A Long Weigh to Go!

One year ago today that I said bye-bye to 80% of my stomach! Even with landing in the hospital 2 weeks later, still the best decision I ever made. I feel better than ever, down 100 lbs, my platelets were normal last week (181k, wow!) and I actually have energy for a change.

Here's hoping to being at goal this time next year — only about 70 lbs more to go! Here's a photo to hold over until I can get Johnny to take one of me to compare before/after-style!

It seems that my stall is definitely over. Lost another 3.5lbs in the last few days, and now I am right around 219.8 lbs. That puts me under 220, and depending on Johnny's current weight, I am either darn close to weighing less than he does, or already there.

Hooray!

Haven't posted in a while because I've still been stalled right around 231 since before Christmas! That seems to be over now, though. About 2-3 weeks ago, I started to notice and see some changes, as did Johnny.

Sure enough, when I got on the scale this week I'd lost over 6lbs. I am now down in the low 220s! I also have dropped down to a size 1X on top. I had to go buy a bunch of new t-shirts because I had nothing left that fit well. It was nice to try on clothes and go "nope, I need a smaller size!"

I am having a hard time recognizing myself again. Whenever I look in the mirror, my face looks so different. I don't even remember it looking like this before I put on a bunch of weight... probably a combination of being older and slimming down vs. being in my early 20s and plumping up.

Hopefully the stall was more metabolism than any bad habit I had that I'm somehow getting around for the time being... My appetite has really dropped off the past 2 weeks, but it's not like I'm not eating enough for my sleeve or starving myself — just haven't been very hungry (which is a good thing!)

At least I am starting to lose some weight in my calves and chin. My lower legs were starting to look wider than my thighs, and it was really freaking me out. :( Now if I can just lose some of this weight around my middle... my pants are extremely baggy everywhere except at the waist/hip area, and I'd love to be able to move down a size or two so I look less schlumpy on bottom.

We shall see, I guess!

In 2 weeks, it'll be my 6-month surgiversary! I am stalling out a bit lately, but I'm still down around 243ish, which is a far cry from 298 where I was the day of surgery.

I'll be going to my husband's company Christmas party around that time, and for once I was actually kind of looking forward to shopping for it. I just got my dress today and was really pleased with how it looks. I had Johnny take some pictures, and thought it was a really good time to do a then-now picture comparison to celebrate 6 months of being sleeved. Hurray!


Before:




6 months later:

Hello! Sorry I haven't posted in a while but I have been absolutely swamped with doctor appointments, plus I was so close to reaching a major milestone! I didn't want to post until I had the super-great news so I could avoid sounding whiny that I was sooo close but not quite there. :)

I have finally lost 50lbs since surgery, putting me under 250 for the first time since I-don't-even-remember-when. I'm thinking maybe 2005, working backwards from 300 lbs in 2010 with my average 10lb a year gain.

It was right around this time last year that I began my major push to qualify for surgery and started seeing several new doctors and also landing in the hospital for the first time, so things timed out this year where I had a lot of annual appointments scheduled around the same time. I am very thankful that this year I am much healthier, happier and on a path of improvement.

It was almost impossible for me to think this time last year that I'd be doing this well, but I am really glad that I stuck with it. I was sort of clinging to this last shred of hope and was afraid that I was putting too much faith on weight loss surgery (and they tell you over and over that it's not some kind of miracle cure), but I knew that for me, with all my other health challenges, it was my one best shot at wellness. I would never suggest to anyone that weight loss surgery would make *everything better* for them, and it isn't what made everything better for me either. Having it as a goal, though, helped me make it through a grueling battery of tests, doctor's appointments, lifestyle changes and ultimately has become a very important turning point in my life -- an event right up there with going to college, getting my first real job or getting married!

So now I have lost 1/3 of the excess weight I have planned on losing. Surgery morning I was 298 and my goal weight is 150. I had roughly 150lbs to lose (daunting) and in the 4 months since I had surgery, I've gotten 33% of the way there. That's so awesome!

My surgeon set a goal to lose 50% of the weight by 6 months, which I am pretty sure I cannot reach since that would mean I've got about 2 months to lose 25 lbs -- a bit ambitious given my average weekly weight loss of about 2lbs. I have been running 3 times a week and doing strength training/aerobic type exercises on the off days in between running, but I haven't been journaling my food (which I need to get back to doing.) I will definitely be putting in more of an effort right now, while feelings are high, so I can have good habits in place when the honeymoon period of easy post-op weight loss is over and things get a bit more challenging.

