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Hey everyone so it’s day 3 of my new year, new me challenge and it almost didn’t happen.

Today was one of those days where I got up early did laundry, ate a little too much for breakfast and by too much I mean a bite too much, and popped in a Leslie Sansone dvd.  10 min in my ass was sitting on the couch watching these smiley sweaty people squat for the millionth time.  Then my brain said get up, stop being lazy af and move.  So I finished the workout but by the time we got to mat work I wanted to throw one of Bella’s toys at the tv and tell Leslie to shut the f**ck up I like being fat and lazy!!!!  Ok I’ve never liked being fat, but I was ok with lazy.

I can proudly say with much reluctance that day 3 was accomplished and now I can’t walk….happy reading y’all until next time.

Well folks I wasn’t lying when I said I was serious about my exercise goals.  It’s only day 2, but 2 days in a row of exercise hell that’s more than I’ve done in years! 😜. You know I’m serious when I do something 2 days in a row while 🤢😷🤧.  I have mom to thank for bringing illness with her when she came to visit right before Christmas, and since then I’ve been fighting a cold, but managing to keep true to what I’ve set out to do.  I figure maybe I can sweat away the cold and cough.

I should also add that I do have my mother to thank for introducing me to the exercise dvds I am currently using.  She loves to walk, and I do remember quite a long time ago my mother popping in a dvd and power walking in the living room when the weather was nasty.  She also did flash dance aerobics in the family room but that’s another story for another time.

So yes my Leslie Sansone walking dvds are fabulous highly recommended for lazy exercisers like myself who are too cheap and too self conscious to go to the gym.  She throws in some strength training plus she has a few circut workouts which have kept me so far from being bored. Yesterday I did the entire circut dvd an hour of upper body, lower body, and cardio.  Today I just did a 30 min cardio power walk.  My legs are still on fire, I had snot dripping out of my nose and I thought my head was going to explode but I did it anyway.

I’m going to try to write a little something each day to let you all know how it’s going.  Happy reading!

 

For those of you who know me I recently shared this photo I created on Facebook.  The image on the left is me about 2 years ago.  The middle picture is this past October and the picture on the right is just a few weeks ago.  I saw this and just went 😱!  So my starting weight last March was 290 lbs and now I am 207 lbs, which is a weight loss of 83 lbs.  Crazy right???!!!

This post may go all over the place because I am currently watching My 600lbs Life and this family is cooking fried chicken and french fries for their 600 plus pound father.  I don’t think families realize how much, even if it’s not food, they can contribute to and overweight relatives issues.  A lot of times they just enable the individual to be the way they are, which sounds like it’s fun but when you’re obese you’re a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.  You’re literally slowly dying in this shell of fat.  It hurts when a person you love gives you a wake up call and tells you like it is, but I’m thankful that things said opened my eyes to what I never wanted to be.

That being said we are going in to a new year and that always comes with new years resolutions that for many of us don’t last beyond the first week of January.  However mine need to last beyond that and they need to be realistic.  I am already slightly disappointed that I am 9 months out and still not under 200lbs.  I’ve decided I don’t need a gym to get the exercise I need, I just need to be disciplined and pop my exercise dvds into the dvd player.  That should be the easiest thing I do all day.  I actually wrote down which workouts I will do each day.  The challenge is mixing it up so I don’t get bored and making sure I’m doing some kind of exercise every day including the days I work.  My work days will be a challenge because I already get up super early to get to work with the hour drive I have.  This may sound crazy, but my unit is not always that busy so during a break or the slow periods I found my exercise woman on YouTube I may be able to squeeze something in while I’m at work.  I’ve also been using the stairs and that’s way more than I ever did before.

So my New Years resolutions are honestly the same as they’ve been every year, except I feel like now they are realistic and attainable.  Since I’ve already lost a small child in weight the last 60lbs should be nothing.

Happy reading and have a safe, happy and healthy New Year!

