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Hmmm, yes it stinks. Its just not as much fun when you can not adjust your ticker every day. I use MY FAT SECRET to track my food and if I don't adjust my weight every two weeks it prompts me to update. It always feels as if it is judging me, lol. I usually swear at it.

Excited to finally get to post on this thread. Today is the day I am making my first soft protein meal. I’ve tested the waters with a bite of lobster yesterday and a spoon of ricotta Saturday but have otherwise been on protein shakes and clear liquids since my surgery two weeks ago. I prepared a ricotta egg white omelette season with a pinch of salt, turmeric, and coriander. It went down slowly, but successfully and I’m feeling full quickly. There is definitely a significant difference between consuming food vs full liquids. Readjusting portions will certainly be a learning curve.

Today is the day I am making my first soft protein meal. I’ve tested the waters with a bite of lobster yesterday and a spoon of ricotta Saturday but have otherwise been on protein shakes and clear liquids since my surgery two weeks ago. Prior to surgery a well seasoned egg white omelette was a the most common breakfast meal for me, often with a side of Turkey sausage after my morning swims. I didn’t get to swim this morning, (at my check up last week my surgeon said I could resume this Thursday though 🤗) , but I prepared a ricotta egg white omelette season with a pinch of salt, turmeric, and coriander. So far it’s going down slow and I’m feeling full quickly. I think I’ll probably put half away for tomorrow’s breakfast. Readjusting portions will certainly be a learning curve.

I put on my first pair of jeans 7 weeks post op to go to Home Depot. They were loose! A few steps into the store and my pants were falling off. A few days later did laundry. Pulled out some leggings. I have knee knows, and mtmy thighs don't touch.

My surgery center has a nearly all liquid liver-shrinking diet for 14 days, but it is causing me the worst chapped lips. I've been drinking 82 - 124 oz of water and it's getting worse. Has anyone else experienced ultra dry skin & lips during the pre-op diet? Diet : Water - 48 oz. minimum Breakfast - 30 g protein shake <5 carbs Lunch - 30 g protein shake <5 carbs Dinner - light meal: 3-6 oz lean protein, <30 carbs, non-starchy vegetable, 2 servings of healthy fat spread throughout day non-starchy vegetables are unlimited throughout the day. Sent from my Pixel 5 using BariatricPal mobile app

Yes it does get way better & easier. Because we’re different & we heal & recover in our own time, there’s no real definitive time frame when this will happen for you. Your tummy becomes less sensitive & fussy, the sensitivity you may develop for certain tastes & smells goes, you feel more comfortable & confident about what you can eat, you can eat more & a wider variety of foods. And one day you’ll look back & go yep, I’ve come a long way from those first couple of weeks. In the meantime keep eating small bites slowly. Remember too the restricted diet & staged return to eating specific foods is to support & not stress your healing tummy. I wasn’t able or interested in eating much either. I ate from a teaspoon & each bite was barely 1/2 a teaspoon. I wasn’t eating 300 calories those first months & barely ate 900 at 6 months. Started with eating only 1/4 to 1/3 cup from purée. Got to almost a cup at 6 months. You will slowly but surely be able to eat more too. Try some anti nausea meds to help with your nausea. Most are prescribed them initially. Ask for some or try some over the counter ones & see if they help. I had varying degrees of nausea in the morning for 8 months. It stopped when I stopped taking my multi vitamins (didn’t need them) - they’re often the culprit especially iron.

I'm 3 months out. I am finally able to include things like carbs & it brought back A LOT of normalcy for me. I am also able to eat about 3-1/2 to 4 ounces of food which fills up a small bowl & visually it helps me a ton. It took me about 2-1/2 months for me to finally feel like myself again. It will come! It will get easier & having access to your old healthy favorites will bring comfort. I promise!

I feel like I am more conscientious than ever of attaching a moralistic value to weight and making sure I am treating it as a neutral. One thing I worried about alot in the week before my surgery is somehow contributing to the societal bias and negative treatment of overweight people by getting the surgery. I feel like I worry about that more than anything.

I’m struggling with this too. I’m 3 weeks post op and my surgeon seems to much more strict with my meal plan than a lot of others, so the food is getting quite monotonous. Not to mention it’s 4 weeks on the pureed diet for me. As for nausea, my vitamins are the main culprit and my PCP prescribed me Zofran to help mitigate the nausea while I play around with my vitamins to see what works.

