Somewhat. Carbonated drinks can cause a painful bloated feeling. A fw sips pose no problem. If you let the drinks go flat, there is no problem either. I was never a big fan of soda’s anyway. If I want something sweet, I drink lemonade made with sweeteners.
DMark, your brother’s surgery is generally known as the RouxenY, done laparoscopically. That surgery is currently the gold standard. The long term results are well known and it is indeed generally safe. This study saw a 97 % good to excellent outcome after five years. I hope and trust you brother will be among that 97%.
I had a newer type of surgery, the Mini Gastric Bypass (MGB). There hasn’t been as much experience with that one as with the Roux-en-Y, but the results are promising. The MGB overall has a slightly lower complication rate then the RouxenY. People who had the MGB generally “dump” less, meaning, they react less badly to sugar. That can be seen as an advantage or an disadvantage depending on if the patient wants to be “punished” for taking sugar in his food.
The other two most current surgeries are the sleeve and the Duodenal Switch., or DS. Our Doper Opal had the DS and is very happy with it.
The lap-band, once seen as the least invasive and most reversible type of surgery, has the most complications and more and more hospitals no longer advise it.
I don’t know much about the other, older types of surgery.
Ah! I have heard of that book.
When my diabetic friend first went on Atkins, I did it with her for ten days in a show of solidarity. (Except you’d have to pry my coffee from my cold dead hands, so I drank coffee.) Otherwise, it was zero carb, zero sugar for ten days. And I have to say, I felt fucking amazing. Apart from wanting to hurl at the thought of eating yet another egg, cheese stick or piece of meat.
As an aside, as I’ve gotten older, I find I’m avoiding suger and carbs more and more because I get sleepy after a sugary or carb-laden meal.
Why the daily calcium supplement? Apart from the fact that it’s not a bad idea generally, especially for women.
From what I understand, less stomach means less stomach acid and as calcium is generally absorbed through the stomach, we need more calcium. It also has to be another kind of calcium, calcium citrate instead of the more common calcium carbonate.
Also, iron and calcium can’t be taken together; one inhipits the uptake of the other. That is why most specialized bariatric supplementshave iron in the multivitamin and supply the calcium in a different pill, to be taken three hours apart from the multivitamin.
Vitamin B12 is also much more difficult to get from food after surgery. That is why bariatric supplements have crazy high dosages of B12. Still, with some people vit B12 deficiency shows up in their bloodwork and then they have to get injections with B12 about once every two months.
Hello and Congratulations! You must feel fantastic. Your posts have been very informative so thanks for sharing with us.
What are your suggestions for another woman with a BMI between 34-36 who is looking into the full gastric bypass? The problem (as it usually appears to be) is BMI vs. insurance. The most recent policy I could find relating to my insurance has the typical requirement of:
“BMI of 40 or greater, or BMI of 35 or greater with co-morbid conditions including, but not limited to, life threatening cardio-pulmonary problems (severe sleep apnea, Pickwickian syndrome and obesity related cardiomyopathy), severe diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular disease or hypertension.”
My husband went with me to a surgery seminar this past Thursday night. The doctor sounds really great. But, I do not have a co-morbid condition, and therefore expect to be denied for this surgery by my insurance. I’m aware of the new FDA ruling, but since I’m interested in gastric bypass and not lapband, that doesn’t count. While he said he would absolutely work with those in the 30-35 BMI boat, it would likely be a self pay. Getting on Google and seeing posts like your own, I now feel completely defeated. Who can afford to pay $9K+?
It’s hard for me to understand a lot of things because I seem to have some affliction that is counting on others to use common sense. You’d think common sense would be a natural instinct, however, that is not the case. It’s a bunch of crap that insurance companies do not include those of us with BMI 30-35! I’m obviously on my way up - barring no miracles - to a higher BMI! I don’t want to get bigger. I want to get smaller. I don’t want to increase the number of medical conditions I have, I want to stabilize or eliminate them. But instead, the 30-35 BMI’ers are not approved for this surgery because if they were, they wouldn’t have to spend so much on their health. And insurance companies don’t want that - they’d lose money.
And similar to some of your other responders, I have also never been thin. I haven’t always been fat, but under 135lbs is an alien world to me. That’s the lowest I’ve ever been. I was about 155lbs in 1998 when I tried to sign up for the Air Force, but I had to lose 10lbs before I could actually sign up. And then I gained a few of those back during basic training. Exercising every single day and moving around from dawn to dusk. How does that happen? We always had to meet our weight requirements at our annual weigh-ins, and while I did go to the gym and workout with my girlfriends, I still found myself taking laxatives and sitting in the sauna wrapped in plastic wrap underneath sweats so I wouldn’t be over. Since 1998 (and I can probably only remember this because of the military), I have been at my lowest of 135 and my highest now of 210. I’m 5’4 and 210 does not look good on me.
