Search the Community

Am 52 and this past October I am at the three years surgiversary RNY .Yes, it can be a little of a roller coaster compared to when I was younger because of menopause and slower metabolism, but it’s doable. I find I have to cut the carbs a lot and I have stalls my lowest was 175 but i am still in the 80s . I lift a lot of weight so a few extra pounds I noticed when I start lifting weights like five pounds if I stop for a few days I noticed I weigh less . The temptation is always with certain foods once I eat them I dump or have heart burn so I don’t touch some foods but it’s a challenge and hard work nothing is easy about this journey

I am at the three week post op mark. Slowly advancing my diet. No more puréed. Now just soft foods. Thank god for grilled fish which is filling and satisfying. No weight loss in a week which I am fine with because I have reintroduced carbs and I know from the many failed Keto diets that the minute you have carbs again the weight comes back with a vengeance. I am still very full after only a few bites so I can’t eat enough protein so I am still doing a shake a day. I am down to just one of the five incisions that is still healing. The rest have closed up nicely. I am having a weird experience with friends and family. I can only eat a few bites of food and with Christmas approaching I have been going out to dinner and to parties a lot. It is such a waste of money to order a meal given restaurant portion sizes knowing that leftovers don’t qualify as soft food after they are microwaved. So instead I have been asking to split meals. I am surprised by how many people look at me like I am a monster for suggesting this. Does anyone else find that people don’t want to split a meal at a restaurant?

I haven't reached goal weight either and had some gain - 6lbs. But not giving up and getting back on the wagon and going to get it right Still happy where I am as same clothes fit with the small gain. I know I can do this and am going to work hard to get it together.

I am at 35 weeks weight loss from September surgery sometimes it times to change things up to see results. Focus on protein intake or exercise.

I disagree that its drastic for anyone with up to 100lb to lose. People have and maintain obesity for many reasons, some quite complex, which is aside from individual factors such as gender, height, age. I am quite short 100lb extra on me is massively obese, whereas, 100lb on a 6ft1 person may well be overweight or just in the early stages of obesity. What a lot of people don't realise for lighter weight overweight person 25lb or 50lb is just as hard to lose as 100lb or 150lb for those who are more overweight.

I understand as an individual who's been overweight all her life how our weight affects and restricts us physically and even mentally. I have lost out on a lot cuz of it. And only here, one can understand how it is to be stuck in that frame all our lives. Besides, even if it's done for the cosmetic reasons and wanting to look good, what's the harm in it anyways? It's your body, your life and your risk that you're willing to take for something that you deem is appropriate at this stage of your life. So let others be and go into it with a positive mindset. What is going to happen, it shall happen. May as well take the risk than live with burden (literally 😂 and figuratively) rest of your life. Good Luck to you. Hope you come outta it with flying colors. And you have this forum for the continued support even if you don't get enough from US doctors post your return.

What did your medical team say at your first check up? If they weren’t concerned by your slow loss you probably don’t need to worry too much. Remember they’ve seen it all & understand the vagaries of weight loss. We all lose at our own rate. If it is really worrying you, ensure you measure/weigh & record everything you eat & drink & have a chat with your dietician & medical team. Sometimes a small tweak can make a difference. @WildWill has a point. What I weigh at my doctors & what I weigh at home is never the same. I always weigh more at my doctors. Clothing, time of day, empty/full bladder, empty/full bowel, how much you’ve eaten or drunk, all affect the number on the scale. My doctors monitor my weight based on their records & I do it based on my own records. If they’re happy I’m happy. A loss is a loss. (Or maintaining is maintaining as in my situation now.) All the best.

I can't say that I understand it all, but thank you so much for the interesting information. I guess it makes matters a little more complicated that I don't have a thyroid (medullary thyroid cancer), which is when the weight problems began.

