MILESTONE!

40 pounds!! :)

Weighed in at 239.6 this morning. So that's 40.4 pounds GONE FOREVER!!! :)

That is 162 sticks of butter. I can't even visualize 162 sticks of butter. But I can feel how good it is to NOT carry 162 sticks of butter with me everywhere I go!

A Photo

This is a photo of me all dressed up for the work party last week. I was stoked to buy a smaller dress and wear it and not be self-conscious. :)

WLS and the Great MN Eating Extravaganza

The FAIR has arrived!!! I love the Fair, it is the highlight of my summer every year, I go as many times as possible and I LOVE it. I was a little worried about what weight loss surgery would do to my fair enjoyment levels seeing as how it is a big food-fest but I figured as long as I go many times I will have the chance to at least taste my favorites.



The day started off with a bike ride to the Fair from Kat’s house – about 5 miles, pre-burning calories in the morning. We wandered around a bit before hitting the “Big Fat Bacon” stand and getting a slab of thick-cut, maple-brushed bacon (to die for). I had 2 bites and it was amaze-balls. Then we walked around for about an hour and a half and found the onion rings that are my favorite. I had 2 onion rings and was feeling very satisfied and figured I should quit eating for a while. About 2 hours later Kat got a foot-long hot dog. I had 2 bites of the dog with no bun and that really filled me up. We didn’t eat again for about 3 hours when we got cheese curds. I had 2 and they were SO amazing. Then we hit the deep-fried pickles with cream cheese filling and I had one of them, which were about 3 bites. I was feeling super full and was thinking I was done for the food for the day. But…we did get some home-made potato chips and I had 3 of them and it put me over the top and I was not feeling well for about an hour. After another hour we went to the dairy barn and got a twist ice cream cone. Ice cream has not set well with me thus far so I knew not to push it with this one so I just had a few licks and it was so delicious but I’m glad I didn’t over do it with the ice cream. I ended the day feeling satisfied but not full or uncomfortable, so all in all, a yummy day at the fair. Followed it up with a 5 mile ride back to Kat’s house so I think I ended up on the winning end of the calorie/fat situation but not great on the protein/health situation. Oh well, there is always today!



SO to recap –what I ate at the fair:



2 bites of bacon

2 onion rings

2 bites of hot dog

2 cheese curds

1 pickle slice with cream cheese

3 potato chips

A few licks of ice cream

All of that would have fit on a little salada plate :) YAY!

Getting used to it all

Wellz, this whole diet thing has settled in to a bit of normalcy I guess. I eat protein at all meals but try to eat normal stuff and not do as much protein shake stuff. This weekend there were lots of great food opportunities and it was nice to enjoy a couple bites of everything. Friday night was the work party and I had 2 bites of shrimp, 2 bites of beef tenderloin, a bite of ravioli and a couple bites of ice cream. Yummy and I was stuffed. Saturday there was pizza and I enjoyed the cheese and chicken off of a piece of garlic chicken alfredo pizza as well as some fresh cut fruit. So I feel like I am not being deprived at all, but quantities are just miniscule. Resulting in weight loss :) Down to 243 this morning, so that's another 2 pounds, which feels really great. I wore a size 16 dress to the work party, which also felt really great :) I was in a 22/24 this winter at my starting weight so this is some great progress. I only worked out three times this past week, once with the trainer and twice to my workout dvd's, which aren't that big of a workout but it's something. I intended to do a ton of biking and cardio but the week just went too fast. This week I will try to walk over lunch a couple of times and do 2 trainer workouts at the gym, plus get in a couple of bike rides. I feel so strong and good I want to really get out and pound the pavement and work it out. I love feeling like this, it's exhilerating. :)

I'm excited to hit the 240 mark. I'm hoping to hit that in the next 1-2 weeks. That would be 40 pounds lost. That is an exciting milestone cuz it's the last big one before hitting the big 5-0 :) I can't believe I'm actually doing this. YAY :)

I am going to now clean my dirty, nasty, awful house and that will count as some cardio :)