Happy holidays everyone!!! Hope the season finds you all well.  I am 9 months post gastric sleeve now and down a whopping 83 pounds, which honestly I still can’t believe.  This last month has not been easy though.  I spent several weeks stuck at the same weight getting very discouraged wondering what I needed to do to break this stall.  I increased my activity, water and protein intake and finally I’ve dropped a couple more pounds.  I am more than halfway to my final weight goal of 140 pounds, but of course with the holidays temptation is everywhere.

Some of what has taken place this holiday season has been fabulous.  I attended a work Christmas party in a dress I never would thought about wearing a couple of years ago.  I gotta say I rocked that dress!  I’ve discovered that the advice they give you on not drinking alcohol is for good reason; mainly because my one drink acted like 3 in my body.  So yeah no more drinking for this girl–good thing I had a designated driver.  The other thing that has occurred a few times may have been dumping syndrome, may have been something else still haven’t seen the doc yet to ask.  I’ve had a few spells where I feel super sick after eating.  I haven’t precisely pinpointed what it could be that causes me to feel so awful.  My symptoms:  hot flash followed by cramping and nausea sometimes diarrhea, then chills.  My skin also flushes then pails and after this is all over I feel like a Mac truck hit me.  It’s awful!  So it could be dumping syndrome, could be too much fat or sugar intake, still not sure.  I don’t have a doc appointment for a few weeks yet so I will make it a point to ask then.

With that being said let’s talk about temptation and the holiday season, it sucks big time!  Everywhere I look there is some kind of tempting food, and most of my fat may have gone away but my sweet tooth hasn’t.  I’ve tried not to go too crazy and just have little bits of things.  To be honest the times I’ve gotten sick I definitely think I went overboard on the sugary fatty foods.  No one, not even me, is perfect on this journey.

Hmmm, what else has happened between now and the last time I’ve blogged.  I received Christmas presents from my mother from normal stores in normal sizes that actually fit.  This is huge!  This hasn’t happened in years, plus my mother actually said they looked nice on me, which also hasn’t happened in years.  I’m still struggling with disciplining myself to exercise routinely—I’ve always been awful about that, but my diet has changed significantly.  I’ve cut out carbonation almost completely, which means no soda.  There is some flavored carbonated water I love that tastes better when it’s flat so I do drink that sometimes, because let’s face it a girl gets tired of water all the time.  I rarely eat pizza or pasta, there’s very little nutritional value in it for me anyway.  I do eat some bread, I don’t go crazy with the bread eating, but the Italian in me has a hard time fully giving it up.  Woe is me I still love the occasional fast food—yes boo hiss!!!  But a junior bacon cheeseburger that I can only eat half of benefits my pup way more than it does me.

I am thinking about joining a gym, since it’s gotten cold out my activity outside has dropped, even my dog doesn’t want to go out.  I figure if I’m going to join one now would be a good time since this is the season for gym promotions.  My thing is I don’t want to join one and not be disciplined enough to go on a regular basis, then I’d be wasting my money and let’s face it none of us has money to waste.  I did hear from someone that if you workout for 30 consecutive days your body is conditioned to just go and do it.  I may test this theory.

Shout out to a school friend who has begun the gastric sleeve journey I wish her much luck and success and until next time I wish you all happy reading.

Hi everyone! Happy late Thanksgiving!  Hope everyone had a fabulous holiday.  My family and I tried to keep is small this year, our family had really shrunk in the past few months.  I lost my aunt to cancer and a few weeks after my Grandmother passed from a heart attack coupled with her 90 plus years of age.  Can’t say that they both didn’t have a good run, although the loss of my aunt was upsetting because she really lead a full life and could have had so many more years in front of her, but that wasn’t meant to be.  So I spent the last couple of months cleaning out a huge house not thinking about blogging of course.

