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A few more thoughts and actions on weight gain. The weight loss surgery I had is called a Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy. Of course there is a group on line to support VGers and those considering the procedure. It's very helpful and informative. I threw my problem with sweets out to the sleevegastrectomy chat group. I found comfort in the many responses from folks saying they had the same problem, that they could relate to gaining some weight back over time. One person chimed in that this was why they thought the RNY was a better procedure (because if you eat sweets w/ this procedure you get VERY ill, I'm told). Others said what I know to be true. This is a calories in, calories out equation. If you don't change your habits, NOTHING will work for you over time. NOTHING. I felt good in the company of my "people".

My work team has taken on a group challenge to get healthier. I am so proud of all of us. We set a goal to lose 15 pounds. For some that's the whole goal, for others its a really good start. Yesterday was our first day. Each of us has two goals we set for the week. If we achieve our goals by Friday, we each determined a reward: Starbucks, flowers, regular bought coffee, all inexpensive, healthy rewards. And the goals are behavior changes, not weight loss because as we already discussed, the scale is not an accurate measure of your weight. So we're planning meals and measuring food for portion control and eliminating sweets and increasing excercise. We recognize that we have different challenges and set out to accomplish different goals.

Don't get me wrong. We want to lose 15 pounds, but along the way we want to change behaviour, increase energy etc.

We feel better already.

Since I have changed my goal from 40 minutes back to 30 minutes, I have worked out consistently. Some days for more than 30, some just for 30, but at least I'm back in the swing of things. My water intake has improved and I'm much more conscious of getting in 64 ounces.

My husband and I were out to lunch yesterday. He told me that when I know I'm going to have sweets, my face lights up and my entire disposition changes. I thought that was very sad but true. A person should not derive so much pleasure from food. More importantly, sweets are not good for me. I get that false burst of energy, I don't sleep as well at night, it's got tons of calories that have no nutrition. I have quit sweets before. It is bad. I an convinced sweets and quitting them is as bad as alcohol, cigarettes, meth amphedamines (ok, maybe I'm getting carried away). But it is a real withdrawal.

I put on a pair of pants today and they felt too small. I think my body gets bigger before the scale goes up. This is why the scale is not a precises measure of our weight. How your clothes feel is a much more accurate way to go. So even though the scale said I had gained 8 pounds, I dont thinks that real. It feel like more.

My excercise is getting back to normal, my water is improved. Now I need to reduce sweets. The goal I'm setting is no sweets at work. I figure that I work about 8 hours a day so if I eliminate those hours that's a big chunk of time and calories. This will become even easier to do once the weather gets better and my girls and I start walking outside again. This leaves my sweet window of opportunity from the time I get home (say 5pm) until the time I get into bed. I think this will help. I'll let you know. And if you have any secrets on how to satisfy your sweet tooth, let me know.

Tomorrow is the two year anniversary of my Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy surgery. Lately, I have had trouble getting motivated to excercise. This is unusual for me. I have two really good habits: 1. I drink a lot of water and 2. I excercise 5-6 days a week. But lately, not so much. Neither water nor excercise. Maybe the two are related. I bet they are. Maybe I drink water more conisistently when I excercise because I start out the day w/ water and just keep on going. If true, then it would stand to reason that if I get excercise back then the water will follow.

I have been slacking off on excercise. But I was at the gym this morning (and w/ the personal trainer yesterday). On the machine I was thinking about why my motivation was off. Here is what I came up with. When my goal is to do cardio for 30 minutes I have NO problem getting to the gym 3 or 4 days a week. But I had conversation w/ my personal trainer last month and he explained why 40 minutes of cardio is so much better for you than 30 minutes. So 40 minutes became my new goal. That became a daunting task. 30 minutes no problem. 40 minutes and I quit going to the gym. I have kept up w/ weight training 2 times a week but I just could not bare the cardio.

My conclusion today is that 30 minutes 3-4 times a week is still better than 40 minutes no times a week. Set goals you can live with and do them. If you can't or won't do them, find different goals that you can do. It's all good as long as you do it.

And do drink the water.

