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How much food are you eating? I can only eat 3-3.5oz at a time. If I eat 4oz I will get bloated & nauseous. I’m over 4 years out & I still weight my food at home. try a stool softener every other day.

If you are worried about what you did then speak to your team. My advice would be relax a bit, forgive yourself, you know what you did wrong and hopefully would not repeat the incident. You are so near onederland it would be a shame to put off this huge milestone by weight gain. You have done so well, keep up the good work

Hi - 5 weeks post op from Gastric Bypass. I am having bloating in my abdomen and discomfort (feeling full ALOT).. Sometimes I have nausea. I understand this can happen after I eat but this is sometimes when I wake up (10+ hours since eating) I am also struggling to have bowel movements. I took a stool softener every day before surgery to help but I've been told not to take since somedays are mainly diarhea. I am losing weight but worry. Thoughts?

I've been struggling with the decision for about 4 years now. Back and forth on if I want it or not, only because it's a permanent option. That being said, I had a son about a year and a half ago which is my absolute world and I could not imagine a day without him, so I decided to go through with the surgery to help me lose the weight quickly, but give me the tools to keep it off this time, in order for me to be around for a long long time. Now I find out that my wife is pregnant with our next child, so this is perfect timing.

Hello from Canada. My reasons for surgery is peaked at the thought of my new born daughter needing me. I just turned 50 when she was born (my first and only). I thought I could not bear the thought of dieing at 65 from some complication due to poor health. I am diabetic and also suffered from ever increasing pains. Back, hands, shoulder pains. It never seem to end a new ache every day almost. I lost and gained weight too many times and had been looking at bypass surgery for over ten years as an opinion but was still undecided and often spoke and researched about peoples success and failures. I'm trying to be very realistic with my expectations of where I am am going from where I am. I have read here about some struggles some are having with staying with the strictness of the new diet routine. How some struggle with keeping food down and even reading about a concerned wife telling us about her husband eating beacon and eggs at week 3 or 4. He seems to have giving up or is in denial about how he had to rethink his relationship with the foods that have lead him to do the surgery in the first place. We all will struggle some more than others. This forum will for me allow me to be inspired and hopefully inspire in return to be better and push through the hard times ahead. If we're easy we would not be here. But we are here to help and encourage. Blessings for everyone and continued success. Keep at it!!

Just be slightly more strict with yourself and wean yourself off a bit on the snack foods. Like yourself, I had some gain back due to a med that I needed for a TN flare (gabapentin) and got all the way up to 197 pounds. I've since weaned myself off the med after being put on something different that doesn't cause weight gain and I've dropped 10 of the pounds I gained as I'm 187 today, but I don't know if it's even possible to lose the 5-10 more pounds I want as I've been struggling to lose any more despite adjusting and fixing my eating habits. My doctor told me today to not stress about it because some of it may be due to my MCAS and some of the issues it's been causing lately. So maybe a part a part of the weight gain you're experiencing is diet, some from the med, and the other part possibly stress? (stress can cause weight gain as well) If you're struggling with getting your diet back on track just slowly adjust it. Don't stress yourself out even more by denying yourself everything just cut it back slowly bit by bit and eventually you'll be eating better and hopefully the weight will come back off.

Start by making small changes. Drop one or two of those snacks. Swap out a poor cooking style to a healthier method. Swap out a less nutritious food for a more nutritious one. Check your protein intake & if it’s low, add more protein to your diet. Same with water. Check your portion sizes too. And so on until you are back to eating much like you were when you were close to or at your goal weight. You don’t have to make all the changes at once. Make one change & then in two or so weeks, make another change. Small changes are much easier to cope with & manage.

How low is low? How tall are you & what’s your BMI? I was 200lbs but at only 5’3 my BMI was 35. I lost all my weight and more. Got to my goal in 6 months & lost another 11+kgs over the next 11 months or so. I maintained at about 49kgs for a year. I put on 2kgs in a month because of a necessary dietary change & a change of a med & have been sitting at about that 51kg for almost 10 months There have been posters here who started with BMIs of less than 35 & had the surgery because of existing health issues & they were able to lose weight. The main difference between people with higher starting weights & those with lower is that those at a higher weigh lose more quickly at first. But their rate of loss slow as they lose weight just like everyone else. Recovery is an individual thing - just how your body reacts to the surgery & heals. Nothing really to do with your weight as such but existing health factors may influence your recovery. Some people who carry a lot of weight in their abdominal area sometimes struggle with more discomfort when getting up & down & generally moving as the weight around their tummy pulls at the internal & external surgical sites. A binder is often helpful as it supports the tummy & abdominal muscles.