This brings me to what I am thankful for.  I am definitely thankful that I had this surgery.  I would not have had the stamina or the health to do half the things I’ve done in the past couple months.  Of course I am thankful for all of my friends and family who have been supportive and encouraging over my journey thus far, and on a lighter note totally thankful I can lay down on the sofa and not have to move any of the pillows to fit.  Really helps when you pull your back out lifting stupid amouts of heavy boxes! 😜

I’m still trying to drill into my mother’s head that I don’t eat that much anymore and we don’t need to cook so much food.  I convinced her that since it was just the three of us we should just cook a breast, we ended up cooking half a breast and my mom roasted wings because she loves them.  We did cranberry sauce, brussel sprouts, cole slaw and sweet potatoes, and stuffing and it was all so much food and it made me want to go invite people off the corner and feed them.  At this point I can eat a slice of turkey and a Tbs or less of everything else we had.  I also had to wait quite awhile before I had any desert because I was not passing up the pumpkin pie.

I occasionally mourn the loss of not being able to finish my platr or stuff myself to the gills, but it’s so much better to feel healthy than to feel like a disgusting slug.  I’ve also had some difficulty with self image and looking in the mirror because I still see that fat girl staring  back at me and although I haven’t done a ton of shopping when I do go to buy something I still feel “oh I can’t wear this it won’t look right.”  So I took a chance to buy a dress for an event I’m attending soon it just came the other day I looked at this little dress and went “no way this is going to look awful!” I put it on and said to myself “oh that doesn’t look half bad.”

I wish everyone a happy, healthy, safe and wonderful holiday season.  Happy reading!

Hi everyone!  This bad girl has not written in awhile.  I had complete intentions of writing exactly on my 6 mos anniversary, but of course life happened as it often does and I never got a chance.  So yes I am 6 mos post sleeve.  Starting weight 290, current weight 215; starting size 26, current size 18; my bra needs to be resized and my feet have shrunk and I’m extatic that I can pick out something I like and wear it, not settle for something that fits.

A question I have been getting a lot is if I’m happy that I did it.  I don’t know what kind of emotions I have anout it.  I don’t know what kind of emotions I have about a lot of things nothing prepares you for loss.  I just lost my aunt and my grandmother fairly close together and I’ve also lost my old life.  The priest said to my mother, I suppose to try to comfort her, “think of it like a bandaid.”  You can take it off slowly and endure the torture or you can can just rip it off and be done with it.  This procedure is really like a bandaid without getting to the heart of why you got the way you got in the first place it’s never going to work.  If you don’t change the majority of your habits it’s not going to be as effective as it should be.  Does it work absolutely, could I have lost all that I did on diet and exercise alone, for me probably not.  There are days I mourn the loss of food the way I used to know it.  To an extent I even mourn the person I used to be, you may be surprised to know that larger people can be somewhat invisible to the general public.  It’s strange how someone who is litteraly larger than life can be not even noticed.

I’ve done my 6 mos bloodwork for my appointment coming up soon.  8 vials of blood later I was feeling a little blah.  The 6 mos blood work checks for all sorts of vitamin deficiencies and anemia.    Also cholesterol and lipids are thrown in the mix.  Hopefully when I go in for my appointment everything will be status quo.  Until next time happy reading!

Hi all it’s been awhile and as you’re reading this post you’re going to be saying to yourself “I thought this was a blog about gastric sleeve surgery and what goes on after it?”  Well it is, but I just need a moment to talk about what’s been going on in our country lately.  I was raised to not see color, shape, or size that everyone was equal.  What’s been happening in our country is more than a little scary.  It’s setting us back I don’t know how many years.  It’s basically spitting in the faces of our parents and grandparents maybe even our great grandparents who fought for our freedom, protested for our rights, and have allowed us to live generally comfortable lives.

Many of our parents grew up with an unpopular war, corrupt presidents/politicians, protests and riots and now our children are growing up with it.  I don’t have children at this moment in my life, I don’t know what I would tell them about certain things if I did.  I wouldn’t be able to give them a good explaination of the hatred and bigotry out there. I wouldn’t be able to explain terrorism or war in a country we’ve been in for 16 years.

Let me just say that in Charlottesville there are not two sides to the story.  Hate does not have sides.  There are no excuses to what happened there and it should not be tolerated.  Being devil’s advocate here, let me also say that as Americans we have freedom of speech and a right to peaceful protest.  Keyword being peaceful.  That being said any Larry, Mo, or Curly can organize a protest pretty much against anything as long as it’s peaceful.