Dietician Visit

I saw my dietician this morning for some pointers on my diet for the next month. Mushy/soft foods is on the menu, focusing on getting in 3 tablespoons of protein and 1 tablespoon of fruits/veggies per meal. That's 7 grams of protein per meal, 3 times a day, so 21 grams of protein from food. That means I only need to do one protein shake a day now and that is awesome since I am so sick of them. I need to go shopping though and procure mushy foods and make a bunch of stuff to portion out to take to work. A lot of work it feels like at this stage just to do a meal. I liked how easy the protein shake diet was :) So things like scrambled eggs, egg salad, tuna salad, moist meatloaf, pot roast, etc will be on my plate for a month. It will make eating out a big challenging as these things are not typically on the menu at restaurants! I am finding eating out is a pain anyway. So I guess no biggy. The biggest challenge now is to not think i can have anything I want again because ultimately I need to stay on a hight protein, low carb diet until I am at goal weight. So even though a french fry is soft inside, it's not on the list of things I should be eating. Dang it!


I have officially lost 35 pounds according to my dr's charts. I stepped on and saw a nice round number of 245. They base my loss on my weight the last time I was at the dr before starting liquids, I was basing my loss on what I weighed the night before starting liquids, which was less. I am going to just go by the dr's number because it is a) a higher number and b) an easier starting number to calculate from. I'm an accountant who is rather helpless without a calculator :) Anyway. I'm happy with that number and working hard to get to the next round one of 240. 4 workouts a week and staying on my eating plan should get me there in a couple of weeks I hope. Onward!

I am going to post my meals and exercise on here for a while so I can keep track of what's going in and maybe it will help me see trends when my weight loss stalls.

B: Protein shake (42 g protein)
L: 1/3 serving Taco Bell Pintos and Cheese (3 g protein)
D: 3 tbsp tuna 1 slice canned peaches (10 g protein)
Exercise - gym or biking, we will see
Vitamins: Yup
Water goal: 64 ounces

Scale and Non-Scale victories!

I have been focusing on working out instead of scale numbers and it has paid off in a couple of ways. Last week I worked out at the gym 3 times, which is my goal for each week, before leaving for a long weekend in Chicago with Kat. It felt great to have hit that goal and know that on the weekend I’d be getting more exercise in since we were bringing our bikes. I planned to start eating food on the weekend so that was also fun to look forward to.

So Friday we got on our bikes with Lance and Stephanie (the cousins) and hit the beautiful Lake Shore trail in northern Chicago and pedalded the 8 miles into downtown. The MOST beautiful ride – super sunny, not too hot, awesome city on one side, beautiful beachfront on the other. I felt stronger than I have since surgery and enjoyed it so much. We biked to the Bean, my favorite sight in Chicago and there was Dave, our friend who moved there 2 weeks ago. SO great to see him! He grabbed his bike and pedaled with us into the city and it was exhilarating to ride with the traffic through downtown. We ended up at a beachfront restaurant for dinner and it was surreal since there were palm trees and sand and surf a few yards away from our table yet we were in Illinois, not California J I had a few bites of some barbecued pork and that was fine, gave me a lot of energy and tired me out at the same time, kind of hard to explain. We then hit the bikes again after saying farewell to Dave and pedaled home with the wind at our backs. Total we biked over 18 miles and about 3 hours. And I could do it! I feel like I’m finally getting my strength and stamina back and it feels AMAZING. I know it wouldn’t be possible were it not for the gym time I’ve been logging. So my non-scale victory, or NSV, is my newfound energy. I feel awesome! I did go to bed earlier than anyone else, and I did sleep like a rock, but hey…so what?

I snuck a weigh-in on the scale. Down to 245.6. So that’s a scale victory! That’s a total of 31.2 pounds so the scale FINALLY budged! Not much, but whatever. I am happy with that and will not be tempted to weigh again for a while. There was a scale in the bathroom at Lance and Stephanie’s and it was tempting tempting tempting!

