What Low Carb Really Means for Me

There are two approaches to eating after surgery:

#1 - Eat whatever you want, just in smaller amounts

#2 - Eat a high quality low carb, high protein diet

My doctor recommends #2 and I wholeheartedly believe in it. I am sure there are lots of people out there who can eat whatever they want in smaller amounts and lose the weight. For me, I am battling internal demons that if I let them loose to have 1 cookie will maniacally take over and make me eat the whole bag.

It works best for me to keep those little demons (otherwise known as emotions) in the box. That means, I eat a low carb, high protein diet. I still get to eat things I enjoy... steak, cheese, almonds, vegetables, yogurt, etc. What I avoid are super processed foods like chips, cookies, and ice cream. It is best for me to avoid them because I know they are a trigger for me. What do I mean by a trigger? It's something that once I start eating, I have a very hard time stopping. It's like I turn into a zombie almost.

So what do I really mean when I say low carb, high protein? I mean I always eat my protein first at every meal. It's weighed beforehand so I know how much I'm putting on my plate. If I have room left, I eat vegetables. Lately, I have had very little room left for the vegetables, but that's okay. Protein is my number one goal right now. I eat anywhere from 60 to 80 grams of protein per day. A typical day right now plays out like this:

Breakfast: Premier Protein Shake for 30 grams of protein
Lunch: 3 oz of whatever protein we had the night before, some veggies for around 20 grams of protein
Dinner: 4 oz of whatever protein we have planned (chicken breast, steak, pork chops, sausage, ground beef, shrimp, etc) and a few bites of veggies for around 30 grams of protein

Bam! That's 80 grams of protein easy. Some days I don't feel hungry at all and other days I'm a ravenous beast. I don't know what causes the differences. If I'm super hungry I'll eat 1 oz of lunch meat with 1 slice of ultra thin cheese or a handful of almonds.

It is not unusual for me to end up under 20 grams of net carbs for a given day. I never go over 40 grams of net carbs per day. My grams of sugar per day stay under 10. I've found that products with sugar alcohol don't bother my stomach, but they STOP my weight loss, so they are off the table right now.

There are many, many more things available to me on the diet, but I have found an eating pattern that I'm comfortable with for right now. So, in answer to the question... what DO you eat on a low carb diet? A lot of meat and vegetables (no, potatoes are not a vegetable... they are a starch). So, that's what low carb means for me

Let's Talk Stage 1

I will preface this by saying I am not a medical professional and every doctor has different recommendations for the stages to follow after surgery. Please follow what YOUR doctor says.

For me, Stage 1 was Clear Liquids.

Clear Liquids include:

Broth (beef, chicken, etc)
Sugar Free Jell-O
Sugar Free Popsicles
Low sugar juice mixed with water (good luck finding that one)
Water

Mmmmm! I know you're drooling just thinking about it. Here's how I got through that lovely stage. It really, really helps that I wasn't hungry at all. I drank everything other than water out of duty. I probably didn't drink non-water things as often as I was supposed to, but my doctor didn't really have a schedule or time frame listed on anything.

#1 White Miso Soup - It comes in little envelopes that are powder and some dehydrated mushrooms. Mix with 1 cup of warm water and voila... salty, pretty tasty Miso soup. I ran mine through the strainer to remove the mushrooms and spices. It took me all day to finish the one cup this made. I ate around 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup those first couple of days.

#2 Swansons Flavored Broth- After 2 days of White Miso Soup, my store was out of the packets and I was burnt out on the taste. So, we journeyed to Wal-Mart in search of the flavored broths I had heard about. I got the Tortilla Chicken infused broth and it was yummy! It tasted so different than the Miso soup and my mouth was ready for a change.  They have more flavors that I haven't tried yet. As the week progressed, I slowly ate more at a time. By the end of the week, I could do 1/2 cup of broth at a meal (Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner). As my ability to drink more at a time increased, I decreased the frequency of my broth intake.