Sorry for griping! Any guidance is appreciated and I will definitely check out the “…for Dummies” book.
Hope I didn’t miss this answer, but do you have a lot of loose skin now?
D had this done about 6 years ago, and she had a lot which her bariatric guy fixed for her.
Congratulations, Maastricht! 
Q
It is good that things worked out. I am considering some form of gastric surgery because I have various health problems (joint problems, hypertension, cholesterol, etc) and type 2 diabetes runs in my family. My grandpa had his first heart attack at 45 (he lived to 81 though) and my dad, despite taking a ton of medications still had one at 59. CVD, diabetes and joint problems will loom strongly in my future (my blood sugar is currently normal, but that will likely change) and gastric surgery seems the most effective way to keep them at bay.
For me a big concern is the procedure has to be reversible with relatively low complication rates. That leaves lap band, stomach plication and mini bypass as far as I know (and duodenal sleeves once those are on the market). Of all the procedures available what was the appeal of the mini gastric bypass over the others (esp the lap band, which seems to be popular)? I didn’t read the linked threads so I don’t know if that was covered. But why mini bypass instead of plication or lap band? Those procedures work well too, are reversible, have relatively low complications and cost about the same.
I’ve heard the MGB is reversible. Plication and the lap band do not cause any absorption issues, so that is appealing. So malnutrition or dumping syndrome wouldn’t be a big deal.
It seems like gastric surgery is making amazing advances in the last decade. We went from high risk, irreversible procedures like stomach stapling or roux-n-y that cost 40k to having low risk, reversible ones that cost 10-15k. That is a major reason I want something reversible, I’m sure 20 years from now something far safer will be on the market to help me lose weight and keep it off.
chrisandlisa. I wasn’t aware that in some parts of the USA, the criteria for lapband had been lowered to a bmi of 30 as of 2011.
As for advice, I’m afraid I come to the same conclusions as you do. Your options are either waiting untull you get heavier or sicker, 
get a lapband, or try losing weight another way. Or pay yourself, (and finance it somehow) or try to get it cheaper somehow. Perhaps there is some hospital that needs subjects for a new experimental method? Last year, that was the case when two hospitals in the Netherlands offered the Endobarrier to people with “lower” BMI’s. I could have participated in the Endobarrier trial, but I wanted a permanent method and the Endobarrier is temporary, although many people lose about 40 pounds with it.
Wesley Clark, by plication do you mean an hernia?
It is quite likely that in 20 years, medical science will have come up with better methods. Possibly chemical methods instead of surgical ones. In the meantime, you want to know which methods are reversible? That are all methods where no parts in stomach or intestine are removed. Up to a point, all methods I mentioned are (in theory) reversible, although it is hardly ever done, only in case of chronic complications. The gastric sleeve is the exception, as most of your stomach is removed, but the reminder stretches a bit, but not to the original size.
Quasi, indeed, a lot of people have loose skin after such a dramatic weight loss. Many say beforehand that they will not have plastic surgery done afterwards, but change their mind as they feel uglier with loose skin then they felt when fat. Plastic surgery means additional costs, often an more expensive and heavier surgery then the gastric bypass itself.
Such surgery is only covered by insurance if it rates as a deformity, ie a three on the Pittsburgh Rating Scale (Warning: page has thumbnails of nsfw (medical) pictures of women with varing degrees of loose skin folds.
Anyway, my wag (no cite) is that about half of people have really bothersome loose skin afterwards. I was lucky in this respect, as in many others: I have almost no loose skin.
Here is picture of me in bikini, made in a brave moment to show others what a truly good result looks like. If you look closely you can see the five little scars of my laparoscopic surgery. Good genes, relatively low BMI, not much jojo-ing before hand… I don’t know why I was so lucky.
I saw a man in my patient group who had an enormous belly and the ladies in the group invited his new slim self to lift up his shirt. And his loose skin was not that bad, either, so he was lucky too.
To gain some perspective on what a normal belly looks like, here is a link to the site "shape of a mother"where normal women show what their bodies look like shortly after pregnancy. (two click rule in effect, some nsfw pictures, but of real bodies. )
Is it true that some people who have had the procedure lose control of their bowels after eating certain things? I saw it on an episode of Nip/Tuck and I’m wondering if it is a real hazard or a made up one.