So I did it this morning. I did it with a t-shirt on and after a cup of coffee. I hoped if it was THAT bad, I could try again tomorrow without the t-shirt and BEFORE the coffee. But my weight gain was better than I had anticipated. I'm 8 pounds heavier than where I was. I'm 13 pounds heavier than where I wish I was. I was pretrified to weigh myself. I have a Dr. appt. for my annual well woman exam on 1/7 and had this vision of getting on the scale and my Dr. yelling at me...like I was a child being scolded by my parent. And I think to myself, get a grip! You're 47 years old. No Dr. should yell at you for anything let alone weight. So I decided to get a hold of my fear and step on the scale. And when the results weren't as bad as I thought they would be, I was both elated and motivated. So I put on my clothes and left for the gym. I would really like to take off the 8 pounds but cannot believe that's all it is. Maybe a skinny person thinks that's a lot, but for a former fat person, only having to lose 8 pounds is a dream come true.

What stuns and dissappoints me is the weeks of dread that preceeded the scale this morning. That's how long its taken me to step on it. Weeks. Before my weight loss surgery, I could have gained 10 pounds in the time it took me to gather the courage to weigh myself. This can be such a vicious cycle.

Life gets very busy. And being busy (or saying that you are busy) is very fashionalbe these days. In fact, having time is almost embarrassing. I sit on two boards, I work a full time professional job, I have a small business, I knit like crazy, have a ton of friends and some family (no children), a husband and sometimes I think my hands are full. I can't do it all, I can't do any more. Then I think about a coworker of mine who is married, has three children, a husband, a father who is ill, sits on every board imaginable, works full time and I think I'm not busy at all and I'd better "get to work". All this is to recogize how the best laid plans go awry. Like when I first started to write this blog, I thought what could get in the way of writing something every day? Last time I wrote was in NOVEMBER. Life gets in the way of a lot of things if we take our eye off our goals. It really is all about how we prioritize. That's how stuff gets done so when someone says they are so busy, what I hear is that's just not important as something else is.

Same is true of healthy eating and excercise. We really are only too busy for it if something else is a bigger priority. There are many weight loss surgeries. Some are restriction only. That means they reduce the size of your stomach but you absorb all the calories you take in. Lap band and the procedure I had (vertical (sleeve) gastrectomy) are both examples of restriction only. So the same old rules apply, calories in, calories out. If you eat more than you burn off, you gain weight. The strategy is that your stomach is smaller so you don't/can't eat as much.

Gastric Bypass and Duodenal Switch procedures are both restriction and malabsorbtion. So not only is your stomach size smaller, but your insides get rewired (a bit of oversimplification) and you don't absord all the calories your take in. So it's not supposed to be the same calories in/calories out equation.

With my surgical procedure, the majority of my stomach is surgically removed and less stretching than with a lab band. But if you consume a lot of calories or if you don't work out or both...VOILA!

Did I mention I love to have a drink or two? I did a few entries ago. If you do the math, you'll see my first problem. Say a beer is 150 calories (I love full calorie, full flavor micro brews). And say I have seven beers a week. That's an extra 1,050 calories a week in beer. Then say I have an equal love of candy and sweets which I can eat more of than I can count. So say that's an extra 2,000 calories a week. And then say I don't work out as consistently as I need to so I don't burn that extra 2,100 calories a week.

So you see where this is all going. I think I've gained back 10 pounds. I say I think because I'm afraid to get on the scale. When I do, I'll write about that too. How do I know I've gained weight? Because I can feel it in my clothes. It's your best indicator of your weight any way. But I can truly tell. The jeans that had some room in them don't anymore. No denying it. And all of it is in my rear end. Ugh.

So I need a renewed committment to all the things that work. That means cardio 4 days a week and weight training 2 days a week. Even G-d rested one day a week so I think I will too!

My dear love of micro brews needs to be cut back. One a day doesn't seem like much but yikes! Do the math! Haven't figure out how to make the reduction happen, but I will. And sweets! Those need to get reduced too. Especially at work. They are everywhere.

More later when I figure out a strategy that will work.

I've been a pretty consistent excerciser for many years.  My sister got me started many years ago and I stuck with it.  More about my wonderful sister later on.  I even trained for a marathon but got hurt and couldn't do the run.  Maybe a marathon isn't best for someone who weighed over 200 pounds.

Here's the news, weight is a calories in, calories out game.  Unless you have a procedure such as gastric bypass (DON'T DO IT!) or a duondenal switch (VERY WORTHY OF CONSIDERATION!) which rearranges your insides so you malabsorb some of your calories, it's just plain old calories in, calories out.  I had an enourmous capacity for food.  I could finish my plate and eat some of yours too.  And still have room for dessert.  So no matter how much I worked out, it could never be enough to burn all the food I ate.

