Status Report

It's Friday, so I figure it would be a good time to give an update on how things are coming along.

Weight...today, I thought I weighed initially at 352. After the little guy went to his grandparents house I decided I felt well enough to have a shower, so I got on the scale and checked sans baggy sweatpants and shoes, and weighed in at 350.5. Amazing how much weight your clothes can add.

So, that means I'm down since January 107.5 pounds.
Since my friend's challenge last Sunday I'm down 12.5 pounds.

Food-wise, I've liked the pudding. Chocolate, vanilla, who cares. It's good. I tried making some cream of wheat, which was more difficult than it should have been just because I was making it with milk to add more nutrition and didn't realize that while I was getting the Cream of Wheat ready to add in and putting utensils away, the milk, which I was keeping an eye on, had some kind of a skin over it that prevented me from seeing that it was bubbling. The moment I touched it with a whisk, FWOOM...it bubbled then foamed over, and I discovered what burned milk on the bottom of the sauce pan looks like.

I cleaned the pan out and tried again, being far more careful to constantly stir it. I added the CoW and stirred on low heat waiting, as the instructions said, for it to thicken. It was supposed to take a minute or two. I stirred and stirred and stirred....nothing. I had what looked like milk. I added more CoW. Stirred and stirred. Still wasn't thickening, although the color changed a little. I kept adding a touch more and stirring until finally I had something that looked like a thinned soup.

CoW is decent, a little bland, but edible. I think I'll add some cinnamon and see what that does for flavor. I'd like to add honey, but I have no idea if a touch of it will cause dumping.

Then there's baby food. I have level 1 and 2, a small variety of different flavors. So far what I've discovered:

The macaroni and cheese? Not bad. Weird thing was the first ingredient is carrot.
The pasta puree sucks.
The chicken and sweet potato? Sucks.
The vanilla custard and banana? Edible.
The corn and sweet potatoes is edible, but the corn flavor comes out more than the sweet potato. It's tolerable but not great.

It's amazing how utterly bland, if not bad, most of these baby foods taste. I was so excited to try something new, some new flavors, and what I get is bleh.

Hungerwise, I'm still not feeling physical hunger (that I can tell), but I think I have a head hunger. Here's what I've identified so far...

Physical hunger: appetite. So far that's pretty much gone still. If I'm not paying attention to the time I don't necessarily know when it's time to eat.

Impulse eating: I still fight the impulse to try some peanut butter or lick a spoon when making something like pumpkinlenta (it smells good...). It's habit. I liked cheese, so I'd grab a slice or three and eat it...I still have the impulse but I make sure to stifle it down.

Emotional eating: food is a comfort. Stressed? Sad? Angry? Food fills that hole in my heart that makes things feel better.

Habit and enjoyment eating: I think this may be tied into emotional eating to some degree. I liked to eat. If a backrub feels good, why stop after only five minutes? So too with food portions. I like eating that ham steak, so why stop at a bite or three or a quarter of the steak? Have two steaks! It's good, I enjoy it, so keep going so you can continue enjoying it! Eat until the stomach can't take any more!

That's part of the goal of this operation. From what I can figure out, my stomach was stretched out and could accomodate a lot more food than most "normals". It doesn't signal that it's full because it took so long to become full. With the new pouch, I am supposed to be able to feel full far sooner. In theory I should be punished for eating more than a moderate portion for a meal because I'll throw the food back up, and eating certain kinds of food can trigger dumping syndrome.

At least, that's what I can figure out.

Personal observations: I met one other barry patient; he was a gentleman that had laparoscopic surgery the day I went in for open RnY. He was in better health in terms of physical recovery...he was driving around and wante dot see if he could drive a mower around, for example, while I was just getting out of my shuffling around with a robe on stage. And, of course, I have this gaping hole in my midsection.

BUT...

He sounded like he was having more trouble with the liquid diet. He didn't have the diarrhea I had; something about the painkillers? But whereas I can drink nearly 20 oz of milk over the course of half an hour, he sounded like he had to take it much more slowly or he had very bad pain which he described as "swallowing a burp". He was even having to ground up pills to a powder before taking them while I'm just splitting or quartering pills and taking them all at one sitting.

Is my pouch faulty? Did something go wrong?

The lady that led the dietary class didn't seem too surprised, saying that it differs by individual how they react to the operation and how things work; some people experience dumping, some don't, some have a "fullness" or get it more slowly than others do, or have different tolerances for different foods. Worse, people can "cheat" the pouch and end up gaining back the weight. But in the previous cases people aren't punished for "breaking the rules" so they don't have the negative reinforcement to help in training new habits.

I've always thought my stomach was iron. I could eat tons of food in a sitting; no negative effects. I was rarely ever bothered by something I've eaten. If it was upset it was because I was usually about to get sicker than a dog.

I'll have to ask next time I go to the hospital what the chances are that I did something wrong or something isn't right with the pouch, I suppose. Maybe I still fall outside the norms.

Until then, though, I'm trying to make sure I stick to 4 oz. servings of food...a pudding cup, or a baby jar filled with cream of wheat or grits, unless I have to actually eat the baby food (or I get the macaroni and cheese again...that wasn't half bad).