Said much more succinctly that I, thanks!
your friend is ignorant … also self-centered and lacks willpower. why not suggest for her to use “snuff” … that way her whole mouth will become one humongous cancerous growth. but, hey … she may lose five pounds … gaining back seventeen additional pounds within 1½ years.
Thanks for that valuable contribution to the thread.
OK.
This actually seems to be working, because she’s lost about 25 lbs. She has had a consult on weight loss surgery, and it looks like she is going to get it.
It seems to me that she is coughing and clearing her throat a lot, but she swears she is not inhaling. She also says she is going to quit vaping after her surgery.
I sort of wonder if the changes to her diet really have more to do with her weight loss, and also the spring weather, because she gets out more, and the more she loses, the more she moves.
She was really sedentary for a while, and then was diagnosed with depression, but by then, she had gained a lot of weight, and the first anti-depressant she was on caused her to gain more. Her meds were changed, and she lost some weight.
I dunno. I’m not an expert on this. I thought it was a dumb idea, but what do I know.
Of course, she’s also spending time reading up on nutrition, and putting a lot of effort into her meal prep, which takes up time, which she doesn’t spend just microwaving something with a lot of sugar and starch, and then doing it again, because there’s still a lot of time and she’s bored.
I also suggested to her that she should get a dog, because she will absolutely have to get out and walk every day if she has a dog. She thought that was a terrible idea back in December. Now she’s talking about doing it after she has surgery. I think maybe she’s cycling through an upswing in mood right now as well. (She’s not bipolar; I just mean even depressed people have times when they are better than other times.)
TL;DR: vaping, losing weight, but too many variables to chalk the weight loss up solely to the vaping, IMO. However, the upshot is she will probably get surgery, and then she’ll quit.
if she has diabetes, she’s eating the completely wrong kind of diet. She needs to eat a low glycemic index diet. Which means no breakfast cereal and only small amounts of fruit. It also means not-eating anything that is labelled “low fat” or “no fat” since most of those products have large amounts of sugar added to compensate for the removed fat. If she stops eating high glycemic index foods and starts eating an adequate amount of fat her “snack” cravings should go away. Some people report complete regression of diabetes symptoms if they switch to a very low carbohydrate diet (ketogenic diet).
It’s possible doing the no-nictotine vaping will keep her hands, mouth, and mind busy so she doesn’t think about eating, but offhand it really doesn’t sound like a good idea.
She’s seen a dietician. What they discussed, I don’t know, but she has seen one. It’s possible she said “Screw everything the expert said,” or not. Like I said, I think the diet changes she made may have needed some time to catch up with her, and might be more responsible for her weight loss than any vaping she’s doing.
Long as it’s just her, and she doesn’t go write a “Vape the weight away” book, I’m inclined to leave an adult alone. If she’d taken up actual smoking, she’d be hearing about it, because I don’t think she’d be able to quit after she had surgery, but I’m now staying out of it.
I put in my 2cents in the beginning that I didn’t think it was a good idea, and now I’m “wrong,” as far as she is concerned.
Guess I’m “wrong”, too.
I’m happy things are going the right direction for her. While I’m (almost) sure that health risks will eventually be tied to vaping, I guess (hope) that will be relatively minor, at least for most people. It sounds like the health and happiness benefits she is reaping from the good decisions she is making will more than outweigh any potential bad effects vaping might cause.
Well, it was a sort of “hail Mary” to try to get just enough weight off to be considered for weight loss surgery. A lot of other people might have tried things like crash diets, laxatives, extreme fasting, and other things that are just as unhealthy as vaping.
I don’t understand why a person has to lose weight before they’ll be considered for weight-loss surgery.
But I’ve known five people in my life who had the surgery: for four of them, it worked spectacularly. For one, she lost a lot of weight, and got down to a healthy BMI, then gained some back, so she ended up weighing about 180lbs., but before the surgery, she weighed over 300, so even though she was still overweight, she weighed significantly less than she did before the surgery, and I wouldn’t call it in any way a failure.
I did meet a person once who never said she had the surgery over a year earlier and never lost much weight, but from what I could gather, she’d been pushed into having the surgery by her husband and doctor, and not only didn’t really want it, but didn’t really understand the kind of diet she had to follow afterward, and was very unhappy about it.
Because at certain levels of obesity, they have a much reduced chance of surviving the surgery*. Just like elderly patients – sometimes their physical condition is too frail to do surgery.
- Actually, I think it’s the anesthesia that is a risk for obese patients – they tend to have breathing problems already, which can become life-threatening during or after surgery.
It’s also because the surgery itself doesn’t really cause weight loss. It’s a tool that makes weight loss more likely/possible. Bariatric surgery patients still have to do the actual work of losing weight – so the clinics doing it and many insurances require some level of education and practice before approving surgery, so that they know there’s a higher likelihood of the patient being successful.
Ah. That makes sense. Well, she is very determined, and her activity gets better and better as she loses weight. She’s buying a bicycle, and got me to promise to bike with her. She started walking to the store (it’s about a 1/2 miles round trip, but she used to drive because of the load of groceries). Now she walks six times a week and just gets as much as she can carry in a ruck sack. Once a week she drives and buys the things she can’t practically carry.
Her goal is to sign up for an aerobics or pilates class once she gets to 199lbs. She wants to make sure she doesn’t hurt her knees or ankles if she signs up when she’s too heavy.
She’s telling me all this now. I guess I didn’t realize she really had a long-term plan, and vaping was just a small thing she wanted to try to see if it helped.