The good news is that running has gotten much easier now that a lot of the excess flab has shrunk away. My skin seems to be contracting a little slower than the flab but so far I haven't had too much issue with really loose skin. My arms do have that weird bat-wing look to them that you see in photos of post-op weight loss patients and celebrities, but I am pretty confident that my skin is elastic enough to shrink up eventually -- it is just lagging behind the fat deposits by a couple of weeks, it seems.

Other good medical news is that since my platelet counts have been so consistently in the normal range since August, I asked my hematologist to take a break from the weekly N-plate injections. There was a very real chance that my platelets would crash back down lower than before I started N-plate in the 2 weeks after stopping the injections, but they were at 141k last Wednesday, 2 weeks after my last shot. 140k is the lower end of the normal range. N-plate is supposed to only be used to help keep counts above 50k, not to make you have normal counts, so as long as nothing has drastically changed when I go in for my 4-week CBC next Wednesday, I think I am going to permanently stop getting the shots.

This is a good development not only because it'll save me from weekly doctor visits, but also because I hope to be returning to work soon. It would be very difficult to have a weekly 1-hour-plus-travel-time chunk in the middle of the week every week, especially at a new job! I had an interview yesterday with a company where one of my former co-workers (and a very good friend!) just started. The company sounds absolutely amazing -- they have won all kinds of awards for best place to work in Hampton Roads, psychologically healthy workplace, etc etc. which would be a fantastic change from my last job, to put it mildly. They seemed very interested in finding a position for me and I had nothing but good impressions and positive vibes from the place. I hope that something opens up there sooner rather than later, because I really am excited about the prospect of working there!

Well, I think that is all the news since my last update. Oh! I also just received some other lab test results back. I was hoping that my cholesterol and triglycerides would be normal, but they are still a little high. Just slightly above the normal range -- better, but not in the normal range like I was hoping. Yet another good reason to pay closer attention to my food journaling, I guess. Gives me another milestone to look forward too, as well!

Stall is definitely over in a big way. I have lost over 7 lbs in the last 9 days (which is incredible since it was during my ah, favorite time of the month, if you will.)

This puts me just a hair into the 250-range. I am right about 259.5. I cannot even remember the last time I was below 265, let alone in the 250s.

The change was very dramatic and obvious, too. I felt much lighter all of a sudden last week and maybe 2 days later I was walking around in a t-shirt and "stretch" pants that no longer stretch on me and my husband went "Ok, WOW, you look a whole lot thinner all of a sudden. Look at you! Wow!"

I have been really terrible about eating (period week puts me into an insane meat-then-sweets cycle where I am hungry all the time... it was much worse last month and the month before, but still a very noticeable change in my appetite this past week) and I haven't exercised in over a week (although I did go out shopping for hours almost every single day instead, which is a lot of activity -- for me, anyway)

I had a job interview last Thursday, so I was studying, shopping and preparing for it most of last week, and then winding down from it (it was a 3 hour marathon of speaking with over a dozen people, so it was kind of a lot for me to process and recover from.)

No idea if I will even be offered the job, sadly. The department doesn't seem to have a clear person in charge of this position, nor do they seem to know exactly what kind of person they want, or what sort of skills they want that person to have. Kind of lame on their part, since I went out and spent at least $200 on clothes and shoes to look the part -- nothing I had fit anymore except a pair of black dress pants which were formerly way too tight on me. Oh well, if nothing comes of it, at least it was good practice on dressing up, putting on makeup (gasp!) and getting out there to shake some hands and talk shop or whatever.

My goals for this week are to get back to exercising (just need to go do it!) and to get back on a good protein diet (thankfully the relative mildness of my period-week-appetite has not left me with any intense carb cravings this time, so it's just a matter of making the smart choices like having meat instead of the easy choices like having potato chips.) :)

My surgeon wants me to be around 250 when my next appointment with him comes around, so I really need to step it up. I might need to go buy some tight spandex running shorts or something so I can try my hand at jogging again, without all the pain of flab bouncing around -- it is surprising how hindering loose flabby bits can be when you are already a fairly poor jogger like me. :P

I had my most recent follow-up appointment on Monday, and it wound up timing out rather nicely. I had been stalled at 270 for almost a full month, so I was looking forward to talking to my surgeon about it to see if I was doing something wrong.

I have read over and over about weight loss stalls and plateaus but never lost enough weight on any diet to experience a true stall. So even though I was quite educated about it, it still was very surprising and frustrating for me. Normally (as in, pre-op) my weight would fluctuate up and down but generally trend upwards --- I'd be "dieting" and get down 3-4 lbs and then it'd go right back up. And then up another 1-2 lbs. Then back down 3-4 lbs but still leaving me 1-2 lbs heavier than my most recent low!

