discouraged but not anymore
Denise, thanks for the message. I know you wrote it to Kelly but I needed
to hear it too. I had my surgery on Nov. 7th, and have lost 40 lbs so far.
I lost 35 the first 4 weeks and then another 5 lbs the 5th week, however,
since then nothing. I am have been reading the lists since January and knew
this could/would happen and have tried to tell myself this is normal and not
to worry. When my emotions said “Did I have surgery to just loose 40 lbs?”
my brain said “As much as I want to loose more, wasn’t the surgery worth it
just to loose the pain in my back, knees, and other places that I had
before I had the surgery and lost the weight?”
Do I want to loose more? Of course! Will I loose more? A friend who had
WLS about 4 years ago asked if I had ever heard of anyone only loosing a max
of 40 lbs after this surgery. (Initial loss, not loss and regain.) While
it may have happened, I know it is normal to loose more (then comes a
different set of struggles.) I hope to loose at least 100-150 lbs. Next
question, Have I ever heard of anyone who had this surgery loosing that much
weight in two months (that didn’t have a major physical problem that was
causing them lots of pain/discomfort and/or was physically risky to thier
health.) Ok, so what do I want? Am I hoping for a major medical
complication that puts my health at risk so that I can loose weight quicker
or am I happy that I am loosing at a normal WLS rate and enjoying better
health every day?
It is funny, before surgery I never weighted myself. I actually purchased a
scale after surgery because I was enjoying watching the numbers come down so
quickly. It is now time to put the scale in my garage and forget about it.
It no longer makes me happy and refuse not to enjoy what I have worked so
hard to achieve this last year.
I have also been afraid of my returning hunger. Maybe I should embrace the
fact that it is a normal hunger that comes from my body needing food, not
the emotional hunger that consumed me in the past. (Although it might come
back in the future.) I am not used to being normal. I don’t think I even
thought about how “normal” people knew when to eat. I guess now is a good
time to start.
Before I was consumed with getting the surgery, recovering from the surgery,
and thinking about why I wanted the surgery. The surgery is over and my
life has begun. I purchased a house 11/2000 because I love to work in the
yard and do small home improvement projects. Today, over a year later, is
the first real project I have been able to do. I am rescreening a window.
Sounds like small potatoes but to me this has been a year in the making.
Wish me luck!
Jennifer
March 29th, 2003 at 12:03 am
(Warning: this is kind of long)
As a very new postop I won’t attempt to answer your other questions,
but this is a topic that really speaks to me. I think you hit the
nail RIGHT SMACK on the old head here, when you say hunger is a
normal thing, and I’d like to elaborate on that a bit.
I followed this list and others on the subject of WLS for several
months before my surgery, and I have noticed that being afraid of the
return of hunger is a major issue for a lot of people. I think I was
a couple of months into the preop process of waiting for insurance
approval, preop testing, and getting a surgery date scheduled when I
started to really notice posts on that subject, and it scared me at
first, to read some of the things I was seeing. Some of those posts
made me feel afraid that WLS would just be another trip to “diet
hell” (only with better results, lol) rather than an escape from it
as I had hoping for. And I was NOT interested in spending my life
obsessing about food and weight issues, no way. I had chosen
accepting myself as I was for several years over trying to lose
weight through diet or exercise, after spending a couple of decades
of it doing exactly that.
So I was worried for a while there. I was wishing I could have the DS
instead of RNY (because with that surgery there is a lot more leeway
regarding what one can eat and how much and the DS postops I know
don’t seem to have these issues as much). I was afraid I wouldn’t be
able to succeed with RNY because the way a lot of people talked about
it sounded too much like dieting.
But geographical and financial issues got in the way of pursuing DS,
so I kept on reading and and talking to successful RNY postops, and
what they told me is pretty much what you just said: hunger IS a
normal thing. In the early postop weeks, most people don’t feel much
in the way of physical hunger because the digestive tract is too busy
healing. But eventually things will heal, and you will begin to
experience hunger, and it IS normal. They told me some of the keys
are learning to distinguish between physical hunger and “head hunger”
(the desire to eat that comes out of emotional and other factors such
as habit), as well as eating the right foods (lots of protein
produces a better satiety level than anything else). And learning to
relate to food differently…not as a security blanket to blot out my
pain, not as an enemy to be feared, but as nourishment that my body
needs to be healthy and also as a pleasure to be enjoyed (within
healthy limits, of course *G*).
If you stop and think about it, it’s the most natural thing in the
world, to get hungry. If that didn’t happen, people would be dropping
dead from starvation right and left, lol, because we’d all have to
force ourselves to eat and who’d want to take the time to bother with
things like shopping for food, cooking, eating and cleaning up
afterwards if we didn’t have a healthy, normal desire for food.
Having a desire for food is part of being a living organism. It’s
mother’s nature’s version of the gauge in the car that tells you when
it’s time to put more gas in. We just need to learn how to read that
gauge properly.
Unfortunately, that people who have been obese for years have trouble
doing that, and as a result, we have spent years either eating more
than our bodies need, trying to deprive ourselves of food focibly
(i.e., dieting), or swinging back and forth between the two. In the
process, we have become conditioned to be afraid of hunger. We have
come to think of it as our mortal “enemy,” the thing that has caused
all our problems with weight and sabotoged all our efforts to
overcome them. And by the time someone takes a step as major as
surgery, they have usually been through countless such failed
efforts. After trying and failing over and over again, it’s SO hard
to believe we can actually succeed, and we fear anything that we
think might cause that to happen. So feeling hunger can be very scary
to some of us, especially if we don’t realize that it is normal and
it doesn’t mean we’re going to fail.
So it all comes down to what you said, I think: learning to relate to
food the way “normal” people do. I have a feeling that’s going to be
easier said than done, lol….but understanding that is the first
step, imho. When I started to understand that myself, I lost my fear
of going ahead with my RNY, and started to believe that I really
could succeed with it. I’m only 6 days postop, so who knows what the
future will bring. But at least I feel like I have a handle on what
the task is that lies ahead of me. It sounds to me like you’re
getting there, too.
Sorry to ramble so long…that’s what happens when I’m home
recovering from surgery with too much time on my hands, lol. And good
luck to you!
Sharon B.
open RNY, 12/26/01, BTC-IL