I just had a sleeve to RNY revision due to severe reflux and a large hiatal hernia. I had sleeve surgery at age 50. (I'm 62 now) I lost 93 lbs from my pre-surgery weight. I reached my goal and went five lbs below for a 'pad'. I stayed at or below goal for 8.5 years. I was diagnosed with arthritis in my hips, ended up on thyroid meds for a while and then Covid. Grazing and less walking put on 40 lbs. (I was NEVER a gym rat, actually I never did any formal exercise) Take advantage of the honeymoon period. Follow the rules, I highly recommend logging your food. It will help you make better choices. I stopped doing that after shoulder surgery and it was a downward spiral. I'm back to logging! This was medically needed, but since I had to do this, I hope to lose and keep off between 25 - 30 lbs. I had surgery the day after Thanksgiving, I'm down 17.5 lbs since my pre-op diet weight. Good luck!!!

What now? Now that’s the big question. Weight-wise, I’m going to find stabilization and probably put on the 5-10 bounce-back pounds. That’s fine. I’m still seeing a bariatric therapist, and I know to reach out – to friends, family, therapist, work – at signs of trouble. I know I take on too much work, and that’s a problematic pattern I’m still working on. I know I need to find and keep finding ways to truly love myself, because that’s the key to saying no, doing things for me, prioritizing myself. I am excited for where I am, and apprehensive about the next year. This journey has been magical through-and-through, but the compliments will stop, and this will be normal life again. What then? I’ll keep finding out, and I’ll live by the mottos I taught myself to believe when getting my mind in the right place: I have a right to be here. And I can forgive myself for anything. Even regain. Even falling into binge eating. Even losing my job. Even ending up single and lonely. I can forgive myself for anything, and that means I’m not scared of anything. Heck, for me it hopefully means I can face anything and deal with it before it becomes a problem. That’s the most important thing for Year 2. Love to all of you, thanks to each and every one of you for sharing your life with people like me, and keep being awesome!

There's truth in the gherlin explanation, but it's also oversimplified so maybe gives people the wrong impression. There's multiple hormones that affect hunger. Leptin is another hormone that makes you hungry - it is made by your fat cells as they lose energy. Leptin is proportional to the number of fat cells you have, not the volume of fat. Fat cells multiply as you gain weight, but they don't die just because you lose weight - they just get smaller. A normal weight person that used to be fat will be making more leptin than a normal weight person who was never fat because the person who used to be fat has more fat cells. Leptin is part of the reason why people have a "set point," or a weight that their body likes to be at that is maintained by the body by changing your hunger and metabolism. Insulin also increases your hunger in the long term. You make insulin after you eat, while you are feeling full. But if you are constantly making a lot of it, your muscle cells get resistant to insulin and have trouble getting food even if there's plenty of food in your blood already. They will feel hungry and tell you to eat more. This is why sugar is kind of addictive to people who tend towards insulin resistance. If your body isn't getting enough protein, that will make you feel hungry too, even if you are eating enough calories. Also, there's two sets of neutrons involved in hunger - your brain is one set, but your gut also has its own neural network, and scientist understand much less about how this "gut brain" works. One of my friends is a scientist in nutrition and physiology, and a member of obesity research societies. He's the one who told me about this "gut brain" stuff. Scientists in the field don't entirely understand why WLS works. One puzzle is that they've observed that insulin resistance improves right after surgery - within a day or two people will be off their diabetes meds. They know insulin resistance improves when you lose weight and when you exercise, but they don't know why there's this fast change after WLS. Another puzzle is that they've found that a few years out, WLS patients have a higher metabolism that is closer to a person that was never fat, whereas people who lost weight through diet/exercise have a much lower metabolism than a never fat person. WLS somehow resets your "set point," but they don't know how exactly. Scientists have tried to develop drugs that change these hormones like gherlin and/or leptin. "WLS in a bottle" would be much easier than actual surgery. But none of these approaches have worked yet. That's another indication that they don't fully understand how WLS works. But it seems likely that resetting your set point is a process that occurs as you lose weight. It's not just a change that occurs instantaneously when the surgery is done. It's not just that your smaller stomach makes you feel less hungry and you can't eat as much, so you lose weight. It's that the process - losing weight while spending a lot of that time not feeling hungry because your stomach feels really full - changes what your neural networks consider to be your set point, and that in turn makes you feel less hungry without your hunger increasing and metabolism dropping in the long term. If this is how it works, that would explain why the people who stick to the diet more strictly in the beginning have more success in the long term. For instance, if you eat sugar early on, that sugar is going to increase your insulin and insulin resistance and make you feel more hungry over the next week. Even though you may be eating exactly as many calories and have exactly the same stomach size as a person who is more strict about what they eat, that process won't work as well, and your set point won't get as low.