When I hit 270, I was ecstatic. Then it went down to 269.5. I was so jazzed about being in the 260s. And then it went back up to 270. And stayed there. And stayed there. And then went up to 271. I was practically sick at the thought of regaining weight, because in the back of my mind it recalled all those yo-yo'ing failures from before. Logically I knew I was due for a stall (lots of people stall somewhere between 3 weeks out and 2 months out, so I was right on track to stall) but the daily reality of seeing my weight not budge after weeks of it just melting off was rough.

Did I mention this all started 2 weeks before my 30th birthday? And that I had to go to DMV and get my license renewed & my picture taken? Ughh, I was hoping to be 250 (probably a bit ambitious for a 2-month-out goal, but I had been on track for it.) I was a bit bummed that I wasn't magically awesome-looking but I also knew that realistically I was tons better off this birthday than any birthday before and I was really happy that I could face down the dreaded 3-0 lighter and healthier than I was last year. Just that tiny irrational part of your mind that comes up with impossible wishes for genies and just *knows* you'll hit the lottery if you play tonight was let down. :)

A true weight loss stall for someone who is losing rapidly is really more of a safety valve than something you are doing wrong. Your body is starting to get stressed from losing fat, water & lean muscle as you happily shed your pounds. Eventually your body decides to stop losing weight simply so it can have some time to rearrange and stabilize without you dying from shock (real emergency-situation type shock, not "oh no, i'm still fat!"-type shock) because all your body's processes are thrown out of whack. So you wind up stuck for a few weeks at pretty much the exact same weight as it adjusts how much water it holds onto, levels of hormones and all that.

After reading up on stalls and getting re-educated about why they occur, I decided to stop weighing and to focus on the basics - protein protein protein, trying to up my fluid intake, cutting down on all carbs and eliminating bad carbs, starting strength training to tone up and rev my metabolism by developing muscles, and most importantly, keeping a positive attitude and trying not to freak out.

Protein is very important (especially for WLS patients and anyone losing weight quickly) because it keeps your body from burning lean muscle (and other bad stuff from happening, like your hair falling out.)

Getting plenty of water and/or non-calorie fluids is important so you can keep flushing your system as the body burns fat and the stuff absorbed in that fat & the wastes of the fat-burning process enter your bloodstream. It also helps your body shift gears downward to your new weight by providing plenty of water to do whatever it needs to do.

Cutting down carbs is important because, especially for someone like me with insulin resistance, carbs = too easy energy = burning carbs not fat = blood sugar spikes = hunger (usually for more carbs) = rinse & repeat until I am way over my calorie goals. I focus on eliminating bad carbs (refined sugar & flour) and I also try very hard to just avoid carb-only foods altogether (rice, bread, pasta, etc.) I do keep some sugar-free cookies in the house and sometimes will have frozen yogurt or no-sugar added ice cream, but I try very hard to make having those things the exception rather than the rule. When I do have carbs, for example if I make rice for dinner, I put protein on my plate first and it takes up most of the plate, then a little bit of vegetables, then a very little bit of rice -- and I make sure to eat 3 bites of protein for every 1 bite of vegetable and only have a bit of the rice. If I'm getting full, I give preference to finishing off the protein, then vegetables and lastly the rice -- but usually Johnny gets to finish it off for me. I still plate up too much food but I at least try not to take too much of whatever carb there is -- if I'm going to overeat, I want to overeat on protein!

Strength training was the most frustrating but the most rewarding. My basic thought was 1) I needed to exercise more anyway, 2) I need to start toning to fill in some of the sagginess where fat was and now there's nothing and 3) more muscles means you burn more calories even when you're sitting around on your butt (incredibly defined and rock hard that it may be.)

The strength training started out well -- I found that Netflix has quite a few exercise videos available to Watch Instantly online, so I added a bunch of pilates, 10-minute workout videos and boot camp-type videos to my queue and fished out my old set of dumbells. I started with pilates and got all of 2 minutes into it before I turned it off -- unfortunately I am way too heavy and out of shape to contort and lift my appendages in those ways. Ouch. I will look forward to the day when I am not too heavy to use my own limbs like that.

