3 Weeks Post Op

Yesterday was my 3 week post op appointment. Again, it wasn't with my surgeon, just the nurse. Sigh. I am pretty sure at this point that the surgeon's business is too big for his own good as I rarely see him for anything and things around there are so confusing. Regardless, it was a really good appointment still. Of course the first order of business was the weigh-in:

This is 10 lbs lost since my 1 week appointment. I am definitely happy with that. I have been really working my tail off making the right food choices, getting in all my protein, getting in all my water, and going for my walks. My total loss now in 3 weeks is:

Whoo hoo! I'll take it. It's tough not to wish it was an even 30 but really, in the past it could take me 3 months to lose this much weight, so I will not complain ;)

I asked her all of my questions... the pain in my stomach is most likely caused by scar tissue. She says I probably pulled it away from my abdominal wall when I felt like I "pulled the muscle"... my aunt had told me the exact same thing (from her own previous experience) so with two sources I'm going to believe it I guess lol. I just hope it stops hurting soon.

As for strength training, I am supposed to wait until 6 weeks to do any. She said if I REALLY want to do some, no more than 5 pounds, but she would prefer if I just wait. Swimming on the other hand, I can do as soon as my incisions are healed up. I'm guessing another week to week and a half for that. I would really love to do some swimming, and that would be a good way to be getting an arm workout without lifting weights.

Also I mentioned that my back pain is out of control and the prescription the surgeon gave me at my last visit (for Ultram) didn't do anything to help. She suggested Celebrex, but said I need to go to my PCP to get that prescribed. So sometime soon I'll have to get an appointment for that. She said it's the only NSAID that is okay to take for whatever reason... sounds good to me.

As for Ian, he had his one week appointment and got his drain pulled. He did better with that than I did lol. He has been walking the past few days and eating his soft food diet of yogurt, cottage cheese, refried beans and egg beaters. His pain is getting better but he is actually having a harder time than I did and needed a refill on his oxycodone. We both thought he would heal faster than I did but that hasn't been the case so far. But the good news is the medicine is really helping him. He even worked from home for 6 hours today.

As for his weigh in, in his first week he lost:

16 pounds! Yay for my honey!

We also had to go to new nutrition courses this week. Ian went to his one-week class but we BOTH went to the 3 week class, so he doesn't have to go back to that later. Unfortunately when we tried to go we were running late (their fault, not ours) and then we get to the elevators and they are not functioning. So we had to hike up SIX flights of stairs to make it to class. In our shape this was really hard. I did okay, but Ian is only one week out so it really took all of his energy. Of course after class, when we had to go DOWN, the elevators were working. LOL. Oh well, I guess we burned some extra calories :)

I am really looking forward to doing my one month photos and measurements and making some comparisons!! 10 days to go! I have so much more to blog about but I'm so behind... more posts coming soon.

Manic Monday

Today I'm participating in Manic Monday :)




Basically on Monday you take pics of the things you do throughout the day and then blog about it at the end of the day!

So, today I started my morning with a walk. Since I am now post weight loss surgery, I have been walking almost every day for the past two weeks, increasing my time and/or distance whenever I can. I wanted to join my friend this coming weekend on a walk for epilepsy (her son has it) and she said it is a 5K (aka 3.2 miles)... which sounded like a lot and I wasn't sure I could do it. So I needed to see how far I am normally walking right now so I could get an idea of if I'd be able to do it or not. I got this app on my phone called walkmeter so I tried it out on my walk today.

Whoo hoo! I walked 2.48 miles which means yes I CAN do the 5K this weekend :) I felt proud. If you want to see more about this app, I went into detail about it here on my health blog.

My friend Taryn accompanied me on the walk today and by the way, it was HOT out. Much too hot for me at 80 degrees at 9:30 in the morning. The sun was baking us so we decided to go through the sprinklers in the park.

