Restriction and 6 months

One of the best parts of the sleeve is restriction.

One of the worst parts of the sleeve is restriction.

The good part is that it forces you to limit what you eat. Let me tell you from personal experience, if you eat too much, even one tiny little bite over where you know you should stop, you risk feeling pretty crummy. You end up feeling like you ate a 10 course meal after 1/4 cup of food. You learn quickly where to stop yet temptation rises from time to time and you just HAVE to have 1 more bite and you pay for it.

Restriction from stress is the most annoying part though. Amazing how our bodies react to stress, it reacts in ways you never imagined. Like in your stomach tensing up and not being able to eat more than a few bites. This is where I am at right now. And it is not fun. To give you an idea of stress restriction today I started off the day with half a string cheese. Normally I can eat a whole one. For lunch I had 2 tortilla chips with a little salsa and about 1 tablespoon of shredded chicken in an enchilada dish at Church. For dinner I ate 2 tortilla chips and 1/4 of a chicken croissant. I just ate another 1/4 of the croissant. These are the small ones too so you can picture how little it really was. There was no room for any other snacks, nothing because my sleeve has tightened up so drastically. What a pain!

So after all that complaining, I will say I am still glad I had the surgery. It has been 6 months since I went under the knife and sit only 5 lbs from goal and I am not even concerned with losing that last 5 lbs. Apparently in person I look much smaller than I am, MUCH smaller. The latest comment was between 115-125 lbs! Craziness! And this came from different people at different times. I weigh 155 lbs right now. Granted I always was able to hide my weight well when I was around the weight I am now. I fit my wedding dress. I fit clothes I wore in high school. It is crazy! I am officially in the size goal I wanted to hit. So I am fine where I am, I don't care if that stupid BMI scale still lists me as overweight, whatever.

I am down a total of 85 lbs and who knows how many inches, I will take those again sometime this week. I go in soon for my 6 month check up and I am pretty certain this time my labs will be off. I am guessing I am anemic but that is nothing new, I spent most my life anemic. I see a different surgeon since my is deployed and I am so curious to see what this surgeon will say regarding my weight. I will also begin the fight for reconstructive surgery. After 3 c-sections in 2 1/2 years and having carried twins, my stomach is destroyed and only surgery will fix it at this point.

All that late night rambling just to say I still love my sleeve, even when the restriction hits hard. The results have been well worth it.

"I don't remember that"

Twice tonight I heard the words "I don't remember that" And this was after showing my before pictures. It's amazing how quickly we can forget just what a person we see all the time looked like. I know for me, I find myself forgetting just how far I have come in 5 1/2 months. I am now down 81 lbs. I am 9 lbs from my goal. So stinkin close! Yet at times I feel like I am still just a fat cow. At other times I feel like I have always been as "skinny" as I am now.

Lately there have been so many compliments, this is hard for me to take. I do not like receiving so much attention but at the same time it serves as a good reminder of how much I have changed. I am the same opinionated and sarcastic person I have always been but I don't hide so much from other people I do not know anymore. I am not ashamed of how I look, of course I still struggle with the new image I see in the mirror and constantly wonder if what I see is real but that is normal, especially this early out. So many people comment not only on how I look but how I carry myself, I stand a little taller, I have grown out of feeling the need to dress in frumpy fat clothes, I dress my age, I experiment with styles now instead of looking for the biggest thing I can find to cover my lard up. I put a little more effort into how I look including hair and makeup. My husband loves it. Most men don't encourage shopping but mine, well, lets just say he has restocked my side of the closet ha!

People are starting to see the real me again, the me that was hidden for so many years after struggling to get a handle on my weight. I have even started taking pictures again when I have hidden from the cameras for so long.

And now I am at a point where I am trying to fix the years of damage done to my body, it will take plastic surgery to fix my stomach, there is no question there. I have been on the wait list for 2 years anyways to fix that, long before I even considered WLS. After 3 c-sections in 2 1/2 years, the last of which being twins, there is no hope in my stomach naturally going back to what it ought to be. Just tonight I couldn't help but laugh at the reaction of several ladies who had no idea just how much is left of my stomach, it hides well under clothes but once you grab a handful, it is shocking. Needless to say their jaws dropped when they saw just how much was hiding ;)

So here I am in the home stretch, ready to hit my goal!