I searched for and found a much more easy & basic workout (10 Minute Solution - Target Toning for Beginners) and started out with a thigh workout and an arm workout. "I can actually do this!" I wheezed as I dutifully clomped my way through 20 minutes of lunges and curls and even pushups (girl pushups, but still!) Aaaaaaand then I woke up the next morning and couldn't walk. FOR 5 DAYS! I was cringing and shuffling and clawing myself out of chairs for DAYS! It was ridiculous, but I did learn something very useful. There is a name for what I experienced and it is DOMS, or delayed onset muscle soreness. While it is rather brutal to go through, it is normal and it means your muscles are going to be better able to handle that kind of activity once you heal up. I'd been through that kind of severe terrible stiffness and pain before and had sort of assumed it just meant that I was so horrifically out of shape that I needed to find something easier to do -- turns out that I just needed to bear the initial pain and try the workout again once I was able to and the DOMS would be much less intense and shorter in duration and eventually go away.

It was pretty disheartening to be stalled, turning 30, unable to walk or sit without terrible pain & stiffness AND unable to exercise because I'd exceeded my laughably low athletic tolerance. But hey, at least I knew that the pain was signaling that my muscles were rebuilding themselves better and stronger.

As soon as I was able, I did the abs workout and the arm workout again. Then once my legs were sufficiently healed I did the buns workout and thigh workout again -- sure enough, even though I did get sore again it was nowhere near as bad as the first time. Wooo!

I weighed myself one random morning and found that I was still stuck right at 270.5. LAME!

I went ahead to DMV and got my new license, horrible picture and all. My old license had my weight at 265 and I figured that was close enough to my current weight that I wasn't going to change it. My picture looked pretty bad -- I think I actually look worse than I did when I really was 265 because my chin looks a bit deflated and wattle-y from the rapid loss. Meh. Hardly anybody is going to see it anyway. I have vowed to go back to DMV and retake my photo & update my weight once I am to goal, even though it is a hellhole full of rude state employees. Not exactly a great way to plan celebrating reaching goal, but there are just some things in this world that must be righted some day.

Then I let myself go a bit crazy for my birthday weekend with cake, some fast food (in WAY smaller quantities than I used to eat) and not much tracking of calories. Some people say a good way to try to bust out of a stall is to actually eat a bit MORE calories than you normally do, so the body stops thinking "ohmigod, I'm starrrrrrving!" and stops trying to hold onto every pound. But in the end I definitely overstretched the concept and paid for it with 2 days terrible heartburn and some scary-strong carb hunger pangs for days afterward -- I doubt I'll ever loosen up that much again, lesson learned there! I hardly ever get heartburn, and when I do get it, I am miserable -- I couldn't sleep for the burning! Blech!

So after my birthday, I had another week to go before seeing my surgeon again. I was still stuck at about 272 (aaaaaaack! bad birthday cake, BAD!) so I started to fret about getting lectured about my abysmal progress. I stuck with the workouts, which didn't cause more than a bit of stiffness from about 24-36 hours after working out anymore. I got back on track with my eating, losing the carb cravings by doing 2 days of liquids-only and a few more days of high protein & not much else. I didn't weigh myself at all. I figured if I was going to be stalled, at least I'd have genuine surprise going for me when I faced my surgeon and I still hadn't budged.

God I dreaded getting on that big digital scale at the doctor's office. I was telling the nurse how I hadn't weighed in over a week because I'd been stalled and it was just depressing me, and she was all "Oh good for you, that's the way to do it!" and then BEEP BEEP, the number came up and I was 268.5 fully dressed. I was like "YAY YAY YAY!" because I knew that meant I had to be at least 266 on my scale at home (I usually weigh sans vetements *cough*... mostly to take away the excuse of "oh i'm wearing heavier pajamas than yesterday!")

So it looks like my first real stall is over. I'd like to think that what I was doing helped break it, although in the end it might just have been the threat of facing my surgeon that finally scared my body into shedding again. I swear whenever I go to a doctor about an ailment, it miraculously clears up the day before seeing them. Oh well, whatever it was, I'm back in the game again and at least I've gained some good habits (and learned some valuable lessons about buttercream-induced heartburn) along the way.

I decided to pick up some soy milk on my last grocery run since a lot of post-op WLS people swear by it. Some people become lactose intolerant after having surgery so soy is all they can drink -- luckily I am not one of them. I have tried soy milk before but always switched back to milk, but my tastes have changed a good deal after surgery so I figured, "Why not"?

I got a half gallon of Silk Vanilla Light, to be specific, and I have to say that it really is way better for making my protein shakes than skim milk. Maybe it's the vanilla flavor or maybe it's just me, but my chocolate protein powder mixed with vanilla Silk is just *really* tasty! I had it for 3-4 days in a row and then had a regular milk protein shake and I was like, "blugh!"

