Living After Bariatric Surgery

I am 5 years post surgery. The best advice would be from people with similar experience.This is a great group of people at all stages of surgery. People on the main boards, while their intentions are good, don't usually have first hand knowledge of the subject -

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/637-gastric-bypass-vsg-lapband

You are not alone. My sleeve surgery was on Sept. 29, 2014. Close to yours. I lost 80 lbs., my diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholestrol in the first year. All was good until 2017 when I started eating peanut m&ms out of the vending machine at work 3-5 times a day. Wow the calorie over-load! I was dealing with a very stressful job, a mom with Alzeheimers and a lack of knowing how to do anything but resort to old habits. In that year, I gained 30 lbs. No surprise there. The surgery never failed me. It gave me the ability to feel full, while I was never able to feel that way before surgery. I was always hungry. I had pushed the process to the back burner. CICO is what I gave up along with my self-confidence, and being in control. I hated trying to make sure my fat rolls were covered when I got dressed in the morning. I may have been able to hide the m&ms but they still showed up on my body. No hiding it forever.

Well, my sleeve surgery was never repossessed, so I am just going to jump back into the process of CICO. I will use my departure from the process as a learning experience, not a reprimand to myself. That's another bad habit I have to eliminate. It doesn't do me any good to make myself hate myself. We are not failures! The process worked before and it will again. You sometimes have to have a few failures on the journey to success. Without the failures, how would you know what works and what doesn't. I have learned that staying away from sugar and flour, diminishes the cravings for those foods. If I don't eat it, I don't crave it. I also found that when I was planning for snacks between meals, that it kept me thinking about food more. I just ate my calories within my three meals that I ate each day. No snacks. Just meals. I felt fuller longer between meals because I didn't have to save calories for the snacks. I now am journaling when the urges for junk food come. By the time I "talk" things out, my urges have vanished or diminshed so much that I just live in the moment of the urge, but do not act upon it. It will pass.

It was also encouraging to know that I was not the only one going through this after surger. Thank you. You can send me a friend request if you would like to. I wish us both all the success we originally planned on having through the surgery. It hasn't vanished. All the best.