This may make me a bad person in the eyes of some of you, but these “White Nationalists” were protesting the removal of a Confederate statue.  Now I know I don’t hold the same opinion on why they wanted the statue to stay in the park, but I do hold the opinion that we should not try to erase history.  Slavery was incredibly wrong and the Civil War even more so, but it happened and there are symbols out there letting us know it happened and we shouldn’t be erasing them we should be learning from them.  We should be teaching our children that these symbols do not represent hate but history.  It’s so very wrong that we’ve turned a flag and statues and who knows what else into symbols of hate.

I recall learning an edited version of history in school.  We were all taught a version that our school district wanted us to learn. History class seemed to be like a big screen movie on tv formatted to fit the screen in the time allowed.  We grazed over the Trail of Tears, the War of 1812, the Korean War, Malcolm X, and equal rights for women and gays.  Our children shouldn’t learn edited versions of anything.  We should not have learned edited versions of events.   We should use what’s going on right now as a tool to teach our children to love each other, that the answer can never be found in hate or causing other people terror, that war never completely solves problems but may just in fact create new ones. If we want our country to truly be great, as adults we must set the example for our a children.  We need to teach them that everyone is equal no matter what color their skin, what size they are, what religion they practice, or what clothes they wear.  We need to start teaching our children not to be afraid of those that are different, but to love them for their differences and to stand up to those that put others down.  Until next time, happy reading.

We all have that someone in our lives that we see make coffee and ask them, “would they like some coffee with their sugar?” For some they absolutely live on it, it’s their fuel.  However there’s always been lots of hype about how much is too much.  In theory the idea for gastric sleeve patients is to optimize weight loss by sticking to a high-protein, low sugar/sugar free diet.  I will be the first person to tell you I need a small piece of chocolate every once in awhile or I’m a very grouchy woman!

Sugar in moderation or a sugar free diet with artificial sweeteners  is really a double edged sword.  Neither real sugar or artificial sweeteners are good for you, and I was rather disheartened by the fact that the whole post sleeve diet was based on chemical laden artificially sweetened substances.  Recently I read an article where studies have been done showing that artificial sweeteners don’t help people loose weight, and in fact may be causing them to gain weight or change the way their body processes and deals with real sugar.  In the past there have also been articles linking certain artificial sweeteners to diseases like diabetes and cancer although this current article by NPR did not really touch on that.

So what to do what to do?? For years I have drank diet soda and other diet drinks, regular soda and drinks were always too sweet for me; and although I do not do carbonation anymore everything I drink, with the exception of hot tea/coffee is diet or no sugar added.  I use a lot of crystal light, which yes is artificial, but I also use plain old lemon and lime in my water and I’m just fine with it.  As far as sugar in my foods.  I did sugar free ice pops and pudding in the beginning plus some sugar free jello, but I found I had a problem with some of them causing me to immediately want to go to the bathroom.  That being said I have started reading the labels on all my food carefully making sure there isn’t any added sugar. Yogurt is a big culprit when it comes to sugar so I look with something with under 10g in it, which with yogurt isn’t always easy and some really do have that artificial after taste.  I no longer include sugar free jello or pudding or ice pops.  I tried Halo ice cream which is artificially sweetened but did not care for it so my choice is now to incorporate sugar into my diet in moderation.  This may or may not be the best choice, but it’s what I’m going for right now.  Until next time, happy reading.

I recently read a news article about a plus sizes model on a flight to or from LA who paid extra for a seat with leg room.  She paid alright to feel like a third class citizen and less than a human being on this flight.  Unfortunately she was assigned a middle seat and was subjected to the grumblings of and older fat hating man.  Mind you this woman is a model and plus size or not she is gorgeous he should have been thanking god a woman this beautiful sat next to him.

During the course of the flight not only was this man sighing loudly and grumbling, but texting someone very nasty texts about having to sit next to her.  This man also deliberately took up extra room in this small space digging his elbows into her side.  She finally stood up for herself and by the time she was finished this man wanted to apologize by taking her out to dinner.   LOOSER!!!