Setting a goal Look, I don’t really get the goal stuff. I had one myself – get under 100 kg/220 lbs. However, if we are to follow the science of this thing, we wake up after surgery with a new set point. Our bodies have a specific weight in mind it wants to be. We don’t know if it’s BMI 23 or BMI 33. We just know it’s lower than where we are. My recommendation would be to a) Stop comparing yourself b) Start loving yourself c) Give yourself the best chances of getting to whatever weight your body wants to be at, and if that’s BMI 33, live with it. But … but … yeah, well, listen: we all know what happens when we starve ourselves. Our bodies will win in the end and we’ll give up on the whole thing. Wouldn’t you rather be a happy BMI 33 person than someome who got to BMI 29 and then put it all back on because it wasn’t a defensible weight and you gave up? If you need to get off the internet and away from all the insane success stories you feel you’re not measuring up to … well, bye bye internet, hello enjoying your new body. Whatever size it may be.

My weight journey pre-op + for a year after the mini gastric bypass I reached my highest weight – 364 lbs – fairly close to surgery. I then lost from 364 to 344 at day of surgery. In the first month, I lost 34 lbs, and at the 60 day mark, I had lost 61 lbs. So 2 months after surgery, I was down to 283 lbs. At the 6 month mark, I was down to 234 lbs (total loss 130 lbs), and at the 12 month mark I’m at 201 lbs (total loss 163 lbs). My EWL is 88.8%, and I’m of a pretty muscular build, so for all intents and purposes, I’m done losing. More importantly, I think I look fantastic! I went from a 54” waist to wearing 32” jeans, and from a 6XL to a medium or large in men’s tops. I can see the individual parts of the shoulder muscles, there’s tricep definition, my legs look like pro soccer player legs … in a way, my fat decade was a massive bulk for the fellow weight lifters out there As for excess skin, it looks like I gave birth to quintuplets a few weeks ago, and there’s loose skin everywhere. I’m only wanting surgery on the stomach area, though. I think the rest will gradually be okay, and I don’t really need to be perfect. I’m great as I am. I’ve debated whether to include photos, but what the hell. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and if this motivates just one person to go do this for themselves, I’ll be happy. DAY BEFORE SURGERY (this is 20 lbs lower than my heaviest) ... aaand: FROM THE PAST WEEK (163 lbs lighter than my heaviest, BMI around 27.5)

My journey to weight loss surgery We all have our journeys, and I love to talk about mine. I’m not ashamed in the slightest over having a hard-to-work-with metabolism in a world that isn’t made for us. It messed me up, but here I am taking back my life. I’ll keep it fairly brief here, though: I was a chubby kid, had some years in a normal weight range, dieted all the time, yo-yo weight, started working a stressful job and eventually fell into a full-on eating disorder (BED). After receiving treatment for this, I was ready for bariatric surgery, and studied my options intensively. I initially ruled out the sleeve due to the regain rates + GERD. I then wanted RNY because of its ‘tested and verified’ legacy but landed on the MGB for the superior possibility for weight loss, higher chance of keeping the weight off, and for how easy it is to revise or reverse if the need arises later. I have not regretted my choice for a second ever since.