After I rested a while after my walk, I took a little trip to Target. My grocery trips are pretty small these days, but I did need a couple of things.

Besides my groceries I also found a cheap tank top (for walking in) and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 was on sale for $5! I really like that movie because of the location - I loved my trip to Greece and I get to relive it a little when I watch this movie :)


Because of surgery, I haven't been to Starbucks in a while, at least not for coffee. But I HAVE been enjoying this frosty treat...

Yep, water. Exciting, isn't it? Would you laugh if I told you it actually is? :) hehe. Since there is a Starbucks in Target I usually get a free ice water to drink while I'm shopping, or to take home with me. It was 95 degrees when I left Target, so this went down reaaaallly nicely.

OK next, this picture is not FROM today, but I received it today so it is going to make an appearance. This is me and Brandy (the one I'll be doing the 5K with this weekend) at her birthday party on New Year's Eve. She just now got these photos from a friend who took them at the party, and she passed this on to me. I love it :)

Tonight was also Ian's first time going for a walk post-op. I went with him so I got in a second walk for today! He was able to go for 30 mins and quite a bit faster than I was able to do my first time out. I'm so proud of him!

It was really nice walking in the evening with no sun beating down on me, but all the bugs everywhere wanting to fly into my mouth made it a little less pleasant lol. All in all it's been a really nice day!

Walkmeter iPhone App

I don't know if I would call this a review, as I haven't really gotten into all of the features or anything. But I did want to share this app because I tried it out today and I really really like it. I wish I had been using it since my first walk, especially since I already had it on my phone... but I just didn't think about it and I'm kicking myself now! I wish I could compare and see how much progress I've made in the last two weeks.

Anyway so here it is - Walkmeter for iPhone and iPod Touch.

When I start my walk I just hit "start." It paused when I stopped to take a picture, and then I just had to hit start again, and it kept it all as one walk. When I was finished with my walk I clicked "done", and this is what I saw:

How awesome! I see the length of my walk, my average pace, the distance I covered, and the calories burned (based on my weight which I input in the settings.) If you look at the bottom of the picture you can see I'm on the "stopwatch" screen. Then I clicked over to the "map" screen.

Now how awesome is this. My walk - on a map. It even shows my starting point (the green bubble), and the points where I hit 1 mile and 2 miles. Mile markers! This for some reason amazed me lol.

I then saved this route, calling it Fox Run Figure 8... it makes me think of a figure 8 because I start in the middle, loop to one side, returning and then looping the other side and coming back to my starting point. Next is the calendar screen...

This is another one of my favorite features. It will keep all of your walks on a calendar. You can store a year's worth of walks (or runs!) and look back at every single walk you have done. As you can see above this shows the recap of pace, time, distance, and the name of the route. If I click the arrow for that walk, I get to see all of the stats:

I love that I can look back on all of this stuff for any walk, not to mention that I will automatically have a calendar of all the days I have walked. I also think the graphs are so much fun, seeing my elevation changes and my pace fluctuations. The huge spike at the end was the last couple of minutes when I slowed way down to cool down. I realized I should probably stop the clock before I do that because it probably drags down my 'average pace'. My usual pace was more like 18 min/mile but at that end part was 33 min/mile so it gave me an average of 21 min/mile. It is just going to be so much fun to see how I progress in my walking. I have already gotten so much better in just two weeks. The first day it took me 30 minutes to walk just one tiny portion of this walk and now look at me :) whoo hooo.

I think this app is really neat and I have lots more playing around to do with it but I wanted to share in case anyone else has an iPhone and could benefit from this! I believe it is $4.99 in the app store.

Things I've Been Eating

Since being told I could move on to the soft food diet, I've been so happy! I wanted to share the things I've been eating.

Denver Scramble

This doesn't contain ham because I didn't have any, but I bought some yesterday and I plan to add it the next time around. I used egg beaters (forget exactly how much i made, I think around 3/4 cup in liquid form)... added 1/4 cup shredded colby jack cheese, salt and pepper, and diced up onions, red peppers, and green peppers. Next time I'll use ham and I'll also calculate out everything so I can share this as an actual recipe with nutritional info.