Gastric plication involves folding the stomach and then sewing it, which reduces its volume about 80%.
https://weightloss.clevelandclinic.org/gastricplication.aspx
Congratulations. I have been toying with the idea myself but I also keep trying to find a way to exercise more and still get all the desk time in that I need to pay bills, etc. I don’t think I can afford it without help from insurance through.
I don’t know for sure. I never hear people with RouxenY or MGB complain about it on the fora, and they certainly would complain about it if that was the case.
I do know that people who had the Duodenal Switch have more trouble with bowel movements then the gastric bypass people. In the DS, your intestines are rerouted so the bowels have far less time to absorb nutrients, especially fat. That allows people with the DS to eat more, (more volume and more fat) but the resulting stools
are more smelly, and, when they have eaten more fat, the stools are fatty and…well, that might cause diarreah. But diarreah and loss of bowel control are not the same thing.
Wesley Clark, that plication method is new to me, you know more about it then I do.
For all those people who can’t afford surger, here is little fact.
Surgery costs start at 9000 euro’s. Costs could be tax-deductable, so that means you get back about …20 %? So, that means you have to pony up 7200 dollars (8000 including additional costs.
How long to get that if you save?
If you save this much per week…in this time you’ll have $10k
$1 200 years
$5 40 years
$10 20 years
$25 8 years
$50 4 years (3 years if all you need is 8000)
$100 2 years
$200 1 year
I could think of less hopeful things to save for. And less valuable investments in one’s long-term health.
I looked up your links. Apparently, this is one of those new methods, and the Cleveland hospital currently holds a medical trial for it. They look for patients with BMI’s starting at 27. It is self-pay, but they “are willing to work with you to get it financed”. As they would, as it is in their own best interest to find guinea pigs. It might be worth it to find out what they charge.
What I read about plication on pubmed.org (just two small scale studies) taught me that the surgery is more complicated and takes longer then the MGB. That increases both risks, and costs. The main difference is that this is just a restrictive surgery without a malabsorbtive component. Frankly, I don’t see the advantages to a gastric sleeve, which is much better researched.
Quick take:
Restrictive means that you can eat less in one sitting. Advantage: you eat less and feel full sooner. Disadvantage: you can eat less and may feel hungre again sooner. And if you eat too much, you feel pain or vomit.
Malabsorbtive (Spelling?): You absorb less calories and nutrients from what you do eat. Advantage: you can eat more and not gain weight, the rest of your life. Disadvantage: you have to take nutritional supplements for life. If you don’t take them, and don’t eat well, you can become sick with vitamin deficiencies. Another (dis)advantage is that you can “dump”, ie become sick when you eat too much sugar or fat. A third disadvantage is that your stool changes, it becomes smellier as more intestine is bypassed.
The gastric bypass is restrictive and a bit malabsorbtive. The DS is less restrictive and very malabsorbtive. The gastric sleeve and plication are all restrictive.
My main source of info were the studies on www.pubmed.org. Those medical abstrachts are a fountain of knowledge if you speak Medical well enough. 
Those studies taught me that lapband has a long term complication rate of 50 % (!) That means that half of the people with a lap band had enough trouble with it in the long term to schedule another surgery to take the thing out. After which they gained weight again. The lap band is one of those things that sound good initially, but don’t solve the problem well in the long term.
The MGB has a complication rate of 5 %, a hair lower then the older Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, which has long term follow up research of over 15 years.
As for how I made a choice: I went to a top surgeon, one who did most surgeries so he wouldn’t advice me a surgery just because that was the one he performed. Then I told him about my eating patterns and I showed him my medical records. Then I asked him what he would recommend me. He said MGB, and I trusted his judgment and scheduled an MGB. For me, it would have been a gastric sleeve or an MGB anyway.
And the spam has been removed…
I’d like to mention another possibility for people interested but not insurance-covered: medical tourism.
For instance, Americans could travel to my surgeon in Belgium. Here is his profile on obesityhelp.com. Patients would be in and out of surgery in a weekend, *provided there were no complications. * The cost would be 6000 euros , or 8210 USD, and that would be tax deductable.
If you don’t mind me asking…what was your height/weight before and after surgery? I am scheduled to have MGB on 12/13/12 in Mexico. The costs in US were about $15000, so after a LOT of research I decided to do the medical tourism since it will only cost $6500. Also, the docs in mexico are more willing to do surgery on someone who has a lower BMI without making patients jump through so many hoops.