Once I had my VG surgery, my capacity for food intake was dramatically reduced and I finally stood a chance to control my portion size.  Now the excercise could really have an effect.  I actually like to excercise.  It helps me control stress and anxiety and I feel strong and healthy when I'm done.  I am motivated by my work's incentive program too.  If we work out 12 times a month, work pays for our gym memebership.  So I go to the gym and do cardio at least 3 times a week.  My rule of thumb is do at least 30 minutes of something different each time (bike, stair stepper, elyptical etc).  I'm told that 40 minutes is exponentially better than 30, so I'm trying to get in those extra 10.  It's harder than you think.  I am a moring person.  Always have been.   I get up between 4 and 4:30, drink my coffee and leave for the gym by 5:30.  Usually home by 6:30 and on my way to work by 7:10.  At my desk by 7:30. 

I also try to take a walk during the day.  I work with two other wonderful women.  We circle our building at least 5 times (which is two miles).  Sometimes we talk about work and use our walk as a meeting time, sometimes we talk about home etc.  But we always have a good and productive time. 

Finally I weight train.  I really hate it.  I hate it so much that I have to hire a trainer twice a week to do it with me.  Otherwise it just doesn't happen.  I work out w/ two different trainers at Sweat Equity in Homewood, IL.  They train with kettle bells which has truly changed my body and my attitude toward weights.  Don't get me wrong, I still hate it, but I love Jeff and Carey and I love how my body has toned.

It's still a calories in, calories out equation.  In the past few months I have invited candy back into my life.  Candy, lots of it.  So I've seen my weight creep back up.  Today we took the left over Halloween Candy out of our office and put in the break room.  Nothing good is coming from a basket full of candy for 3 women who are watching their weight.

There have been many revelations that have come from being food quantity restriced.  I use that term deliverately because now that the healing from surgery is over, the year of alcohol sobriety is over, I really can eat what I want.  Too much sugar makes me feel ill, so does too much fat such as the fat in ice cream.  I often eat too much sugar.  I really try to stay away from too much ice cream.  It's just not worth it. It makes me feel super lousy.

One of the effects of my surgery and the removal of 3/4 of my stomach is the removal of a hormone called grehlin.  Grehlin makes you feel hungry and sated.  Some research has shown that obese people produce more grehlin and are therefore more hungry than non-obese people.  When the stomach is reduced in size and REMOVED (remember that the lap band and gastric bypass procedures both restrict stomach size but do not remove the actual stomach), the grehlin production is also reduced so you feel less hungry and are sated more quickly.

When you do eat, your stomach now acts like a firm glass of water versus a flexible balloon.  When a glass of water is full and you add more water, what happens?  It spills.  The glass cannot hold another drop and it doesn't expand.  When you blow up a balloon, you can usually put in a little more air and a little more for quite a while before the balloon finally pops.  My stomach acts like a glass verus a balloon.  I can only eat just so much (especially healthy foods like chicken, fish, veggies etc) and then no more.  Not one more drop.  And if I do eat one more drop, I usually throw up.  Just like the water glass spills.  Before my surgery, my stomach could expand like a balloon. 

Food loses alot of its appeal after surgery.  You must eat VERY slowly, chew completely, wait to see if you are full before you get too full.  And your tastes change too.  Things you used to love don't taste as good as they used to.  So now that you are restricted in how much you can eat, your persuit of food completely changes.  The result is tons of free time.

What I didn't know before my surgery is how much time I spent on food. I spent time thinking about food, getting food, eating food.  Feeling guilty about how much food I ate.  Rationalizing that tomorrow would be different so I may as well eat more today.  Thinking about more food, getting more food, eating more food and feeling guilty about how much more food I ate.  I know that some over eaters also spend alot of time going to get the food (think fast food, the grocery store, making up imaginary people etc).  This was not my thing. 

After my surgery all that stopped.  At first you don't feel that well (after all you've just had a pretty big surgery) and then you're just not that interested.  So now you have all this time.  Time in your head because you're not even even thinking about food.  Time in your head because you don't have anything to feel guilty about.  Time in your life because you aren't eating the food, cooking the food, going to McDonalds to get the food.  You wake up in the morning and think to yourself, "what did I do to myself yesterday?".  And instead of spending time go over it all, you think I did nothing but good.  And you're done.  Your head is clear to think about other things.

So what do you do with all this time?  Next time I'll talk about excercise, knitting, relaxing and realizing I was CREATIVE!!!!!!!!!