I can see you have achieved your goal. Well done and I totally agree with you that it is never too late to make things right. I had the surgery before I turn 40 and I lost 50 kg and went below 100 kg for the first time in 20 years just in time for my 40th birthday. I'm now going to try all the things that I wanted to do but couldn't because of my weight

Thank you Tomo for your response. I also had lap band in 2008 and had it removed in August 2022 following horrible reflux and weight gain. I understand your experience about the lap band restriction, it was quite unbearable at times and maybe I have to go back and think how I managed to overcome that! I think I need to stop overanalysing this and stop reading the horror stories and what can go wrong. thank you

I get it, major surgery is scary! I think it’s important to examine all the reasons you want to do it. If it’s for a quick fix and quick weight loss to look better, it’s probably not a great idea. If you are tired of being overweight and have health issues that you want to overcome, then this is a great option. I say this because you definitely have to be in the right frame of mind to be successful. This surgery is a tool to help you get healthy, it’s not a permanent fix. You will eventually be able to eat whatever you want again, so it’s up to you to keep with it. As far as dumping, as long as you are following your plan, it shouldn’t be an issue. just my two cents! Good luck with whatever you decide!

If I didn't have a history of all other weigh loss medications failing I would be convinced not to get the surgery. But I am too far along in the process (surgery on 10/11/22) to stop now. It is the best weight loss medication I've ever experienced. I've recommended to everyone who isn't ready for surgery and I will take it again with a heartbeat LOL.

I am 5’4” and was 200 lbs. when I got my sleeve in 2020. I got down to 146 and have pretty much maintained that weight for a year. I would love to lose another 10 lbs but, I confess, I don’t exercise quite as much as I could, and the nutritionist suggested light weight training, Someday…..

Glad you got some reassurance OP. We do torture ourselves with this stuff. Bottom line - if you stick with the programme you've been given you *will* lose weight. Best of luck.

I had my surgery (bypass) back in 2019, I got down to 175 stone. I started sertraline 7 months ago now, and have gained nearly 20 lbs. Albeit my diet hasn't been the greatest, but I feel horrific and starting to hate the way my body looks again. Any tips for getting back on track? I snack/graze too much but don't feel strong enough to go back to old/good habits!! Any tips for diets to try/how to lose weight again

For me it was realizing that if I could have done it on my own I would have at this point. It’s not a lack of knowing what to do or laziness it was a deeper issue. As to why now? I have young kids I felt too exhausted to do anything with. I love to travel and I didn’t fit in a plane seat, full stop. I was tired of feeling like I didn’t want to meet new people or see old friends because of how ashamed I was of how I looked. I was tired of the very real everyday discrimination and judgement morbidly obese people receive. And I knew I would never be happy at 340 lbs. it would be a source of frustration and unhappiness my whole life. Some people are able to be content at any weight and I admire them but that wasn’t me. I felt wrong and miserable in my own skin, and I couldn’t do the physical activities I wanted to take part in.

I've used the Carb Manager app in the past to track my nutrition and linked it to my fitbit. However, their nutrition info on a lot of things were off. It was annoying always correcting it or creating my own for simple things. I tried the Baritastic app the last few days but I don't like how you can only create recipes using servings sizes instead of actual weight. (Example: I cook Soup for me and my family and it equals 65 ounces of food. I eat 20 ounces. It will calculate the nutrition info of exactly what I ate instead of guessing serving sizes especially since I cook for 6 people.) I am pre-op still (surgery in Nov.) but want to find a reliable, easy to use, accurate food and fitness journaling app. Any suggestions? Sent from my SM-S115DL using BariatricPal mobile app

