Oops, left out “exercising” from my page search. But what jumped out to me in post 31 was your mentioning that you have a gym membership that you don’t use. You mention counting calories and not drinking soda and then mention having no control over what you eat. Which is it?
You don’t look huge in your pictures. If I saw you on the street I would never think in a million years that you’d be considering surgery.
I’ve lost 70+ pounds on Weight Watchers (hit goal last Tuesday, plan to lose about 5 more pounds), and though I’m not a man, yes, this is exactly what I (and most WW members) have LEARNED to do.
I did not have a problem with self-control, and I was not a binger or junk-food junkie. I simply ate things without regard to what I had previously eaten that day or week, or what I was going to eat later. It’s enormously helpful to keep track of what you eat and look at the big picture in order to get control of your eating.
Now, even when I’m not strictly tracking, I still keep a mental rough tally of what I’ve eaten today and how much I have left in my daily allowance. It’s a huge change, and one that I’ll need to maintain my whole life in order to maintain this weight.
I’ve also learned to enjoy foods that are better for me (I love to eat mushrooms now, because hey, they’re basically “free” pointswise) and to scorn foods that aren’t. When you learn that a generic old piece of sheet cake is more than half of your daily allowance, suddenly it looks like a horrible choice and you snag some fruit from the fruit tray for your dessert instead.
I understand the difficulty of self-control. I’m going through this with my mother, who’s struggled with her weight her whole life and has the same problem. It’s bad enough that she can’t resist the first piece of banana cream pie, but then she decides that it was so good she must have another. She needs to learn to be satisfied with a tiny sliver (if any at all) and tell herself that the sliver is plenty of a treat for her. Just because you know that something is delicious doesn’t mean you have to eat a huge amount of it, or even any. I frequently tell myself, “Wow, that chocolate cake looks sumptuous, and I love chocolate cake. BUT – I already know what chocolate cake tastes like, so I don’t need to have any. That cake is probably 2/3 of my daily points. I can’t afford it.” Or else I steal just a bite from Mr. S’s portion and stop there.
So yes, I don’t drink beer, but I might stop at one glass of wine and switch to water or diet soda. And I have learned to be happy with (to use your example) the taste of one cookie, or even half a cookie, instead of four, and still consider it a treat. It’s part of learning to eat like a thin person instead of a fat person.
I also have a hard time seeing how having the surgery will help you get your eating habits under control. If anything you will need to be MORE disciplined, not less. I fear that you see this as a magic solution and are setting yourself up for disappointment or worse.
I too wish you well, but I’m not hopeful for a good outcome here.
Three family members have undergone weight loss surgery.
One came through the surgery fine, did well after, lost a lot of weight, then gained much of it back.
One (the above family member’s husband) died while recovering from the surgery. A massive heart attack got him. The couple were supposed to be doing this together, helping each other get through it. Instead of reveling in their weight loss together the wife had to plan her husband’s funeral.
The third, my stepmother, had the surgery back in October. She did really well for a while but has taken such a drastic turn for the worse that we’re scared for her life at this point. The doctors can’t figure out what is wrong with her. Among other symptoms she can barely walk, her speech is slurred, and she is losing weight way too quickly, according to her surgeon.
She seems like someone who has had a stroke but that has been ruled out. After numerous tests including brain scans, visits to a couple of neurologists, something like 20 vials of blood taken, etc. her surgeon is asking her to strongly consider reversing the procedure.
The doctors think that part of the cause of the stroke-like symptoms may be due to extreme dehydration she suffered after the surgery. Her esophagus basically stopped working. It had been so traumatized by the surgery that the muscles that should push food down into the stomach gave up. She threw up everything she ate, drank, etc. This went on for weeks before they could figure it out. Finally they put her in the hospital and hooked her up to iv nutrition for a week or so.
She has been in and out of nursing homes, rehab centers, etc. because her health is so fragile she cannot be properly cared for in her own home. I wouldn’t wish what my SM is going through right now on my worst enemy. She is a shell of her former self, at best.
