weightloss extravaganza!
 

hey so. yeah. i'm having bariatric surgery next week. i weigh a lot. probably more than the number that just came into your mind.

today i start the pre-op diet. i get to have 3 protein shakes and clear liquids (i got broth and sugar free popsicles). so far i'm ok. this until tuesday, where it's just clear liquids. and then surgery wednesday.

i got final clearance today from my doctor.

i would enjoy if other people posted also but i really just want a place to bitch when i get hungry

Go for it, reprise! It's gonna be tough, but you are tough, so I'm sure you'll make to the other side.

How serious is the surgery? Will you have general anesthesia?

yes, it's general anesthesia. it is probably going to be laproscopic, but if they are unable to do it they will do it uh, non-laproscopically. it's serious in that it's major surgery, but you leave after one night and i can go back to work in 2 weeks. some people feel like they can go back in just a few days, even. but i mean i'm going to take off of course.

basically they cut out 75-85% of your stomach. this makes it where you can't eat as much but also removes most of the cells that make hunger causing hormones, so you're not hungry either. not for a while, anyway.

i'm probably going to lose 75-100lbs in 6 months. and about 120-150+ within a year.

we believe in you!!

Wait, you mean that you've got to eat nothing but the meal-replacement shakes and clear liquids for that time period?

I would die, haha

ugh i hate coming out of general anesthesia. it's the worst. :(

i had a friend who underwent a similar procedure. at first he had a rough time. he kept eating way more than he could handle and that would make him get sick. but eventually he adjusted, and yeah, lost a TON of weight super fast.

good luck!

I have two friends who went through this. One has lost 200lbs since October and he is a very tall man so it kinda makes sense he lost that much, but he wasn't prepared for how quick it would be.. he looks so different it's insane.

Good luck. They're both so much happier now that they're healthier. And even anyone gives you shit for it, fuck em!

Me too. Why can't I stay under anesthesia forever?

my cousin had this done recently cause she was pushing 500 pounds. before the surgery i saw her at my parents' and she couldn't even sit down. she was standing behind the couch with her stomach resting over the back of it.

she's lost 150 pounds but lots of loose skin. she's gonna go back to mexico to have it removed (mexico is where she went for the procedure cause it's much cheaper and just as safe)

i overdosed once (total accident) and apparently they had to use defibrillators on me on the side of the road and again at the hospital. this happened to be the only time in my life i spent big bucks on a bra at 40 smackers and the medics cut the damn thing off of me. same goes for my pants. i think everything i was wearing got taken off in an expedient fashion.

after i woke up, remembered how shitty my life was, and then saw the bill, i was soooooo upset i didn't just die. /snap

never paid that bill either since i never asked to be saved. ah youth!

GOOD LUCK, ERRCA.

I'm happy for you, everyone I know who's undergone weight loss surgery has found it pretty life changing. :) Good luck

good luck indeed! :) you'll be fine though!

Are they going to teach you better eating habits or put you on a diet plan post-surgery??

Learning how to eat is a huuuuge factor in staying healthy. I believe in you!:)

You're the other half of me.
Soothe and heal.

post/av ^

yep, that's it. and for a week after surgery also. so far i'm alright.

i'd consider going to mexico for sure if i didn't have decent insurance. i know i'll have a lot of loose skin but i'll live with it if i have to. i'm not quite as big as your cousin but yeah life's getting fucking rough, my body hurts all the time, i've developed nerve pain and stuff recently. and arthritis or something on the top of my foot. hurts like hell after i work.

yes, for a long time you only basically eat protein since you can barely eat anything (so you don't lose too much muscle mass)

eventually you can eat sorta-normally but never like i could now. at that point i'll be on a diet plan of some sort (prob low calorie/lowish carb, but they don't make everyone have the same one) and hopefully i'll be exercising and all that.

thanks for all the believing in me :) just now starting to get hungry... had like 10 popsicles today and i have one more shake i can have. might have some broth. i havent eaten in about 24 hours at this point, not too bad

damn, since october. that's insane. that's pretty much what i want to lose overall, maybe like 230. i think by the end of the year i'll be in the 200s somewhere at least (total weight not weight lost)

i had a hungry few hour last night but mostly i'm fine. i do have a headache but otherwise ok. day 2.