Keep trying things, this affects all of us but each body gets relief differently. I watch the timing of the vitamins too. If you take calcium with iron they bind up and cancel each other for example. Drink 64 oz of water, try everything said including probiotics and or prebiotic foods like kombucha, yogurt, sour kraut, kimchi. You will find a sweet spot, it just takes time to work out the new plumbing system. I wouldn’t let it back up more than a week. I use a multi prong approach with probiotics, magnesium supplements, and benefiber each evening, caffeine in the am. It got me back to regular most mornings. Best of luck experimenting! (I was motivated by a very bad blowout at work that I never want to repeat lol.)

I’m about 5 weeks out from surgery and food, while easier than the first two weeks, is still hard. It’s stressful because I’m nauseous all the time. Things I love I can’t have, even if they are healthy. I’m really struggling with if it’s going to be like this forever. I can barely eat more than two bites at a time. I just need to know if this gets better cause I’m really struggling. It’s making me irritable and not fun to be around.

I started wearing masks in public again a couple of weeks ago and I will be home from now until surgery date. Only grocery pickup, if I need to. I was contemplating getting another booster for my C-19 series but my doc said I should be good since it ran through my family a couple of months ago. My partner still has to go to work for a few days before my surgery, so that is a potential exposure. Glad my kids are out of school, though!

I totally agree on the shakes, I find them really tough to drink! Glad you've been able to find a solution with the soup and isopure. I'm nervous, too. I've not had a surgery either. I keep telling myself they do this every day, though. I really hope recover goes well for us, too! I'll be alone in hospital for 3 nights and then in a hotel for 2, so I'll try to come on here and update, too. I'm not sure what time of day the surgery will be, I hope early so I don't have to wait around much! Did you get a time?

Thanks all for sharing! I tend to meal prep since it's just me and it's easier to cook once or twice a week than every day. That's really the only reason my days tend to be fairly similar. As many of you hinted at, I am really trying for that healthy relationship with food where I enjoy in moderation. Glad to see that seems to be working for so many!

My WLS is scheduled for 12/29. I started my 14-day liver shrinking pre-op diet on Thursday and the first few days were rough with headaches. I don't know why this didn't dawn on me sooner, but I've just just cancelled my Christmas plans with 24 members of my extended family to avoid getting COVID, flu, or RSV (our county/region has high rates of all 3 right now) because I don't want anything to interfere with my procedure, and I'm pretty sad about that, but I've invested too much now to have my procedure delayed. Anyone else facing similar decisions? RSV, influenza, and COVID cases are really high in my region and hospitals are already full (especially pediatric), so I'm just being extra cautious with my family. Besides, they are grazing all day and I also wondered how my 2 protein shakes and 1 very small meal was going to get me through that holiday.

Got my pre-op 3 days after Christmas, so I'm going to enjoy one more full Christmas dinner.

That was excellent thank you lol. I guess I'm afraid that I will be one of those dumbasses too haha. That is my personality. I push myself and think I'm super woman, and I am not lol. That was helpful because this type of information is so hard to find on the net because the sites are written by doctors and they say how long the recovery is but it is too general. The way they word it, I picture myself having to lie down for 2 weeks straight, and I can't do that with a bunch of little cats depending on me to be fed. Thank you.

This is such a critical issue that my team literally put it at the very front of their bariatric pre-op binder. I'm attaching their guidelines for dealing with constipation. There are no copyright marks anywhere in their document, so I'm going to assume this falls under fair-use guidelines. Sorry for all the poop emoji's! I think it was their way of trying to lighten the mood on a serious subject that people feel strange discussing. One thing you'll see over and over in this is if you're having trouble, call your team. It may feel weird to talk to your nurse about this, but constipation is one of the most common questions they get. They are very used to talking about it. For what it's worth, my surgery was a few weeks before you and I still take one colace and one peri-colace daily. BM Guide.pdf

I have chronic constipation so I take Trulance everyday, then miralax twice a day plus senna tablets at nights 3 times a weeks or else nothing will move. It really is miserable.

