I Lost 173 lbs in exactly 11 months

On the left was me back in August of last year. I'm not exactly sure what my weight in the picture was but it was somewhere between 460 and 480. I started a weight loss program with the University of Washington on the 21st of January 2016. My official starting weight was 473.4 lbs. On the right is me yesterday. After a whole lot of work, I finally busted the 300 barrier and weighed in at 299.6 lbs. I haven't been in the 200's since the 90's and I'm not done. I still want to lose another 75 lbs to reach my ultimate goal but yesterday was a good day.

I did it through diet, exercise and eventually surgery. I did a write up of the pre surgery process here (http://imgur.com/gallery/oR13Z). I lost 131.4 lbs before surgery and I've lost 42.4 since. It has not been the smooth ride I was hoping for but I am getting it done.

The surgery itself went very smoothly. In addition to having the gastric bypass, they also removed my gallbladder. Thanks to my extreme weight loss prior to surgery they were able to do laparoscopic surgery instead of unzipping me. This meant I only had to spend three days in the hospital and made my recovery much easier. The early part of my recovery was very easy. I was fairly heavily medicated, but I got more than my required exercise and breezed through the liquid only part of my recovery diet.

Surgery scars. Six small incisions, the biggest of which is on my left side and about 1.5 inches long. This is infinitely preferable to a large cut right up the middle and in my case it would have been both since the plan was always to start laparoscopic and only unzip if they couldn't see everything they needed to. The extreme weight loss prior to surgery made visibility better and I didn't get unzipped.

Also worth mentioning, when they do this surgery they pump you full of gas (nitrogen I believe) to help with the visibility. This gas stays in you when they are done and has to be "naturally" removed. What followed was the most flatulent week of my entire life. Additionally, since I was on some fairly hefty pain killers which "can cause constipation" , I was given a stool softener to take. By the way, a liquid post op diet, post surgery gas and a stool softener are a truly horrible combination. I only took that damn pill once. Somehow I managed to avoid complete disaster but there were several very quick trips to the bathroom.

Let it be known far and wide that I am a fucking idiot. After two weeks of a liquid only diet (and still on post-op pain killers) I was cleared to start on soft foods. I had eaten nothing but jello, applesauce, yogurt, pureed soup and protein shakes for two weeks and I had a serious craving for something with a little substance. I went with scrambled eggs. Yes, I am a party animal. For the longest time, I have enjoyed my eggs with a healthy squirt of sriracha in them. That was pre-diet me. In deference to my sodium count more than anything else, I only put 1 very small squirt into two raw eggs before scrambling them. I got about two bites into my eggs before I had to stop (I only got that far because I was shoveling the second bite in while I was swallowing the first one). The most ungodly burning pain had lit my insides on fire. I curled up into a fetal ball for about an hour and then threw out my eggs. I thought I was done, I wasn't. For the next 4 hours, I couldn't even drink water without reigniting the volcano that was living in my gut. Apparently adding sriracha to a newly healed gastric bypass (not to mention the now absent gallbladder) is an incredibly bad idea. On the bright side, I no longer had a unstoppable craving for scrambled eggs.

I walked into this with my eyes open and I did my research, but I also had a few misconceptions. My biggest misconception was just how long recovery was going to take. I expected to be back on normal food after a month and on to a problem free life where I just had to watch my diet, do the work and the weight would just fall off (stop laughing). Predictably, it didn't quite work out that way. I was on the liquid diet for just over two weeks. Then I moved on to soft food (plus liquid) for just over four weeks and soft food kicked my ass. My scrambled egg disaster was just a taste of things to come. My liquid diet had gone so smoothly that I thought everything was going to be easy. Soft foods quickly disabused me of that notion. After surgery everything changes. Not only am I eating less (1/2 a cup at a time for the first month a a half) but I have to be very careful to take my time while eating. If I eat too quickly, it causes pain, nausea, dumping (just what it sounds like) and sometimes vomiting. If I don't chew enough (don't swallow anything above the consistency of applesauce), pain, nausea and sometimes vomiting. Same goes for eating something my stomach will no longer accept. Noticing a trend? This is the fun part. Because I also had my gallbladder taken out, what my stomach will and will not deal with has changed. Finding out what those things are requires a lot of experimentation and when the answer falls on the not side, I get pain, nausea and vomiting. I did this for a month on soft food before they cleared me to resume solid food and the experiments continue. I thought the recovery was only going to be a month but according to my doctors, it can be a year or more before I figure everything out and even then, things might still change. Nothing to do but do it.

Other big things to worry about, dehydration and constipation. These are the most common issues that land gastric bypass patients back in the hospital. Fortunately I have not yet had an issue with constipation but getting enough water is sometimes rough. Drinking anything with your meals is strictly forbidden. The new stomach is very small so if you drink with your meal, it can flush out the pouch and lead to dumping (no fun). I am supposed to wait 20 minutes before and after a meal to drink anything, and I am eating 5-6 times a day (very small meals) to get enough calories to function. I am supposed to eat 1300-1500 calories a day, something I only achieved for the first time about a month ago (before that I was way under and on sick days I'd be lucky to hit 800 calories). For proper hydration I need to drink at least 8 cups (64 oz) of water per day but I can't gulp. Drink too much at once and it can cause dumping so it must be done in small sips over the course of a day. So I can't drink with meals. There are 5-6 meals a day and I need to wait 20 minutes on each side before drinking anything. Getting enough to drink is hard.

Also when I say drink anything, I mean water. Carbonated beverages like soda or beer and really any alcohol are still on the forbidden list. Fruit juices are okay but they are also calories . Drinking your calories is a great way to get fat.

Here I am a month ago when I broke the 300 barrier. This is the part they don't really tell you about. Skin. I was knocking on the door of 500 lbs when I started this process and while skin will shrink with weight loss, there is only so much that can be reabsorbed. I've lost me in high school and that is just a bit too much skin to shrink away. The worst that I'm willing to show you is under my arms but as you can see above, I'm sagging all over. I call this my flying squirrel look. I work out at least 5 days a week right now (the Y has stupid weekend hours), for an 70 minutes of cardio per day (swimming, treadmill and stationary bike) and I've started lifting weights to try to put a little of the right kind of bulk back in but the long and the short of it is, I will probably need additional surgeries down the road to remove the excess skin. It is a good problem to have. My choices were to remain fat, with all the associated health problems, or lose the weight and fix some of the existing problems, even if I found a new one. Easy choice. Of course the easiest thing is to not get fat in the first place but that ship sailed a long time ago. The best time to plant a tree is 30 years ago. The second best time is now.

Cat tax.