Food is quite another situation entirely. I am feeling rather down about food in general. I could eat anything I wanted this weekend but in tiny bites of course. I fill up in about 5 small bites. This is good, this is the whole point of what I had done. But it really hit me HARD at Sunday dinner in Chinatown. I love Chinese food. I was feeling ravenous, which is rare since I have such a small stomach, but we’d not eaten all day and had been running all over town at this point. We sat down and I was so excited to taste some of my favorites and we ordered lots of different items to try off the Dim Sum menu. I had about 6 small bites and I was full – not just full but painfully, uncomfortably, I want-to-die full. I hadn’t even tasted what I had really wanted to try, the sesame chicken. So I sat there waiting for the feeling to go away and the urge to lay on the floor in a fetal position to subside. It hit me so hard how going out to dinner is just not what it was. I had to sit there for 45 minutes watching everyone else eat and waiting for them to be done. I no longer wanted to eat anything but it was boring, it was, sorry to be dramatic, isolating. Everyone was comparing items and textures and laughing and sighing over how good everything was and I was sitting there in misery. I was totally bummed out. And what can be done about it? Nothing. I can’t eat. Everyone else can. It’s not anyone else’s responsibility to change a thing. So I have to figure this out, how to better handle these situations. Granted in the future I’ll be able to hold much more food and I can eat for longer than 2.5 minutes, but that won’t be for months yet. So I think the first thing is to make sure I don’t get so hungry and the second thing is to take a couple of minute break between bites. I won’t fill up as fast and will know when I’m full quicker so I won’t be uncomfortable. And ultimately, going out to eat will be the rare occurrence, not the norm, as it used to be. There just is no point. I’d rather socialize AWAY from food so I don’t have to watch it and see it. Once it’s out of my face, I don’t give it another thought. This whole thing is quite a learning experience, that is for dang sure! The good thing is that I got to have a donut. Make that, 1/16 of a donut. One medium size bite is all I can handle of anything bread or yeasty. So that makes a donut way less appealing, which is awesome cuz they are one of my favorite things ever. It makes me want to live on protein shakes for the rest of my life and just forget about food entirely, way simpler. But we can’t have that, so onward in figuring all of this out!

Resigned

I guess I need to put my scale away and not look at the numbers and just keep doing the right things and have faith that it will pay off. It doesn't budge. It makes me mad. If I had not had surgery, I would have rewarded such poor results with a full-on Chinese food binge. So I guess the surgery is serving a purpose already in keeping me from being able to binge on anything that doesn't start with "protein" and end with "shake." Anorexics get skinny eating nothing, right? So I don't get the whole "you're in starvation mode so your body isn't burning anything, just storing it all" crap. So, I'm putting the scale under my bed and ignoring it for a month. That's my new strategy for not being cranky.

Frustrated

So it didn't take me too long to get frustrated. I am not losing weight! ARGH! I know it slows down, blah blah blah, but being on a liquid diet should mean I will see the scale drop and then adding in exercise? More droppage. Nope. I'm so irritated. This better not be the trend or I'm going to be madder than a hornet. I worry my body is in starvation mode and it's conserving everything I eat and drink but the doc said that wouldn't happen. I get in my 3 protein shakes a day, which is about 500 calories right there, plus the stuff I eat, so it's not like I get no calories. And I drink a ton of water and I've worked out twice this week and plan another workout in the morning with my trainer. I need to see results or I'm going to get crankier. I bought a dress for our firm's formal summer event and I got it in a size that I SHOULD be able to fit into or pretty close and was thinking if it was a tiny bit too small I could just exercise harder in the next weeks. Now I'm wondering if that will even matter. I ordered it online so I couldn't try it on - maybe not the smartest thing ever, but I loved it. So anyway. Done venting I guess.

Last night I had the most yummy dinner. Kat had made me chicken tortilla soup and there was a bunch left so I added some more salsa, some tortilla chip crumbles (they got soggy and so they were drinkable) sour cream and cheese. It was heaven. I got about 3/4 cup in before I felt full and it was SO tasty and yummy. I don't want to eat it too often though adn get sick of it. So I save it for when I am eating at Kat's house. :)

This weekend will be a challenge, going to Iowa for Sweet Corn days and Arnold's Park with my sister adn cousin and all of our kiddos. There will be incessant eating all around me. I will be chugging my protein shakes. I can already tell I will be cranky about it. Oh well. I must gear up for it and be strong. The end of liquids is in sight and then life will be a lot easier. I officially am going to start eating mushy foods next Friday on my Chicago trip, so only a week left. YAY!

