One Year Followup

Today was my day to visit my surgeon/doctor in the bariatric department.

As I had already posted, April 7th was my one-year anniversary for the surgery. Now I periodically go in for followups.

So how I'd do? Well, he didn't give me huge kudos, but he didn't tell me how I screwed up either. He looked at some vitals and change in medications since last time, asked a couple questions (Pains? Digestive issues? Etc.,) and then said that it looked like I had plateaued. He asked about my eating habits, and my wife made sure I mentioned my snack of fruit/vegetables with peanut butter. To paraphrase:

"Okay," he said. "There's no problem with peanut butter. Or vegetables. But if you're going to break the plateau, you need to be careful about how much you eat. Patients sometimes learn to graze, and you can easily take in 3,000 calories a day just eating a little bit the entire day." Which, of course, will stymie the whole losing weight thing.

He suggested that something has to go. The snack, or a meal, but something had to be cut out. If I liked the snack, I could make it a meal.

Okay...

I said it was hard to not know what number I should be aiming for with my weight, since I've been stuck in the 270 to 275 range for the past couple months. He said, "Hang on..." and left the room, coming back a few moments later and saying, "230."

"230?"

"Three months out of surgery you should weigh 230. If you that number in two more years, you hit a home run."

I can do that. I'm sure of it. Two years to lose fifty pounds?

What I think I can do first is tweak my meal preps to trim excess calories there first. tweak here, tweak there. Trim calories. Trim some more. See what gradual changes add up to.

So now I'm super stoked about trying to lose weight until I hit my "target weight", not that I have one. The hard part will be adding in several small changes to tweak my caloric intake, then integrating them into a new habit, since it takes something like 21 days of consistently following a pattern to establish a new habit.

But the big thing to keep my eye on is that I now have a solid number, and a definite deadline by which to hit it!

The rest of the day was celebration. I had taken the day as a sick day, and my wife took the day to accompany me (I was going to the doctor and their lab for blood analysis and I didn't know how long it would take, so I took the day as a sick day. I was at the doctor. It counts.) We hit the Sam's Club, we hit the comic shop, the book store, and a few other errands. My wife even celebrated by giving me a couple of wonderful cards congratulating me on the progress I've made and giving me a $50 gift card to Barnes and Noble! I was really surprised by that. I couldn't even spend it when we stopped there because I really wanted to find something that just screamed, "IF YOU LEAVE WITHOUT BUYING ME YOUR PANTS WILL EXPLODE." Nothing screamed that to me. I'm saving it for a special occasion instead.

So that was my day. The doctor didn't yell at me, the lecture was set to minimum. I have to tune my eating habits a bit more. And I need to lose about fifty pounds. Not too shabby, all things considered!