Fact of the matter is that this happens on a regular basis and it’s disgusting.  A person doesn’t need to be a size 2 to be respected.  And yes I’ve noticed a larger person is treated way differently than a smaller one.  Dealing with this is especially difficult when you’re a weight loss/gain yo-yo and you’ve experienced the gambit of sizes.

This leads me to a quick blurb about NJ illustrious governor and our 4th of July weekend government shutdown.  Again while perusing Facebook Christie’s pictures on the beach were plastered all over sites like NJ.com.  Well people of course made comments regarding these photos and I’ll be the first to say in some cases yes I’m a hypocrite and my thoughts went to he looks like a beached whale, but what angered me were some comments made by a friend I went to high school with.  In the grand scheme of things the comments made were childish and only upset me for the sheer fact that not only did I know him but his best friend is a very large guy and would he call his own friend a beached whale??? I think not.

Moving on to a completely different subject is how I’m doing on this gastric sleeve journey.  Everyone asks how I’m doing or what I’m eating now?  Well I’m allowed to eat anything I can tolerate, doesn’t mean I do but I can.  Unfortunately I’m a grazer and trying to curb that habbit and stick to 3 meals a day and 2 snacks.  Lately, I haven’t had much of an appetite but I normally eat way less in the summer because of the heat I just don’t feel like eating.  I focus on getting as much protein as possible it should be between 70-80 grams a day.  I try to keep track but don’t always remember.  I haven’t lost any unusual amount of hair so I assume I’m doing alright in the protein department.

I still struggle with fluid consumption and do so much better at work than at home.  A fellow sleever told me she had a 30 fl oz water bottle she tries to drink in half a day so that by a certain time she knows she’s gotten at least half the requires amount in.  Not a bad idea and having a 32 fl oz water bottle at work it’s been helping me out a lot.  I still don’t know why this is so hard to do at home but I guess I’ll get it eventually.  I also feel like I’m not getting enough veggies.  I make sure I eat all my protein first and sometimes by the time I’ve finished that there isn’t room for anything else.  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.   Happy reading until next time!

 

July 8th will be my four months out and I just came from my 3 month checkup.  Lately I’ve been getting annoyed, frustrated, basically freaking out over the numbers on the scale.  I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed, but I do get upset when the scale is 2lbs up overnight.  My nurse brain knows this is just water weight, but man it annoys the f**k out of me.  It’s also annoying that the doc’s scale adds an additional 2 lbs on top of it.  However despite that I may have stated before I am 50 lbs down.  According to the doc this is better than expected.  The nutritionist said they expect patients to loose anywhere from 10-12 lbs a month which is about 2-3 lbs a week, so despite my ? I’m right on track.

I did have some concerns at this visit.  I’ve been feeling a tugging/pulling sensation every omce in awhile, which the doc assures me is normal.  Apparently there is an internal stitch somewhere in there that causes that feeling.  He did make sure he didn’t feel a hernia in the area—I’m hernia free so everything is normal.

I also had some burning questions for the dietitian, questions which have stemmed from reading Dr. Google!  Yes even though I’m a nurse I do still read Dr. Google, but I know that Google isn’t the authority on everything unlike others in the world.  My first question was on straw use.  I hate drinking out of glasses number one and number two I tried it and found that I can drink way more using a straw than not.  Disclaimer on the straw folks there is a time post surgery when you aren’t supposed to use a straw.  Theory is that you drink too fast and that could make you nauseous and possibly vomit and the other reason is that you bring more air into your belly and that can make you gassy and uncomfortable.  It has done neither to me so I’m using a straw.  I also wanted to know about calorie goals.  I see all this talk about this surgery patient eating 800 calories that surgery patient eating 1200 calories.  It is not a big deal at this point, as per the dietitian who said at this point if I were maybe eating 800 to 1000 calories that would be fantastic.  The biggest concern for her was still getting enough protein 70 to 80 grams per day. I’m thinking I may have to theow another protein shake in the mix I’ll have to a bit more careful tracking.  The bottom pic is just a haha funny until next time, happy reading!