I highly recommend anyone who is having a hard time with protein shakes to try mixing them with soy or vanilla soy to see if that helps. I really like my protein powder (Optimum Nutrition Gold Standard 100% Whey in Double Rich Chocolate flavor) but I was still getting a bit tired of it until trying it with vanilla Silk. I also like that there's a few grams less carbs than skim milk -- even though it is sweetened, I haven't noticed that it makes my blood sugar spike at all.

I haven't tried drinking it on its own or cooking with it, and I'm not sure if Johnny would like it for his occasional bowl of cereal, but I definitely think I'll be keeping soy milk in the fridge from now on. I look forward to using it to make ice cream soon -- I am pretty sure I'm getting an ice cream maker for my birthday, so I'll be posting the results of my low fat, low carb homemade ice cream adventures soon!

Well, today I go back to the surgeon for another post-op checkup. It's been 2 weeks since I last saw him and I'm down another 8 lbs or so. Not as dramatic as my first 2 weeks' weight loss, but considering that I've been through a lot in the last 2 weeks, I'm not going to complain!

You may recall from my last post that I was expecting bad news when I went to my hematologist on Wednesday (June 30th), because I wasn't feeling great. I expected my counts to be pretty low. Well, i was right to some extent -- they were so low that they sent me to the ER and I spent 6 days in the hospital. I didn't know it when I left the house, but I had a fever of over 101 and my white blood count was almost 0. My platelets also crashed back down from 315 to 33.

They spent the first few days working to get rid of the fever and they had me on an ultra-broad spectrum antibiotic, since we couldn't figure out what kind of infection I had. They did chest x-rays, abdominal ultrasound, a chest CT scan and dozens of blood cultures and blood tests but nobody ever came up with a specific diagnosis for what kind of infection I had. I didn't have any symptoms other than a fever and no white blood cells. I also got a few injections of Neupogen, which is an injection that stimulates your bone marrow to make white blood cells (similar to how my N-plate injection stimulated my bone marrow to make platelets.) After the fever went away and they were waiting on blood test results, they got more concerned about my platelets. I didn't have my weekly N-plate injection because my hematologist didn't want to give it to me when I was that ill, so that made my platelets go down even more (one of the reasons I have to get the injection weekly on the same day is because when you stop the injections, your counts will go down lower than when you started usually.) I couldn't get N-plate in the hospital because it would have worked against the Neupogen injections, so my hematologist did something different.

She gave me a round of IVIG treatment, which is basically like 3 liters of the antibodies extracted from thousands of blood donors' blood and suppresses the autoimmune response in ITP patients like me, making my body stop destroying its own platelets for a while. It is supposed to last about 2-3 weeks, so I'll be going back to the hematologist next week to see if I should restart treatment for my platelets. It took forever to infuse that much medicine into me, something like 18 hours. But it had its intended effect and my platelets rose up to the 180s within two days and should stay at a decent level long enough for us to decide what to do next.

It was rough being in the hospital for that long, especially with no clear answer as to what kicked everything off. Thankfully my surgery seemed to be fully healed with no complications and wasn't the specific cause of all this. I've got no doubt that the stress it placed on my body probably had something to do with things spiraling out of control a bit, but my stomach held up just fine and all my incisions are healing up without any infection or even pain anymore.

Eating hospital food (even if it was "mechanically ground") didn't quite fit in with my surgeon's guidelines for eating pureed and mushy foods, so I struggled to get in enough protein and couldn't avoid sugar for that week. I have been trying to work on it since being home, but now I get to be advanced to a normal diet today and things should ease up considerably.

I'm trying to get back into the routine of cooking, exercising and doing chores around the house again now that I'm just about fully healed.  I am trying to avoid going out to the store and being exposed to any potentially sick people because I'm a bit concerned about falling ill again. Since I don't know what happened this last time, I am not sure if I caught something at the doctor's, at the grocery store, from Johnny or something else entirely. I just want to avoid getting sick until I can talk to my hematologist again in a few weeks and see if any of the blood tests that hadn't come back by the time I was released from the hospital turned up any new info at all.

I am focusing my energy on using the treadmill, going swimming and tracking my calories. I've been having some head hunger issues which might have been kicked off by all the sugary hospital food (I'd gone weeks on all sugar-free stuff, so all the juice, pudding, ice cream and other standard hospital fare was way too sugary for me to handle now!) Hopefully I can kick that again by sticking to my sugar-free and no-sugar-added staples whenever I get a craving for something sweet. I am still having some pretty intense cravings for protein, but now that I can eat cheese, fish, eggs and soon pretty much anything, I haven't really found those to be too troublesome -- in fact, they keep me on track to meet my 90g of protein-a-day goal and steer me away from eating sweets or carbs since my stomach just doesn't have room for both!