This was my prep:

Relish Tuna Salad

This is the first thing I ate when I came home and was allowed to try soft foods. It turned out so tasty. I used two small tuna packets which equaled about 5 ounces. Here is my 'recipe':

- 5 oz tuna

- 2 tbs light or fat free mayo

- 2 tsp mustard

-2 tsp sweet relish

- 2 tsp finely diced onion

Right now (2 1/2 weeks post op) I can eat about 2 to 2 1/2 ounces of this.

Edamame (Soy Beans)

I figured this was a good choice because it is both a vegetable AND a protein source. In general veggies or fruits should be a small portion of my meal right now but this had as much protein as some of the other things I've been eating... so I had 1 oz of these beans, sprinkled with sea salt, and 1 oz string cheese as my meal. The beans are fairly soft to begin with but I chewed them very well to make sure they were soft enough going down. I found this brand at Target and they are already fully cooked so I only have to nuke in the microwave for about 30-45 seconds and they are ready to go.

Frigo Light Mozzarella String Cheese

I picked out this brand of light string cheese to try (also from Target) and I am very happy with how it tastes. It tastes like full fat, delicious mozzarella. Each stick is one ounce... I thought maybe this was by weight (not volume) so I tore one up into pieces to see if it fit in my 1 oz shot glass, and it did. So it is truly a volumetric ounce. 1 oz has a whopping 8 grams of protein, wow! That's great. I have been having these with some of my meals, either a full stick or just half depending on what else I'm eating.

Cantaloupe

Figured this was good as a soft fruit... this is what I had for breakfast today with my egg beaters. I did about 1 1/2 ounces of the egg beaters and 1 ounce of the cantaloupe. I think I should do less cantaloupe next time though, keep my focus on the protein source. It tasted soooo delicious though :) Refreshing. This is my first fruit since surgery.... other than licking a cherry the other day LOL. Yep, licked it.

Chicken Salad

I do plan on making my own chicken salad and I have all the stuff to do so... but I LOVE the chicken salad they make at Target so I just had to get a container. It is so very tasty. I had 1 1/2 ounces of it with 1/2 ounce of light mozzarella.

These are the things I've been eating so far. I was posting some of the pics on Facebook today and a friend/loyal reader said she was surprised how much they let me eat and that she thought it would be a lot less. Keep in mind that I bought these small dishes expressly for the purpose of making my small portions look bigger and helping me feel more normal and satisfied. As a reminder, here is one of the photos from when I bought the dishes so you can see how small they are:

(Dinner plate, salad plate, my tiny appetizer plate)

It gave me an idea though, I'll have to put one of my meals on my regular dinner plate next time as a comparison. I guess I should look at it like, if my meals are looking large, then I accomplished my goal because that's what the small dishes were supposed to achieve :)

Feeding the Hunger

I hate to borrow from Weight Watchers, but I think their hungry monster is the cutest thing ever LOL.

So I have been struggling with major hunger since day one of my surgery and it has been incredibly frustrating. I kept wondering if something was wrong with my surgery and it wasn't going to work, or if something was wrong with me and everyone else was tougher than I am... something like that. As you know I was on one ounce of select soft foods every two hours. I was still hungry ALL the time.

Well yesterday as we were getting ready to leave the hospital, I had a stroke of good luck. Kim came in to talk to Ian. She is the head of the entire bariatric program at the hospital. She was asking us questions about our experiences and how everything went since doing the VSG (Sleeve) is still such a new thing there. Funny she made a comment about always going to see each patient, cuz I never saw her! But that's okay, she redeemed herself! I mentioned to her that I had been hungry this whole time, that I was on the restricted soft foods, one ounce every two hours, etc. She told me that was way too restrictive and that if I was experiencing hunger, I should advance to the full soft foods diet... and ALSO I could have anywhere from 1 to 4 ounces every 2-3 hours!