End ramble. I am hoping to weigh tomorrow morning and find that the scale went down an ounce or two. blah.

No leaks!

Had my swallow test today. I had to swallow the nastiest liquid ever while an x-ray dude watched it go down into my newly tiny tummy and then take images for the doc. No leaks :) I then had my post op physical with the surgeon and they were thrilled with my progress and how well I am doing. I was pretty thrilled to thank them for being so amaze-balls. I was down to 248.5 this morning, they put a big -31.5 on my chart since they calculate from my highest weight of 280. I LOVE IT :)

My favorite part of the day though, both the surgical assistant/nurse and my surgeon asked how Kat was. :) He was there with me on the surgery day and blew everyone's socks off. He has the most beautiful soul, such a sunny, happy personality and makes everyone feel so good, of course the most important people in my world that day, the surgeon and his assistant, were no exception and they both remarked how much he brightened the room and how awesome he is. I of course, agree. What a difference. It is so wonderful to be with someone who is so amazing and who brings such a positive response from everyone he meets. And I mean everyone :) I am so lucky :)

I hit the gym last night for the first time since surgery. I took it easy and just 30 minutes on the elliptical but then Steven was still having fun so I hit the treadmill and did a walk/run til he was done. I burned about 450 calories and had great energy. Tonight we went back and I did an hour on the elliptical and Steven wasn't ready to leave yet so I did some strength training on my arms a bit. Surgeon doesn't want me doing anything to stress my abs for another month so I don't get a hernia where the large incision was. Fine by me, I hate core work :) I see my trainer Friday and then twice next week so I can get back to arms and legs at least - I am sure I've lost a lot of muscle since I haven't worked them in over a month. Oh well, onward! :)

Dr also told me if it falls off a spoon and has no chunks, I can have it. So I am going to make some smoothies with some fresh fruit this week and I'm excited for that :) Much better than soup. 2 more weeks feel more bearable with smoothies in them!

Update

I haven't updated in a while, oops! I am still on liquids, some days it bugs me a lot, some days it just doesn't matter. I realized I needed to get more food in me in addition to the protein shakes I've been drinking, even though I have no hunger and actually am just tired of trying to eat. I need the energy and nutrition. So this weekend Kat made me his amazing chicken tortilla soup and he added beans to it, pureed it so it was thin enough for me to drink and topped it off with a little dab of sour cream . Heaven. Then I ate soup at Panera a couple of times and even though I can hold about 1/4 cup at a time, it still felt really good to eat yummy soup instead of broth over and over and over. I still have struggled with having enough energy so today I determined to get more protein in. I had 3 protein shakes instead of the 2 I usually manage to get in, and had 2 cups of chicken broth for additional protein. I drank more than necessary and it made a huge difference in my energy. I went to the gym and did a hard 30 minutes on the elliptical and then 10 more minutes of alternating walk/run on the treadmill. I burned 500 calories and worked up a huge sweat and felt GREAT doing it, no exhaustion. I'm going to try to do it tomorrow night too. Steven is now a gym member now that he is 13 so he can come with me so it was fun to go with him. I set up 3 personal training appointments too so I can get back to muscle building. I'm excited to be back on the fitness path again and as long as I make sure I get in my nutrition I should be good. I will weigh in the morning but I don't think I lost anything this week - seem to have stalled out which is normal after such a huge drop, and it will likely be super slow while my body settles in. I don't care, it'll all come off eventually, just going to keep doing what I'm doing and enjoying my smaller clothes. I shopped on the weekend and I was BLOWN AWAY to fit into sizes I haven't fit into for about 15 years. CRAZY. But FUN :)

Off to bed I go - tomorrow I get to go to the dr and drink barium for an x-ray to make sure my stomach is sealed tight and then to my surgeon for my official check up. I hope he is pleased with my progress, I know I am!