#3- By Saturday, I was sick of being at home and getting pretty tired of soup. So, my mom and I went to the movies. We saw a cute, but predictable movie called "Age of Adeline". Afterwards, we went to the local Chinese restaurant and picked up some egg drop soup. I ran in through my strainer to drain out the eggs and chicken chunks, etc. It was heaven in my mouth! I know many doctors will say this isn't technically a clear liquid, but I didn't care. Since it was thicker than broth, I stepped back to 1/4 cup at a time. With the new thicker liquid, I also took a few sips then waited 10 minutes to see if it would agree with my stomach. It did!

Yes, sugar free Jell-O and sugar free Popsicles are on the list you see above. I tried. they were gross. The sweet taste made me want to gag. It just wasn't working for me. Your taste buds change after surgery for awhile. I don't know why, but they do.  Though, I will say I still find sugar free jell-o and popsicles to be nasty,  vile things that one should never be required to eat.

Yes, I could have made my own broth, but I'll be honest I was too damn tired to care about it. My husband says he doesn't know how I survived that week on nothing but that little bit of broth here and there. I just wasn't hungry and drank enough to get through it. Lots of people end up with a lot of nausea after surgery. I was blessed to not have that during the clear liquid stage.

I absolutely did not count calories or protein or anything during this phase. For me, it was about healing and following the instructions from my doctor to the best of my ability.

Surgery Day Flashback

Okay, so I left off at my last weigh-in before surgery.

The day of surgery is pretty much a blur. There's a good 6 to 8 hours of time that I don't remember at all. I remember them taking me to my room and me saying that I hurt and I wanted to walk. Everyone thought I was insane. They gave me more drugs and I slept for another 3 or 4 hours. At that time, the nurse came in and I asked to get up and walk. So, she took out my catheter and I took my first walk.

Ahhh! It felt good to get up. When you have laprascopic surgery, they fill your abdomen up with air. They try to push it all back out, but it doesn't all come out. You end up with the air trapped in some places like up by your shoulders. Walking is the only thing that makes it move and eventually go away. That first night all I could have was a couple of ounces of ice chips every few hours. My mouth was very dry, so that ice felt like heaven every time they brought it in.

My room was right over the helicopter pad and there were 8 life flights that night. Every time one came or left, it woke me up. So, I got up and walked some more. Next morning they told me I'd have to stay in the hospital another night due to an elevated white cell count. I wanted to cry, but it was for the best. My husband hung around with me part of the day, then headed home before traffic got bad.

Day 2 meant I was able to have something other than ice. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were all the same. You know those little containers they put salad dressing in at some restaurants?  They brought me three of those for each meal. One of chicken broth, one of unsweet tea, and one of sugar free orange jello. I sipped the broth for each meal. I wasn't hungry, but they wanted me to eat to see if I would get nausea. Nope! I was fine.

The most heavenly thing on the tray was a bottle of water! I was very excited to see that after nothing but ice chips. Day 3 rolled around and I was good to go home. Woohoo!!! I asked for a dose of pain medicine before I left because I was concerned about a bumpy car ride home. I probably didn't have to have it, but I figured better safe than sorry.

Really, the physical pain of the surgery and recovery was pretty minimal. I only took pain medicine in the hospital once and then once again for the car ride home. After I got home, I took one dose the first two nights to make sure I could sleep. Then, I was good with liquid Tylenol maybe once or twice per day.

Tomorrow... the clear liquid diet, otherwise known as I will never eat chicken broth again.

Non-Scale Victories (Otherwise known as NSV's)

Part of this journey has lead me to become a bit obsessed with my weight. By obsessed, I mean weighing myself once a day and letting the results set my mood for the day. Big loss, I'm in a great mood. No loss or a small gain, thunderclouds form over my head and I want to cry. Needless to say, even though I'm going to say it, that's not healthy at all.

If the point of this whole journey is to be healthy, then maybe the scale doesn't matter as much as I think it does. It is simply one way to measure my success. The number on the scale does not change who I am as a person or my self-worth or my contributions to society. The number on the scale is simply a calculation of how much gravity is affecting me. Those are the things I try to tell myself as I psych myself up to step on the scale every day.