I was hoping the OP would return so we could discuss some of the things posted here, but they have not. As such, I wanted to take a bit of time to delve a bit deeper into what was posted in the event anyone reading this was confused. Sorry, but this will be a long post. The TL;DR version is that most of what was posted was inaccurate. Let's start with this section: Dumping syndrome (feeling very sick when eating certain foods), is really variable for both Sleeve and Roux-en-Y gastric bypass patients. Some people have this, and some don't. It's generally accurate to say that dumping is more common in gastric bypass but regardless, relying on this as the way to keep you from eating things you shouldn't, is just not a good strategy. As I mentioned before, neither surgery fixes what's between your ears, so if you go into WLS expecting that this is going to keep you from binge eating, you likely won't be successful. Stomachs can stretch, but it takes repeatedly overeating for this to happen. I wanted to make that clear since some people are overly worried about this. As long as you stick to plan, this should not be a concern. Again, not a good strategy expecting dumping syndrome to "fix" you. Fix your eating problem first, then have surgery to help you get to a healthy weight. The OP seems to have a misunderstanding about how fat cells work. White Adipocytes (fat cells), store lipids (fats) as droplets in the body of the cell. The volume of the droplet stored in each cell can grow or shrink as needed. The point is that the number of fat cells one has does not determine some sort of "baseline" amount of fat you will store. Yes, obese people often have more fat cells on average, though this is somewhat determined by genetics, overall body mass, as well as how long you have been obese. The OP is correct in that you can grow new fat cells if you exceed the capacity of your existing adipocytes to store lipids. What's not correct is that this somehow makes it more likely that you'll gain weight if you overeat. If you overeat, you'll gain weight regardless. This is factually wrong. Yes, being cold does require your metabolism to work harder to keep you warm. Studies have shown that on average, if you were to exercise in a very cold environment vs. a warm one, you can burn as much as 30% more calories when subjected to cold. Keep in mind that this effect only occurs when you are exposed to cold however. Let's take a simple example to illustrate how little of a difference this makes: Let's say your basal metabolic rate is 2000 calories. If you burn 30% additional calories in a 15 minute session of shivering as the OP suggested, that means you'd burn about 21 extra calories. (2000 calories divided by 24 hours is about 83 calories. That times 30% equals about 25. Divide 25 by 4 since it's 15 minutes of shivering and you get about 6. So if you take the OP's advice, you'd burn about 6 extra calories for your 15 minutes of shivering. Now if you actually workout (rather than just sit), in a cold environment, you can certainly increase the calories burned, but again, it's limited. I hope you see that this is not a good way to actually lose weight. Plus, we should be exercising for other reasons like to improve our cardiovascular health. Shivering won't do anything for that. If you want to know the real way to exercise for weight loss, you need to do strength training. Why? Because as you strength train, you also increase your basal metabolism. In other words, you burn more calories even when you're not working out.

I'm also interested to hear other low BMI weight loss surgery experiences! I am having VSG in 6 days and my starting weight (before liquid diet) is also 205.

I'm in GA, but am working with Alabama Surgical Associates. https://www.alweightlosscenter.com/payment-options/self-pay-pricing/. I have UHC and our policy doesn't cover any bariatric procedures. So far I had a phone consult with Dr. Doucette. He wants me to lose 30 pounds before surgery - which because of my work schedule should be the end of Dec. I have a weight check in call with the Dr. in 2 weeks.

What has been your experience with going into surgery with a weight of 205lbs or under? My starting weight was 220 but I've lost 15 pounds pre op. I've heard people smaller will not loose any weight. Going into surgery smaller what is the recovery like? (I am doing this surgery because I've tried everything to loose weight and live a better lifestyle)

My results with the sleeve are completely different. I DO get sick eating sugar, rich foods, etc. It has been 8 years since my surgery and I have kept the weight off (100+ lb. weight loss).

I do my measurements and weigh in on the 4th of every month. Surgery Date April 18th 2022. Pre op diet weight 317lb. As you can see this month i did not loose much weight. Almost no weight for 3 weeks. Typical stall. It happens. We shall see where we are at next month. Hoping to reach under 200lb

So, my new insurance provider, Cigna, is not covering weight loss surgery--it is excluded for my company's policy with them. I contacted Sage Bariatrics, and self-pay for Gastric Bypass is $15k. I know there is a cheaper option in Mexico (OCC), and have sent them some questions. Can anyone recommend any other center of excellence that might have decent pricing, either in the USA, someplace else in the world? Thanks!

Thank you all so much for advice and your input, I do follow a low carb diet due to insulin resistance with PCOS. I think that unfortunately I may be kinda stuck here, I’ll keep following the plan and hope and pray for some movement in the right direction but I think for my mental health it’s not helping to beat myself up every week that the scale has stopped moving.. cause it hasn’t moved in 5 months…. I’m happier now at my 220lbs than I was at the 289 lbs before surgery so I think to give myself a little mental break I need to figure out how to be more positive about the small success I have had over the last 10 months. Focusing on the “not good enough” mindset has really triggered my depression and sense of self hate again and I definitely don’t want to get back to that where I need medications to get out of bed daily because those depression meds made me gain a ton. Gotta try and find some positivity somewhere right? Thanks!