I asked, how can I advance to the next food stage when the class isn't until Wednesday? I don't really know what I can have. She took the time to write down some notes for me!

So as of now I can have:
- Any meat that I can mash up to a mushy consistency. The easiest things are tuna salad and chicken salad but I can do other things too.
- Some fruits and vegetables that are soft and chewed well
- Any kind of fish
- Peanut butter
- Soft cheeses, white cheeses are preferred because they have less fat
- Protein bars, the more dense the better, no hard crunchy ones
- Soups and Chilis

Each meal should be at least 90% protein, only 10% complex carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables.

She also said that even though they usually do not crack down on the 'no drinking during or after meals' until you're on completely solid food, that I should start now and see if it helps with my hunger. So I am not drinking after my meals for an entire hour.

I started that yesterday, and also had some tuna salad that I made up, which I was able to eat 2 ounces of. It helped, but I still felt hungry sooner than I should. The next meal was more tuna and I had 2 1/2 ounces, and this time I felt full the whole rest of the night.

Today has been great - no hunger bothering me today!! This morning I had egg beaters with cheese, diced onions and red and green peppers, of which I ate 2 ounces. My next meal was more of the tuna salad - 2 ounces. My third meal was 1 ounce chicken salad with a 1 oz mozzarella string cheese. My fourth meal was 1 ounce chicken salad and 1 ounce edamame (soy beans). The only time I've felt hunger today is right before I go to eat again, and most of these meals have lasted me 3 hours, not just two!!

I am feeling SO RELIEVED. Nothing is wrong with me, I just needed more substantial food in a larger amount. The thing is, the Sleeve is a 3-4oz stomach right off the bat, whereas gastric bypass patients have a 1oz stomach to start. Since the sleeve is new and not popular yet due to no insurance coverage, they group us with the bypass people. We have their nutrition classes, their instructions and guidelines... but a bigger stomach!!! I mean I can't even eat the 3-4 ounces yet which is great, but I can eat 2 - 2 1/2 so no wonder I was fricken hungry all the time... I was never filling my stomach more than half way with each meal! Kim said they have a lot of work to do developing the program for the sleeve, and this is obviously a major oversight right now. My surgeon was just telling me "the hunger will go away." Kim is a Dr. as well as the director of this whole program so I trusted her too and obviously she was right. I feel so much better and finally feel HAPPY that I did this instead of worried that something was wrong.

Cheers to no hunger pains!!!

Hubby's Surgery

I'm sitting at the hospital and not too long ago the surgeon came to tell us that Ian was in recovery and his surgery went beautifully - perfect, even. Great news. We have been waiting patiently... I'm here with my dad and Ian's parents. They said he would get to leave recovery and go to his room about 15 mins from now so I am really looking forward to seeing my sweet hubby. I'm sure he's very sleepy.

He was in great spirits this morning and excited about his surgery. I snapped a photo of him once he had his IV and everything.





So cute, except for the way-too-short haircut :-P He did it for comfort during his recovery so I guess I have to let it slide :)

As for myself... It is tough to be out all day long during this phase of eating. I brought a lunch box filled with little one ounce cups of cottage cheese and yogurt. I drank some protein shake this morning and will have some more tonight but I'm sure I won't get enough today. I went to the cafeteria with my dad for his lunch and thought how much easier this will be when I can eat regular food... They had roast turkey which would have been the perfect choice for me. To have portable snacks would be nice too. Carrying around this lunch box all day is not ideal... But at this stage it is my only choice and that's ok :) I can deal.

Looking forward to seeing hubby soon and I'll update again. If you haven't seen it yet, I have a video update posted below!

2 Week Video Update

Password: healthupdate

2 Weeks Post Op from Christie Stearns on Vimeo.