Having this surgery can be the greatest thing to ever happen to a person. I truly hope that is the case for you. My concern is that the risks of such surgery are so great that they overwhelm the benefits, at least in my not so humble opinion. YMMV.
In the beginning part of a diet a person can lose a lot of water that is retained from eating a bad diet so this can be right. A better indication of weigh loss rate would exclude the first week.
Yeah, in the last week, it appears to have leveled out to a much more normal 2-3 lbs a week. Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to maintain my crack head level of a pound of day :p, but alas, the healthy way is probably better!
I’m honestly not entirely convinced of this. She walks and bikes an hour a day – but at what intensity? Is she raising her heart rate significantly? Is she sweating? Breathing hard? A leisurely 60 minute stroll burns maybe, maybe 200 calories. That’s half a sandwich. If you power walk the entire 60 minutes, you can bump that up by roughly 100-150 calories, but that’s still not much.
The runs help, but 6 miles a week (and it sounded like she doesn’t always fit that much in) isn’t that much. For comparison, this former fat girl runs at least 20-25 miles a week, as “work out” exercise, and this is on top of “travel” exercise (walking/biking to get to my destination).
Also, as I noted above, just switching the workout to mornings before breakfast can make a huge difference. When I recently had to nuke 10 pounds, I ate a little less, and started running in the mornings, and lost a scary amount of weight in just the first 4 days (7 pounds, enough that I started eating more so as not to damage myself). The point being, that if you’re giving yourself a metabolism boost (which remains higher for several hours after exercising), take advantage of it and do it when you’ve still got several hours before you go to bed and your metabolism drops to minimal levels.
In any case, like the others, I’m not convinced that surgery will give you willpower and discipline when you haven’t found it through other methods. And it’ll be a lot more dangerous to have a bad willpower day after surgery. If this were a case of “lose 100 pounds right now or go to an early grave” I might see it, but this seems excessive.
Missed the edit window:
How much exercise someone needs to lose/maintain weight is going to vary from person to person. Some people may do just fine on 30 minutes, 3 times a week. That amount would be way too little for me, as an example. I’d gain weight on that. (To be honest, I think most people would – I’m not sure why 30 x 3 is touted as a gold standard for “enough exercise.” It may be better than absolutely nothing, but it’s still barely any.)
Oh, I fully admit I don’t know much about exercise - I’m in the middle of my own weight loss spree (I run for half an hour 3 times a week, and walk about 45 minutes a day), so I’m not at all the best person to give advice on that. But it’s not like Maastricht is utterly sedentary or anything, and I’ve found in the past that while exercise helps with your (my) fitness levels, it has never done much for weight loss - that’s all in the diet.
And what I really wanted to do was side-step the arguments about whether Maastricht just ought to exercise more to lose weight and focus on the willpower issue that seems to me to be at the heart of success, surgery or not. It looks to me like she’s seeing this surgery as some magic fix, and I’m curious as to why she thinks it will suddenly give her the willpower she admits to currently lacking. If it’s a deterrence issue, there might be other, safer, ways of achieving that same effect, for example.
Huh? 
Yes. That’s called taking responsibility for your own weight. You’re not willing to do this?
And this attitude of entitlement and refusal to exert any willpower at all will change how after surgery?
I think the hope is that after surgery that extra piece of bread will make her sick, so she won’t eat it.
And I’ve found the opposite, so there’s going to be a certain amount of trial and error before someone finds the right combination for them. I can be fairly (but not insanely) liberal in how I eat, as long as I don’t go crazy and stuff myself on a regular basis. I have a huge sweet tooth, so ice cream? cupcakes? Yeah, I can do that, a couple times a week. An extra piece of bread is not even a blip on the radar. But then again, I run for close to an hour 5 times a week. I couldn’t eat like I do if I didn’t do that. And yeah, if their current level of diet/exercise leaves someone maintaining weight, they’ll need to do more of both to lose any.
