4 Weeks On...

Tracking my weight loss to date, for those who, like me, love the facts and figures:

My heaviest weight: 115 kilos (253.5lbs) for about 2 years to around Jun/Jul 08
Pre Optifast diet 111.1 kilos (244.9lbs)
Day of Operation 105.2 kilos (231.9lbs)
4 weeks post op 100 kilos (220.5lbs)

So on my own I struggled to lose 4 kilos (nearly 9lbs) in 6 months, which isn't too bad and deserves a pat on the back. In this time I did go up and down however, losing and gaining the same 2 kilos several times over. But when I hit my surgeons office it gave me renewed hope and helped the process keep to a downwards direction. Then the Optifast diet gave me a huge kickstart in the 2 weeks prior to surgery. The weight loss has slowed down considerably, probably due to my body trying to adjust to the new food regime! I have put the scales away, so I'm not obsessively weighing everyday. I know the weight will come off.

My main focus at this point is to make sure I get all the liquids/water I need on a daily basis and get my protein requirements in. I have progressed onto 'mushy' food, and although that sounds disgusting it tastes like heaven after consuming only liquids for so long. I've gotten into cooking again, which is a novelty! I'm not working at present (damn this recession!), so my domestic skills are coming out of mothballs.

I am really enjoying flavours and my whole relationship with food has done a 180 degree turn. I am not consumed with the hunger I was before the op, although I do feel hunger. Its a different feeling. Pre op my hunger was like this: most of the day, unless I was distracted with work, a low level nagging feeling in my stomach and mouth. The mouth part was a craving for something nice to taste, the stomach bit was an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Then at around 11.30 (pre lunch) and 4.30 (pre dinner) I would get this intense craving coupled with a feeling of faintness, headache, dizziness and nausea. So by the time I ate I would INHALE the food, it never even touched the sides and I never felt full or satisfied. I did test my blood sugars from time to time to see if this was a symptom - but it wasn't. Now, post op, I have a feeling that perhaps I should eat something, bit of an empty feeling in the tummy - check the clock and lo and behold! its actually a mealtime! When I heard of this lack of hunger phenomenon to do with WLS I knew that if I had this one small thing, loss of the over the top appetite, that I could do it.

Small victories so far - have crossed my legs; had my photo taken without cringing; taken off the bra extender; can get out of bed without puffing and struggling; still of my diabetes meds as blood sugar levels are within normal range; skin looks great; and (according to reports) not snoring so much! I completely deny ever snoring in the first place, but I have been told it rattled the windows.

NSV's - what are they?

Non Surgical Victories are those little moments when you experience a gift from losing that weight. For example, yesterday, in the blistering heat of one of Auckland's hottest summers for years, we lay on rugs in the garden under the shade of our golden elm. I fell asleep with the sound of the cicadas. It was lovely. 12 kilos (25 lbs approx) ago I could not lie on the ground. It was excrutiating and getting up again was a real problem. Yes I still am a bit ungainly getting to my feet, but it is so much better than it was. I felt encouraged at the greater mobility and had a bath. Not too bad but I'm looking forward to lying in a bath where the water actually covers me!

Another NSV was being at the Big Gay Out - which I go to every year (part of the Hero Festival in Auckland) and not dodging having my photo taken. I know I'm not skinny yet, but I feel so much more confident of my appearance at present.

I'm working my way back through clothes I haven't been able to wear, some of them have hardly had any use at all. And a lovely fresh water pearl necklace that was just too tight looks great. Its fun and I don't have to spend any money yet!

Liquid liquid everywhere...

Its been 2 and a half weeks since the op and I'm still on the thin liquid diet, and getting pretty sick of it. My surgeon tells me it will be a few months before I'm on proper food again, I had kind of thought it would be a few weeks. I'm doing OK considering. Certainly the pre-op me would have not been able to stay on a liquid diet for very long, I would have been ravenous by this stage and all food withing a 3 km radius would have been in extreme danger of being consumed.

The feelings thing is quite intense too. Can't bury myself in a bag of chips when things go wrong, no stuffing down feelings with a huge plate of pasta. We've had a tragic loss in the family last week and my feelings have been right there - up front and personal. The movie "Happy Feet" had me weeping for most of the first half.

In terms of weight loss, since I started the pre op diet to today - which is a month ago - I have lost 11 kilos. Translated to American, this is 24.25lbs. Or for UK readers this is 1.732 Stone, or to be more precise 1 Stone 10 1/4 lbs. Anyone conversant with old Russian will recognize this as 2,579 Zolotniks and for the student of ancient French - .2247 of a Quintal. In any event its a sh**load of weight to lose in 1 month!

Well heres to it! (Raises glass of choc protein drink - nicknamed sawdust delight)... Cheers!

Tears for Fears - and Weight For It!

I have a motto - Be Prepared! This means that any and every disaster that could befall me has been well thought out in advance. Comet coming down on the motorway? Yep I've thought that one through. Earthquakes, tsunamis, fire, flood and famine - all grist to the mill of my active imagination. I don't think I'm morbid as some people suggest, I'm just being practical. When an emergency does occur (as it does fairly rarely) I am the one with the plan of action. Mostly. When something happens that I haven't thought of I have been known to freeze up completely. Like the time a naked madmen went berserk, rampaging through our house and out to the woodpile which he then proceeded to throw through our windows (which were closed at the time). I didn't have a plan for that.

