna or BCBS gets too horrible (of course, the insurers have also colluded to make changing insurance outside of a job change very difficult... they basically game the system any way they can). And if people could see just how much potential salary they're giving up, just so their employers can pay their outrageous insurance premiums, there'd be a revolution. I've seen estimates that say that up to 20-40% of the cost of keeping an employee is benefits, with most of that being health insurance premiums. Just think what you could do with another 20% of your salary in your pocket... Of course, the moral problem with health insurance is that we're effectively making it unavailable to the poor and uninsured (often the same group) with our broken system. Until we stop screaming "socialism! socialism!" and running away whenever someone mentions single-payer medicine, this will just keep getting worse. Single-payer systems aren't perfect by any means, but they are more humane and a LOT more affordable (both to the individual and to the nation) than our current for-greed system. And before someone starts talking about the poor, harassed doctors, that's a red herring. Most of the money in our scam-based system does NOT go to the doctor; most of the money goes to CEO's and stock shareholders in whatever corporations manage to squeeze out the most competition. The doctors these days, after paying off the ridiculous graft malpractice insurance rates, are lucky to get by. Have you noticed how private practices for NON-lucrative specialties (lucrative: plastic surgery, weight loss surgery; non-lucrative: pediatrics) are disappearing? That's why; doctors are NOT getting rich off our current system. If they were, we'd have more medical school graduates and fewer business school graduates; instead, we're getting frighteningly near to a serious "doctor shortage" in the US. No, the only people getting rich are the execs and shareholders of Aetna, Blue Cross, Cigna, and so on. Yes, OP, the system is broken and disgusting, and anybody who's paying attention SHOULD be feeling the same anger you felt when they see just how much of a scam it is, especially when you consider the fact that people are dying because of it.

Some claim carbonated beverages will stretch your sleeve, but after you're past the initial six month healing period, I doubt this sincerely. One thing that IS true is that carbonated beverages are much more acidic than non-carbonated beverages (because of the carbonic acid they produce). Additionally, Diet Coke (and Diet Pepsi and Diet RC, etc. etc.) all have large amounts of other chemicals added (for flavor and as preservatives) that make them even MORE acidic, to the point where I would be concerned about the damage they might do to your incision scar, given repeated consumption. I used to be a HUGE Diet Coke drinker, and now that I'm sleeved I simply cannot drink the stuff because the acidity gives me a severe upset stomach and stomach cramps. That being said, I've seen no studies proven that acidic beverages cause damage. But since there's no NEED to drink carbonated beverages -- there are plenty of refreshing and delicious non-carbonated beverages -- why risk it?

It's extremely common and nothing to worry about. They are a little annoying because they're prickly and get caught on stuff. Talk to your doc about it, but usually what they do is just pull it out with a forceps. If there's a loop left they may have to snip that (they did for me).

I second the "eat meat first" thing. Not only is meat denser (fills you up quicker), but it produces a much better glycemic curve than any breads or sweets. It's a long, slow release of blood sugar, preventing that spike and crash that led so many of us into metabolic syndrome (and eventually diabetes or worse). In short, you will "feel full" longer if you focus on Protein first. All the statistics on weight regain being said, it's very true that losing is the easy part. For the first year or so, you hardly have to do any work to shed 10 pounds, it seems. Past that, it gets harder. I'm not as far along as Tiffykins, but I'm about 17 months out, and I'm definitely at the stage where I have to WORK to lose weight. That means doing SOME kind of fitness activity EVERY day, plus going to the gym to build muscles with resistance training twice a week. And truth be told, I should be doing more -- more cardio, more resistance. Ladies, it's super important that you get enough resistance training, since if you let your muscles atrophy through weight loss and inertia, you'll have to fight even HARDER to avoid regain later. And gents, it's super important that you do cardio and not just pump Iron, since the strongest muscles won't prevent a heart attack, and all of the "metabolic rate" nonsense to the contrary, there's simply no replacement for BURNING calories if you want to lose fat and keep it off. Bottom line is, after about a year (seems to be the average), weight loss and maintenance becomes WORK, if you want to maintain it. There's simply no avoiding that fact. However, unlike pre-sleeve, the hard work can actually, well, WORK... you actually CAN lose the weight and keep it off. You CAN get and keep a body you're proud of. I don't know about you, but for me, pre-sleeve, even those "simple" goals seemed impossible. Now, they seem like a challenge, but possible.

Well, liquids probably won't, as long as they're closer to "clear" liquids. Some of the more "full" liquids MIGHT, but you'd really have to be overdoing it... almost TRYING to sabotage yourself. Bottom line is that before you got to the point where they'd damage you, you'd be in significant discomfort or pain. So if you stop before that point, you should be fine. Some argue that carbonated beverages can stretch your sleeve, but as far as I know about the physics of gases and liquids, that's just really unlikely. Gases (the CO2 from carbonation) are compressible (so the stomach can "squish" them into a smaller space), and just like liquids, it's far more likely that the stomach will squirt them out one of its sphincters before stretching the tough upper stomach tissue. In short, you'll burp or fart before you get to the point of stretching. It's probably still good to avoid carbonated beverages because they tend to be empty calories and very acidic, but I doubt they'd stretch your stomach.

Yeah, the width of my shoes changed a lot. I went from having to wear "extra wide" shoes to just normal size. I gotta say, the ability to wear normal sized shoes, and the fact that my feet really don't hurt anymore... a HUGE improvement!

Remember that post-op care instructions vary from doctor to doctor, so different people will be told different things. From what I know, avoiding alcohol is important for two reasons. First and most important, your stomach is still healing for six months; the scar formation -- which is very important -- around your incision could be compromised if you constantly irritate the lining, and alcohol does exactly that. In fact excess alcohol can actually cause necrosis (tissue death) in the stomach lining. Is that what you want going on when your stomach is still trying to heal from a very traumatic surgery? Also, I've heard that rapid weight loss really taxes your liver, and alcohol can make that worse. Lots of obese people have a condition called hepatosteatosis -- fatty liver -- which is actually a very serious condition which can lead to cirrhosis (scarring) of the liver, or even -- in extreme cases -- death. If your liver is still recovering from this, are you sure that adding alcohol (another liver toxin) to the mix is a good idea? Bottom line, follow your doctor's orders to the letter if you're hoping for the best recovery and good weight loss results. They make those recommendations for a reason