The surgery: what is it, how does it work, what does science say about weight loss and complications with MGB? What is it? There’s nothing ‘mini’ about the MGB. The name was given by Dr. Rutledge who invented it in 1997 to describe its simpler configuration compared to Roux-en-Y gastric bypass. Basically, the stomach is divided and a long, narrow pouch is created (a little like the sleeve), but the rest of the stomach is left in place (like with RNY). A loop of the small intestine is then connected to the pouch, and that’s it. There’s one connection point – one anastomosis – and unlike the sleeve, the food travels directly down into the intestine, as the pyloric valve is bypassed. The bypass is anywhere from 150cm – 350cm (3 to 9 feet), though recently most surgeons do 150cm to avoid malnutrition later on. Here’s a diagram: How does it work? As with all bariatric surgery, there are things we know and things we don’t know. We obviously feel full faster due to the smaller stomach, but because it’s ‘open’ in the bottom to the intestine, and this anastomosis is not especially narrow, we can usually eat pretty large amounts fairly soon after surgery. My personal experience is that I’ve only felt I ‘had no more room’ a few times, and always with minced meat, weirdly enough. The big trick is that you feel satisfied very quickly, because the food lands undigested pretty far down the intestine. It’s like the feeling after a huge Christmas dinner. Technically, I could eat more, but I feel stuffed (and satisfied). So I don’t. We have at least 3-4x the malabsorption of RNY, so there’s some calories being flushed right out. Personally, I can see when I eat a higher-fat meal that some of it goes through undigested (sorry for theTMI). How much do you lose? Unlike what people think, there are tons of studies out there documenting that weight loss is generally greater after MGB than after sleeve and RNY. Not a single study out there shows less weight loss with MGB when comparing MGB and RNY. Excess Weight Loss (EWL) ranges from mid-60s % EWL to the 80s after one year (a few studies show even higher WL, but those are generally from cohorts of fairly low-BMI study populations). All-in-all, weight loss is excellent and looks like it’s long-term durable in the studies. Especially when compared to the sleeve. Complications? For some reason, there’s a ‘feeling’ among American bariatric surgeons that MGB carries a higher risk of stomach cancer. This is not true, and it has been studied. A few patients experience bile reflux, but this is a lesser concern with the Spanish ‘anti-reflux stitch’ most MGB surgeons now use. Mine did as well, and while I suffered heavily from GERD prior to surgery, this is no longer a problem. Long-term, malnutrition is an issue, so take your vitamins. Think of vitamins as being generally a good idea for sleevers, mandatory in the beginning for RNY’ers and then see how your labs develop as the years pass, to very important for MGB, also long-term, and life-or-death for our duodenal switch friends. This reflects the malabsorption – none in sleeve, a little in RNY, a moderate-to-significant amount in MGB, and a lot in DS.

[MINI GASTRIC BYPASS THREAD – PLEASE CONSIDER YOUR SURGERY AND EXPERIENCES MAY NOT APPLY TO MINI GASTRIC BYPASS PATIENTS] Hi all BP’ers and lurkers out there; especially hi to everyone who had the mini gastric bypass (AKA the one-anastomosis gastric bypass/single-anastomosis gastric bypass/omega loop gastric bypass) It’s my surgiversary! I can’t believe it’s already been a year. But what a year it has been. Man. I wanted to share a lot of thoughts about my journey – there’s not a ton of MGB patients out there yet, and especially not in the US. I’ll admit I’ve been working on this for a while, because I want to share the good word about the MGB and contribute some of the things I simply cannot find out there. Well, now I know, at least how it’s been the first year for myself. So that’s my small contribution. Below, I’ll post the following posts individually so it’s easy to browse for anyone new: The surgery: what is it, how does it work, what does science say about weight loss and complications with MGB? My journey to weight loss surgery My weight journey for a year after the mini gastric bypass My diet and calories – stages + what does a typical day look like after a year? Exercise – what and when and how much? Alcohol and MGB What I wish they had told me prior to surgery Setting a goal Why I think you should consider the MGB What it’s like being a mini gastric bypass patient on BariatricPal – what I found useful, and why I needed a pause from participating on the forum What now? I hope you’ll find some of this enjoyable.