Hey everyone! This is Ashley. I had surgery on October 6th and had to start my pre-op diet in the beginning of June of this year... My heaviest weight is 356 lb... The day of surgery I was at 313 lb... And as of today I am at 264 lb!!! I was so thinking excited when I hit the 90 lb mark of weight loss ! Can imagine what if you like once I lose 100 !!! My goal weight is about 180 lb. Some about 85 lb away from that goal I believe ... More than halfway there just from the pre-op diet and 2 of post-op!?! It took me a while to be more comfortable with trying new foods as I was terrified of throwing up or having dumping syndrome... I had the gastric sleeve and things have been going much better than expected! I'm able to eat very healthy but lots of different types of foods which is really exciting! I even ate a sliced apple the other day which some people can't tolerate the skin and I did create! The reason I'm reaching out to y'all is because I'm dealing with chronic constipation. The only time that I can really go to the bathroom without any pain is if I take milk of magnesia... I tried to avoid it but The 2 weeks ago after realizing I hadn't gone to the bathroom in 2 and 1/2 weeks but I had no stomach pain or anything so I totally lost track of it! I had a bowel movement " naturally" If you can even call it that took two days to get out last Sunday and Monday... It was an extremely painful experience and extremely hard to the point where put it this way. I had to plunge the toilet a couple times just to be able to get it down.... Details are gross I know but this is what this page is all about getting help for our gross details! I just now took more milk of magnesia because I haven't gone since that severely constipated situation... I have been very good about eating very healthy and drinking a lot of water and getting my protein intake. I have however unfortunately not been great at taking vitamins and keeping up with them. I ordered some more vitamins today and decided to get back on track. Even before surgery I was deficient of vitamin d very severely as well as low on iron to the point of anemia. So I'm wondering if my nausea that I've been having isn't just constipation but also vitamin deficiency and if maybe that's why I'm constipated as well... I also ordered benafiber tablets to see if that helps... Do you guys have any advice on how to go better? What do you do when it's been a few days and you haven't gone? In the past? If I don't go for three or four days pre-surgery I had to get stomach cramps and pains and things like that and that's not happening this time around. Advice is welcome. There is hope if we just stick together. I love you all so much. You are like a family to me! I look forward to your responses!! Sent from my Pixel 6 using BariatricPal mobile app

everyone experiences recovery differently so you'll only know when u know. i seem to be one of the unlucky ones who had a rough time of it. BUT it was self-imposed as i didn't listen to my doc about taking it easy. LISTEN TO UR DOC!! But truth be told even though it was rough, i could probably have done it all on my own...with effort and ALOT of self-pity. The most difficult recovery to work around was the arm lift because u use ur arms the most...reaching was def challenging. so like catwoman said above, if you plan it out beforehand to keep everything you need low and easy access it can be done. for the tummy tuck standing up straight and getting up from a seated or laying position was kinda painful...but again nothing that would incapacitate you. i had no issues doing stuff due to the breast lift. unless you count me splitting my stitches open because i tried to go for a run. but that was easily avoidable...DONT RUN. in short, in my opinion it can be done. uncomfortably yes, but it can be done alone. BUT..if you could have someone either stay with you (or do regular drop ins) for at least a week, it would be so much easier on you...physically and mentally. which is good for recovery. i was a sobbing mess for a good month...i was glad i had my fam around to take care of me. but please don't let this scare you...most if not all if those i know who had PS had uneventful recoveries. i was just a dumbass who tried to do more than i should and paid for it. ...and despite it all i still have zero regrets.

Hello, how long did your stall ultimately last? My sleeve was done 11/21. 4 weeks post op on Monday. I’m down a total of 21 lbs but scale has not budged in 11 days. Any advice? How are you feeling? Have you returned to work ?

I remember feeling like I was pregnant too. Laughable when you are in your 60's. There are foods that I can not tolerate even now, 1 year out. Most fish and especially salmon seems too greasy or smelly now and it was my go to food before surgery. The smell of cooking broccoli or cauliflower makes me heave. Any meat fat would have been the first mouthful before surgery. Now the winter birds are enjoying these tasty treats. One thing that I cry over is I have lost my tolerance for spicy food. I feel like a child again, starting back at the beginning with mild spicing. Even mild tinned chilli seemed too hot this week.

I forgot most of you would be in winter at the moment. We don’t get snow here at all. I had shoulder surgery on the 1st dec. I was told 2 weeks in the sling. I wasn’t really prepared mentally for the after. my gym membership includes pool and spa. And my shoulder rehab is heated pool. As we have a family membership I am pushed by the teenagers to go nearly every day.

We recently moved to a new apartment. Guess who was up on the ladder all day installing curtain rails, hanging curtains, photos etc. I can't remember the last time I was on something that is more than 20 cm above the ground 😂. I can't use my weight as an excuse to tell my wife that I can't climb on the ladder and hang stuff anymore. Skipping meals and hard labor during the past week seems to have paid off. I lost 4 kgs and now down to 89 Kg (from 150 kg before WLS)