on what day is the surgery? do you have to go in to work now, while you are fasting before surgery?

its april 3, next wednesday. and yes i work at the store from fri-sun

are you worried at all about being dizzy and stuff? or will the protein shakes be sufficient to keep you on your feet?

seeing progress, no matter how small, is one of the best feelings; you see it and you crave more. i am beyond super excited for you. you are obviously going to have access to experts but if you have any random question or whatever, or you're feeling overwhelmed by all the misinformation out there, i am here for ya. (but i don't know anything that research couldn't tell you; i just like talking about health/exercise related stuff.)

Good luck with the surgery. A family member of mine had this done and it had a dramatic impact on her weight, health, and happiness. I wish you the same outcome.

yes i am worried a little. all i've had to do is sit on my ass so far. we'll see i guess.

it's funny just how much FOOD is bombarded at us everywhere. fucking emails, ads, wherever i drive there's restaurants, all kinds of shit just food food food

Even though we currently only seem to use medical interventions for more serious cases in which weight loss is necessary, I wonder if in the future, we'll start looking at these procedures as appropriate for even more moderate cases.

It just seems like despite the whole motivation/self help industry that tells us how we can just "change our lives" if we do XYZ, actual research into psychology reveals just how difficult it is to do that. Most people who try to diet and exercise fail to lose weight or gain it back. All the internet articles about how people did it, so we can do it to, are probably an example of survivor bias: they were all written by the minority of people who were successful.

So many things affect our willpower and motivation, from pre-frontal cortex metabolism, to hormones, to upbringing. There's even some research that says that your gut flora and intestinal microbiome has effects on your behaviour and appetite. It's really a gargantuan effort to act against those things. But physical interventions, like altering the hormones that affect hunger, or decreasing the maximum size of the stomach, can give people a fighting chance. Maybe in the future, medical interventions along these lines will be suggested even for people who only need to lose twenty pounds.

People are much more likely to be successful when we put them in circumstances that facilitate that success. Even something like getting people to recycle, that behavioural change doesn't happen just through PSAs telling people how important it is to do so. It happens when we make recycling easy and convenient for them to do, so that doing it expends little cognitive and physical energy.

Maybe we gotta work on some Skinner-esque Walden world where we manipulate the environment so that the chances of individual human success are maximized.

I wish there were more medical options for moderate weight loss, the yo-yo life gets old af. I have probably every clothing size by now.

god i hope they at least refer to a nutritionist first before going through such a radical procedure.
there are many aspects to one's relationship with food that can be addressed through therapy.

best wishes...I'm excited for you, to think of the changes this might bring to your life. Medication side effects have robbed you of a lot in recent years but the meds are so necessary...this seems like a very practical solution. will be thinking of you, over the coming weeks!

I hate this repeated statistic about how many people gain back weight or fail at dieting. (I believe the most repeated is 95% of people gain it back within 5 years.) It's because people think they can diet for a month or two or even 6 months, then go back to eating like they did before.
A diet is a change of lifestyle. We can talk about how hard it is to make lifestyle changes or keep lifestyle changes but it is absolutely possible for more people than the internet would have one believe.

Slow/fast metabolism, while not a myth, is wildly misunderstood and blamed for much more than it should be. Same with "genetics" and weight. The info has been so diluted over the decades and obviously is not helped with the companies selling weight loss "quick fixes".
I personally feel that shrinking your stomach or any kind of physically interrupting changes like that still don't address the root of the issue which is overeating, whether it be because of emotional issues or boredom or what have you.

This is a nice idea; I'd be up to do some thought exercises about it. However, people aren't overeating or eating unhealthily because they aren't in the circumstances to. Sure, food deserts exist but I'd accept that if it was just poor people who were overweight.
The US is super food-centric. We use food as an identity. Overeating is often seen as normal, down to the casual jokes made about it ("I want abs but I want a Double cheeseburger more yuk yuk yuk", as if u can't eat your double cheeseburger in moderation). Even a whiff of trying to get the population to eat to their own benefit is ridiculed as "muh freedumz".