I decided to TRY to focus on other things for awhile. Does this mean I'm going to stop weighing myself daily? Let's be honest here, probably not. But I can work to change my mindset and the way I handle the numbers that appear.

This weekend, I got comfortably into a pair of jeans I have never worn that are smaller than I was in high school. That was NSV #1!

NSV #2 - I was able to buy a bra without having to order it. Apparently, when you are as big as I was you are expected to have very large breasts, which I do not. I walked into a department store and tried on a 38B. Lo and behold, it fit! Comfortably!!

NSV #3- I bought size 10 shoes! I was wearing an 11. Now, I can comfortably wear some 10s. That's pretty awesome! Plus, the shoes have a bit of a wedge heel and I'm comfortable in them. I wouldn't have even tried to wear them pre-surgery, as anything not flat hurt my feet very badly. Shoe pics below!

NSV #4- I was able to paint my own toenails without thinking I was going to pass out. I can actually reach my own feet comfortably now! Not that I do anywhere near as good a job as the nail salon, but it was free :)

Sometimes, I think it helps to change my focus a bit. To take a step back and look at how far I've come and all the changes that are positive that aren't just my weight. I have so many NSV's when I think about it that it's amazing. I can walk up a flight of stairs easily now, I can fit in most chairs comfortably now, I no longer wonder if a chair will support my weight. It's really a long list and I am finding joy in those small things as well as in the bigger things.

Fears

My worst fear was (and still is) that I'd be a failure. That somehow I will screw this up. That I will lose my focus and determination and not see this through to the end. Because well, let's be honest here... I've never followed through on any plans related to weight loss before. I feel a lot of pressure, mostly from myself, to make this work. To break out of my fat girl shell and leave it behind permanently. But it's hard. It's really, really hard.

We all identify ourselves in some way or the other. The athletic girl, the girly girl, the gymnast, the scholar, the funny one, the fat one, the thin one, the sarcastic one. The list goes on and on and on. It's an identity that we wrap ourselves up in. It becomes part of who we are. We see the world through that and it colors everything. Now, I need to change that lens I'm looking through. And I'm not really sure I know how.

How do you change your whole mindset? How do you stop using food as a crutch to deal with emotions? I've already noticed that if I'm eating in a social setting, I'm not as careful as usual. That I let talking and socializing take over and slip back into old habits. People think having the surgery makes it easy to do this and I will swear to you it doesn't. It still requires A LOT of hard work and determination. It requires finding a way to change your entire relationship with food. Food that has always been a comfort, a pick-me up, a way to celebrate, a way to mourn has to become something different. It's a fuel source, nothing less and nothing more.

I'm still struggling with this daily. When I have a bad day, I still want to eat ice cream or chips or well, anything and lots of it. I crave pizza. I drool over soda. My body does NOT want those things, but my brain does and it wants them badly. I have to really, really think about each bite I put in mouth. Am I really hungry? Or is it "head hunger"?

The truth of things is that right now and I'm depressed and I've never, ever dealt with depression without using food to comfort myself. That's not an option for me now and it's bewildering. Emotions feel stronger now than they did before surgery. I've spent entire days in bed crying because I just can't do anything else. Are the emotions really stronger now? Probably not. I just don't have a way to numb them anymore. I'm trying to break this cycle of addiction. You know the one where you feel bad, so you eat a ton of food to feel better, then you feel worse because you ate a ton of food. Then you spiral out of control for days or weeks before you get it back together. You eat healthy for a few days or weeks, then start the spiral again. I'm tired of that cycle. I'm tired of feeling bad about myself.