So in preparing for this surgery I was well aware of the things that could go wrong. Its a very risky procedure and can result in some pretty serious hospital time and even death. Until my stomach is completely healed I still run the risk of leaks, which is the serious hospitalisation scenario. What I haven't been prepared for is how smoothly things have gone, and I now have that nagging feeling that something is bound to go wrong because its all gone so right. That is all horse-feathers of course. I have to pull myself up and have a damn good laugh at myself.

I have added a weight converting widget on the sidebar because, being a New Zealander we are all metric. I weigh myself in Kilos. Due to the fact that I am quite oldish, Kilos mean less to me in weight that Stones and Pounds do so I convert the Kilos to Stones and Pounds. On the American websites that I frequent, however, the weight standard is just Pounds, so I also convert to Pounds also in order to communicate in American. I found a nifty website which I will put in my links which gives you ALL the weights at once. I love it. The gadget is a very cut down version of what they do. I hope someone else enjoys playing with it as much as I do.

Compulsion and Obsession

Now I know its not a good idea to weigh oneself daily, I know that weight doesn't come off evenly, I know that I will drive myself crazy if I keep doing it...so why do I do it? I am an obsessive person - anything can be done to death if its done by me. I have even had a knitting compulsion that was both bizarre and dangerous at one time. Dangerous? Have you ever tried knitting and cooking at the same time? It gets ugly real quick.

Mercifully my obsessions come and go, I'm completely over online poker now that I play Second Life. I always seem to have one or two on the trot at one time and never have I been without something. Maybe they are just hobbies? Normal people have hobbies right? Stamp collecting? Ugh! I contemplated stamp collecting once and worked out that there are so many stamps in the world over a long period of time I didn't stand a chance of getting all of them - so why bother. And when does a normal activity become an obsessive compulsion? I don't know the answer to this question as this is how I have always been.

My compulsive eating is what got me into this shape in the first place, and to me it was normal. I have always been a little crazy around food, and a little nudge of emotional upset could lead to complete eating meltdown. When I was medicating myself with alcohol and other substances, food wasn't too much of an issue, my crazy eating was sporadic as alcohol mainly did the trick. But I do remember many years ago getting up in the middle of the night and grabbing the jar with the icing sugar in it and putting a whole tablespoon in my mouth as I heard someone coming. I jammed like the whole tablespoon in! And discovered it wasn't the icing sugar jar at all. It was the cornflour jar. Oh, btw, cornflour is not nice when you have a whole tablespoon in your mouth!

When I stopped drinking is when I started eating in earnest. Its not just about stuffing the pain down either. I wanted my body to be fat and hideous, to match the way I felt about myself on the inside, and also because I could not deal with being attractive to men. I had huge issues around that. I was deeply conflicted about men. I loved them and detested them. I wanted power over them and fell victim to them over and over again. I limped from one short term encounter to the next. My one long term relationship in my twenties was completely dysfunctional. My body in those days, when I was drinking, was the wide hipped big breasted variety that was lusted after by seemingly every man that came along. I always got sucked into thinking that someone might just care for me and want to be with me. Very sad really. And so my body image became distorted and I piled on the fat as a protection from the pain I felt inside. The longing and loneliness got buried. What I wanted and what I felt was of no value at all and I denied myself - everything. Everything but food it seems.

Can I leave the protection of the fat behind? Have I grown enough to not be pushed around by the actions of others? Its a scary thought.

A Video for the grandkids

My Youtube vlog where I explain to my grandchildren what is happening to their nanny.

Home again

The operation went like a dream. Nothing to report - totally uneventful. It was surprisingly quick, about 2 hours, and I was waking up to a slightly sore throat and a kind of dullish pain (not much of one) at the top of my tummy. The painkillers used post op were good old paracetamol, intravenously in my drip, to avoid any nausea or vomiting. I have 5 small dressings over the 5 small holes and very little else to show for it! Laparascopic surgery is amazing. The small surgical hospital was clean - really clean, and the staff were very kind and very professional. I have only the highest praise for my surgeon Robert Fris, he is a very skilled and knowledgeable man, but also comes across in a warm and caring way. Big ups to the anaesthestist Ian Harrison too, who took lots of time to explain things, even the icky question that my son was curious about - "How do they get the bit of the stomach out that they have removed?". Answer - "You don't want to know..."

The healing is going very well. I'm on liquids all this week, thin liquids. Next week will be thicker liquids. I'm not having any difficulty getting my meals in and sipping water between the meals. I did at first, it was late Thursday (op was on Tuesday) before my tiny new stomach seemed to 'open up' and let things through. I feel full after my glass of Up and Go - or whatever I'm drinking. I am thinking about food, and that will no doubt pass in time. I dreamed of big fat greasy chips last night. There is definately a part of me that will miss eating junk food. The price for eating that rubbish is too high though and I'm not going to torture myself by hanging onto it.

There are a whole lot of foods that are really tasty and healthy at the same time, and I look forward to meal planning with a different viewpoint. The old me with the seemingly endless stomach capacity would think how I could make things filling...like pasta and potatoes etc, pure starch. I went for the filling things because I never did feel full. I was hungry all the time, even after eating 2 plates of curry and rice I would be thinking of what to have for desert. I still don't fully understand how I got to be like that. Even when I made healthy food choices the constant hunger would be there.

I feel as if its the start of a whole new life.