But for most people it is going to be a combination of diet and exercise, simply because eating so little as to consuming less than you expend, on a sedentary lifestyle, would leave me, at least, starving.
And I’d be more comfortable saying “Go for it” on the surgery if I were convinced she didn’t see it as some sort of magic bullet. With or without surgery, the discipline is going to be absolutely necessary.
This is probably a stupid question, but what the hell. When people say so and so “just lost water weight,” is there an expectation that this weight will come back, or is it real weight loss? I ask because if it’s likely gone for good, I’m not sure what the point of making the distinction is.
I think it’s because the water weight comes from too much salt in the diet. When you start eating well, your salt intake goes way down, and therefore it is assumed that the weight is gone forever.
However, I usually go up a pound or two just before my period, and I call this water weight. I have no idea if that’s true, and it’s gone next week when I weigh in.
That’s what calorie-counting is like for me, too. I know that if I try to deny myself a food I love I’ll end up eating it (and probably more of it) in the long run eventually. My diet has room for everything I love in it; if it’s a birthday and there will be chocolate layer cake, my exercise has to go up to make room for it, because life without chocolate layer cake isn’t a life I want to live. In my what is so far a 21 pound weight loss, I haven’t felt like I’ve denied myself anything, or used much willpower - the bottom line at the end of the day is the equation: I get x calories worth of food each day, I ate x calories, I exercised x calories off.
ETA: Which is not to say I don’t still exercise choices. If it’s plain yellow cake, no thanks - not worth the calories. 
I don’t count calories. Every attemtp of me doing so have lasted less then three days. On the other hand, I don’t care for sodas , alcohol, ice cream or fast food. So that is easy for me.
Many people mentioned that I would still have to count calories after the surgery, and if I can’t do that, how would I do it then? That is a legitimate question, and I have wondered about it myself and asked my surgeon. A large part of the solution is that I will be very less hungry. Surgery influences the levels of the hormone ghrelin in the blood, and that hormone influences how much hunger we feel. Another part is the nausea and discomfort if I would eat too much. I really don’t know, but I asked my surgeon about this and he said it would not be a problem.
Gruntled, don’t you think the words " arrogance" and entitlement are a little heavyhanded when we are talking about me wanting another slice of bread at a meal?
Your surgeon is trying to sell you on a procedure that will make him a bundle of money. He is not an unbiased source of information.
I met people in Weight Watchers who ate their way around every weight loss surgery there is. Many of them had gastric bypasses.
Part of the problem with most overeaters is that eating has a psychological component, and is not just a response to feelings of hunger. The feeling of hunger goes away after consuming a relatively small amount of food. When you reach for that extra slice of bread at the end of the meal, as you describe, you are not feeling hungry at that moment. Your physical hunger is already sated.
And yes, you are an overeater. Anyone who eats more calories than they expend is an overeater. It’s the very definition of the term.
You seem like a nice person and I think it would be great if you succeeded in losing weight, with or without the surgery. But all my acquaintances who failed with gastric bypass had the same attitude as you–they didn’t want to have to exercise any self-discipline. They wanted the surgery to do it all. And in the end, their surgeries were expensive failures. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
I think before you have surgery, you need to develop a positive attitude about what you CAN do to combat your psychological desire for food.
There is no way you are fat enough for surgery Maastricht. My recommendation is that you move to the United States, where people will compliment you on how thin you are.
d & r
If you are getting a lot of hostility here, it is probably because you are taking a relatively minor problem that thousands of people solve with a simple and free solution, and rather unconvincingly arguing that this solution won’t work with you, and instead you need a relatively massive, dangerous and expensive solution. It’s like arguing that you need to take a helicopter to work instead of walking, when work is only a block away.
That’s going to rankle the people who have worked hard to control their weight, as well as people who medically need this sort of surgery and don’t have the resources for it.