So, yeah, it's hard. It's real damn hard. The emotional journey is 100 times harder than I expected. I never realized how much I was using food as a crutch. Now, I'm learning to stand on my own two feet. I can't accurately describe how hard it is or how rewarding it is. It's about so much more than losing weight at this point. It's about changing so much inside me as well. I hope that I become a better person for it. A more stable person, a more caring person, a less self-absorbed person. A happier person who isn't weighed down by the baggage of my past. The past is done and can't be changed. It's time to forgive those who have wronged me and to forgive myself for everything. I would never hold a grudge against someone the way I do against myself. It's time to embrace the future and all that it holds, whatever that may be.

Background Continued

So, picking up where I left off yesterday. I went to the nutritionist and she told me what I'd be eating like after surgery and told me to cut out all soda. I started on February 3rd. No soda, no bread, no pasta, no chips, no junk, no candy, no potatoes. You might be starting to wonder what I did eat. It sure seems like a very long list of NO's.

What did I eat? Low carb protein shakes for breakfast, which I wasn't to sure about to start with. I tried a few brands and found the Atkins ones to be very tasty. Caramel Cafe is probably my favorite. I love an iced caramel macchiato from Starbucks and it tastes very similar to that. I ate ALOT of salads for lunch. There's one from a restaurant close to my office that has grilled chicken, blue cheese, pecans, and craisins with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing that I loved. Dinner was mainly meat and a veggie or two. I didn't worry about portions or counting calories or counting carbs. I just ate as much as I wanted to of the low carb things and was full. Did I miss chips? Not as much as I thought I would.

April 14, 2015 290 pounds

In the end, I lost 40 pounds in the 2 months of monitored weight loss. It was completely awesome to lose so much weight so quickly and without really ever being super hungry.

January 17,2015... 330ish pounds

Why did I go so much further with it than the nutritionist said? That's a really good question. Part of me wanted to see what it was like and if I could do it. I understood that she was telling me this was a lifestyle change and that the surgery wouldn't really work for me if I couldn't make these changes. I read a lot of blogs and joined support groups. I noticed that the people who really embraced the lifestyle were more successful. I felt that if I was going to put myself through the stress of surgery and recovery and cost my insurance company a ton of money (more on that later) that I better make sure I could do it. And it turns out I could!

I had a few slip-ups here and there, but overall I did extremely well. That gave me hope that surgery was a good solution for me.

Kicking the idea around and the background

I should have started this blog months ago. I thought about it frequently, but I never was sure if I had that much to say. Turns out, I do have A LOT to say! Not just about the physical part of this journey, but about the emotional side of things too.

Let's start with a few basics. I had gastric bypass on April 20th this year. It was not a decision I came to lightly. It was something I declined to do for years actually. But the sad truth of it was I was getting bigger and bigger, I was out of control. I needed help! I started using my husband's health insurance and it would pay for the surgery. I could say that I agonized over the decision for days or weeks, but that would be a lie. One day, I looked at myself in the mirror and said ENOUGH! I called and made an appointment the very next day.

That was in January. The day after my initial consult, I met with the nutritionist who laid out a plan for me. I needed 2 months of medically monitored weight loss, during which I would need to actually lose some weight. I needed to prove to the doctor and my insurance company that I could follow a diet plan. She gave me one simple task for the 1st month... to cut out all soda. I did that and more. I was so eager to prove myself that I dove into living a low carb lifestyle, which is what my surgeon says I need to follow. I started that new low carb lifestyle after the Super Bowl.

You may notice I keep using the word lifestyle. It's not a diet. It's a major lifestyle change. It's an overhaul. It requires different thinking and a different mentality. It's certainly not easy. I LOVE carbs, more accurately I LOVE chocolate and ice cream and sweets.  But somewhere along the way I made the decision that those things were not as important to me as getting healthy. I was tired. Tired of taking blood pressure pills, tired of being tired all the time, tired of being the fat girl, tired of wondering if chairs could hold my weight, and so on. It was exhausting just to get through each day.

This feels like my last chance. If I don't get control of my weight now, it will kill me. At 330 pounds, with high blood pressure and a history of diabetes in my family, the decline was inevitable. I knew what was in my future without a drastic change.