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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!!!!!!!!!

One of the things you commit to before embarking on Surgery for Morbid Obesity (weight loss surgery-whatever!) is not to drink alcohol.  One reason is caloric.  There are a lot of non-nutritional calories in alcohol so you don't want to drink them and slow your progress.  The other reason is because your body can't necessarily handle the alcohol (liver, kidneys etc.) AND the rapid weight loss.  My weight loss was not so fast.  But I made the committment.  I was going so far as to have this surgery, which I thought was quite dramatic, I was not going to take any chances of slowing down weight loss or messing w/ my essential bodily functions.

For some, not drinking alcohol is no big deal.  For me it was a super big deal.  I learned a lot about myself in my year of sobriety.  For one thing, I learned that I could be as mind altered from over eating as I could from over drinking.  Doing either of these things takes your mind away from solving problems, dealing with life etc.  They are both mind numbing activities.  My point is that I learned how much I failed to feel and deal with life while I was intoxicated with food or drink.

I learned so much "in the sobriety".  For one thing, I learned how stupid people can act when they drink too much.  The only people who think you are funny are people as drunk as you.  The rest of us think you are an idiot.  I was one of those idiots. I thought I was hilarious.

But more importantly, I learned how to listen to people.  I was not put at a party to be the entertainment.  I learned to sit quietly, talk to people about what was going on, listen and learn.  It was wonderful.  People are amazingly interesting if you can just take a little time to get to know them.  I learned to leave if I was uncomfortable or having a bad time or just had enough.  I learned to take better care of myself.  And then, because I didn't drink, I was ready to get up the next day, work out and feel great.  No food or drink hangover.

I also learned that sometimes I needed something to do with my hands.  I couldn't drink much and I couldn't eat much and sometimes, I wasn't always comfortable or interested in talking/listening. So I started to knit.  And since I was most concerned about making through the party rather than how goofy I looked, I'd bring my knitting.  That first half hour was painful for me and knitting took the edge off.  I imgine some people thought I was rude or inappropriate, but I just couldn't be concerned about that.  Knitting is beautiful, and tactile and relaxing and I love it.  I have made beautiful things with my new friend.  I don't take my knitting to parties any more, but it sure helped me in my first year post op.

More about life in sobriety next time. 

I spent a lifetime either being fat or thinking I was fat.  Finally I really was.  I had about 95 pounds to lose.  I could not imagine a way to lose it and keep it off.  I had done my share of Weight Watchers, South Beach and liquid protein.  It's just that I could only stick to it for a day, a week, or a month at a time.  I lost the most weight with Optifast, a liquid protein diet that is medically supervised.  I drank 5 protein shakes a day, 800 calories.  I lost a lot of weight.  I was on the diet for 11 weeks.  I never went off the plan.  We'll talk more about that later if anyone is interested. I was starving when I did it and eventually gained it back and more.  That is all of our stories.

I had to do something different.  I would not have gastric bypass surgery.  I knew about 8 people who did and only one or two of them was as fit and thin as I wanted to be.  So regardless of the medical data that said this was a good idea, I didn't think so from what I saw.  I guess that a 75 pound weight loss is great, but not if you have 75 to go to be thin enough.  Lap band sounded like a total disaster to me.  And worse than all this was how many medical institutions offered to do these procedures. 

I learned about two surgeries for Morbid Obesity (as defiened by a BMI of 40 or more) that sounded different and better than either a Gastric Bypass or Lap Band.  One is called a Duodenal Switch (which is both restrictive and malabsorbtive).  Other procedure is what I had which is called a Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomey (or Vertical Gastrectomy (VG) or Sleeve Gastrectomy).  Both of these surgeries have been performed in Europe and Mexico for longer than in the US. 

The Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy (or VG for short) began as a phase one procedure.  Patients who were candidates for the Duodinal Switch might have needed to lose a "quick" 100 pounds before the more complicated procedure was safely performed.  Some never went back for the second phase because the first was effective enough.  More infor is available on all these procedure from obesityhelp.com.

With a VG, all but about 50-60 cc's of your stomach is removed completely. You end up w/ a stomach about the size and shape of a finger.  So you are restricted in how much you can eat because your stomach is so small.  It functions the same as it always did but now you can only eat as much as a thin person eats. 

That's the big secret.  If you only can eat as much as a thin person eats, then you get thin.  That's how think people do it.  They don't eat like we do.  They either can't do it, aren't interested in it, don't have the capacity etc. 

Can you even imagine what it's would be like to not be ABLE to eat everything on your plate?  This is my new normal.