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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!!!!!!!!!