You’re right. I do need to trust myself. I’ve done the research, asked questions and even made sure to get a physical before the surgery AND I am traveling with a family member. I got so discouraged after speaking with her and I can’t help but think and feel that this was her intention because of how she feels about the surgery. She asked if I was doing this for cosmetic reasons. Really? 🤦🏾‍♀️ I’m tired of gaining and loosing and then gaining again. I just want a new lease on life. I want to feel good and look good. I’m going through with it regardless. I do have a lot of support but I have some people who are worried and have all these bad ideas that something is going to happen to me.

I have a PPO with Humana through my employer and they have nothing to do with weight loss surgery or programs. 🤷🏾‍♀️😏

Lisa, hang in there... if you stood on the scale at the Dr's office... it could be off a few lbs and I'm sure you were not butt naked to identify your true weight. So depending upon your clothes, shoes, jacket (it is getting colder at least where I live) these could all be throwing your numbers. The simple thing to do to determine if your scale is out of whack is to grab an object of a known weight (i.e. a 2lb dumbell) stand on the scale, get off the scale, grab the weight, stand... compare. Either way 1lb in 2 weeks... uh... unless you are doing massive weight lifting - I suggest a call to your NUT and have them go over your food intake and exercise patterns with you. Chin up... if you follow their advice... you will see weight come off.

It is only a phone call to reach out to your Surgical Team. It is literally impossible not to lose weight after a bypass unless you are just ignoring everything they are telling you to do. There is an explanation along the lines of what others have been saying here.

Rest assured that you can speak with your surgeon or the PA associated and let them know how you are feeling. For me, the pain exceeded the ability of the pain management to supress. I did end up back in the ER and was given much needed fluids and pain management via IV and then sent home with a different pain pill. I have a few friends who went through the GVS and oh they were running a marathon the next day... no pain, all was beautiful and right in the world. For me... JC, I was in pain and needed a full 2 weeks of pain medication to get me to the point where Tylenol was able to take up for mild discomfort. It does get better, each day, small gains... Take Deep Breaths and know that you have a support system and you need to discuss how you are doing with them.

Hello everyone, I have lost another 1.5 lbs since last Tuesday so I’m really happy about that. I guess it’s safe to say I am over the hump. Yesterday I didn’t eat so well, though, and I am paying for it today. My stomach hurts and I keep having to use the restroom. Very happy to be back on track this week, it has been difficult to be on a diet with family over, but at least I kept losing. I sort of wish I had the gastric bypass instead of the SADI because I see people losing all there weight in less than six months, but I think this was probably best for me for a lot of reasons and I’m thankful for having this opportunity after messing up the first time.

I am 12 days post-op! Insurance ended up approving the surgery, they just took their sweet time about it. I’m so glad that my doctors wrote extra letters and went above and beyond so that I could have the surgery safely. I have lost 13lbs since the surgery for a total of 64lbs down from my highest weight. 100-ish more to go! I’m also glad that I took short term disability and did the full 5 weeks my surgeon recommended. I didn’t honestly understand just how impacted I’d be by the surgery and it’s comforting to know that I don’t need to magically get better in time to go back to work.

A lot of employer offered insurance plans can have specific exclusions for weight loss surgery. I've had three different insurances through employers in the past two years (old job switched carriers and then came to a new job) and all of them had WLS exclusions even if medically necessary. All of my plans have been pretty good, high quality plans otherwise, but they still have the exclusion. There could be other reasons for the OP, but just wanted to note that many still don't.

I agree with the above poster - many people don't loose weight for a week or so because you can gain up to 9-10 lbs from the fluids they fill you with during surgery. Or, you may be in the "three week stall" which can happen early and last for a few weeks. Make sure you're getting all your water and protein, and hang in there!