Looking for Negative stories! What are the Cons if any?

[Lorelei 2]

Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and experiences with me.

I hope to be able to read the shared thoughts and experiences of others as well. The more information I gather, the better.

Thus far, this is what I have gotten from this thread, or rather what I have decided at this time.

I am going to do all the leg work to get the surgery, IE: see whatever hoops I have to go through for insurance to cover the cost, gather any proof or documentation they may require, and get the ball rolling in case they make me wait 6 months etc. This way, if I decide to go through with it, I will hopefully be ready and covered and not have to wait any further.

In the meantime, I am going to try harder to lose as much weight as I can the normal way. I have one new tool, a really wonderful gym at the place where I work that is free to employees. I will take advantage of that. (which might screw me up if I Do decide I want the surgery and then bring my BMI down too low and get stuck at what you call a "stall"). No surgery, and no more weight loss, we’ve all been there I think, but I will try again.

I managed to lose 65 lbs once, took about a year, but I did it for the wrong reasons. I didn’t do it to be healthy, I did it to look better and mostly for a person I was in a relationship with. So when he cheated on me, I lost all my will and put on 15 lbs. Then, I moved across the country, only to get a diagnosis of breast cancer, so I spent a year fighting that, (and winning fortunately, still even have two breasts), during which time I put on another 25 lbs from the steroids they give you when you have chemo and lack of activity, also due to chemo and radiation.

I don’t think that having survived breast cancer constitutes a co-morbidity to the insurance companies, but it should. When I was finished with my treatments, my Oncologist very specifically stated that one of the first most important things you should do to avoid a recurrence, is to be as skinny as possible. Not just lose weight and get healthy, but to be as skinny as possible, his exact words.

This is because the fat in your body holds on to estrogen, and when you have an estrogen receptor positive cancer, it feeds the cancer if there is any left in your body. You have to take medications to prohibit the production of estrogen in your body so it is very important to lose as much fat as possible as well.

In my view, this makes being a cancer survivor (which puts you at risk for recurrence), is something that should most assuredly be considered a co-morbidity.

I hope to talk to many of you about how much weight you lost pre-surgery following the prerequisite liquid diet and how difficult that was for you.

I would expect that if you were doing it just to lose weight without the promise of your surgery at the end of two weeks, it would be much harder than doing it all by itself to lose weight. Hard to combat hunger indefinitely with no light at the end of the tunnel.

So, I'm trying to cover all of my bases. Get everything in line to have the surgery, and make sure I actually need it before I take that deep of a plunge.

I have what is considered a low BMI, 33.5. I’m 5’7” and weigh about 215 so I have less than 100 lbs to lose. I want to start by getting down to 140 and then see what my body and health are like to decide if I should go further and shoot for 120 at my height.

I will be searching the forums for more information about everything, including the liquid diet requirements and the subsequent results.

I thank you all and look forward to hearing more from you.

Best wishes and a happy healthy new year to everyone.

Lorelei