Erica, I know you Reddit, and I would encourage you to subscribe to r/fatlogic and r/askfatlogic plus maybe even r/loseit.

Those three combined have really really helped me when I've been discouraged or questioning or just need some stress relief. They address a lot of common misconceptions about weight loss and the struggle/journey.

A lot of fat positive stuff online encourages diet myths, defeatism, and pseudoscience. I don't want to see you get too discouraged!!

I actually agree with this wholeheartedly. Most people's metabolisms, when weight is controlled for, are within a couple hundred calories of each other. People with "fast" or "slow" metabolisms are very rare. It's hard to conduct studies where we can precisely measure how much people are eating, because people suck at estimating their own caloric intake, but the most well-controlled studies that are based on experimenter measures of intake rather than self-reports tend to show that people's weights are based on how much they eat, not on different metabolisms. People who say "I don't eat a lot, but still keep on weight" or "I eat a lot, but can't put on weight" are mostly just poorly estimating how much they really eat. Maybe like 1% of people actually have a glandular problem that significantly affects their weight. For the rest of us, it's calories in, calories out.

However, I think that genetics still play a role, just not in metabolism. Rather, I think it plays a role in appetite. Some people just feel the impulse to eat more than other people do, so resisting cravings is much harder for them. This is just my hypothesis, I haven't done a ton of research into it. But for some people I know, losing weight wasn't even difficult. They just snapped their fingers, said "I'll start eating less," and did it. Eating more than they should was more due to them not really making their diet a priority, or not paying attention, than feeling the compulsive need to eat. Other people, they try to eat less, and they just can't stop thinking about food 24/7. They start having dreams about food. I think these people are facing more of an uphill battle than the others.

Yeah, a lot of fat-positive stuff is literally insane, essentially on par with denialism of the link between smoking and cancer, or climate-change denialism. The difference is that it seems to be a rare form of pseudoscience and denialism that infects the left more so than the right.

I'm all for "fat acceptance" if we simply mean by that not discriminating against larger people, and treating them with dignity. A lot of research shows that there's rampant weightism in society. People often unconsciously associate negative behavioural traits with being larger. Larger people have more trouble getting jobs even when physicality is irrelevant to the performance of those jobs. One study even showed that larger women are often given less financial assistance than thinner women are from their parents (for some reason, this relationship wasn't found for larger men).

But if by "fat acceptance," we mean the conspiracy theory that there is no link between size and health, and that the medical community is just lying about it having negative health effects because they are biased and mean, and even that intentional weight loss is bad because making the decision for yourself to lose weight somehow marginalizes other larger people, that stuff drives me crazy.

Also, didn't want to seem.combative by quoting you haha. It just reminded me of a self righteous rant I wanted to go off on.

And upon reading what you're putting down, we definitely agree w each other.

good luck, reprise! I have family members that have had the surgery and had great results.

I absolutely agree that it's not addressing the root of the issue. However, it fundamentally changes your relationship with food and basically gives you a period of 6-12 months to 1) lose weight basically no matter what and 2) break bad habits thay exist out of laziness/complacency (as opposed to actual disorded eating in itself like binging or whatever) 3) figure out how to improve that relationship.

Yeah, I read r/fatlogic sometimes. Believe me, I'm not a healthy at any size etc person at all. I know I'm fat, and I know it's bad for me. I do have hypothyroidism and I did gain most of my weight after being on psych medications, and those things don't help. But the problem is just that I eat unhealthy things and eat too much. I have to learn how to change those things, and this will help. It's like a hoarder or something getting a fresh new place to live in where they have a free maid for 6 months. Will it go to shit again if they don't address their mental illness and issues? Sure. Does it have to ever get that bad again? Nope

Do you think this procedure will mentally help you? Obv your brain is your brain and meds help but is your view of your body yet another tax on your mental state? Will this procedure be getting a hurdle out of your way?

I don't even think I worded what I wanted to say very well. For a reader I sure can be at a loss for articulation.