I’m now on my 7th week of my diet and I can try anything, except lettuce. I can try lettuce this coming Friday. After that, I’m off the graduated food diet. I’m really off it now, since I don’t exactly miss lettuce. I can’t have bread, rice or pasta for 6 months, but so far I can live with that.

Why am I not happy? Limited calories and sloooooooow weight loss. After upping my calories a little after my last post, I lost 4 lbs. that week. Woohoo! That victory was short-lived, however, because the next week, I gained 1/2 a pound. This past week, I lost 1.5 lbs (2 lbs. if you count the 1/2 a pound I gained and then lost again). Geez! I can’t get over the fact that I’ve lost more on my previous diet while eating more calories than this. I just don’t get it! How can I be a slow loser when I’ve never been a slow loser before? Arrgh!!!

Well, my only comfort was at my 1 month follow-up, the nurse told me that I am pretty close to where they expected me to be – 20% weight loss after a month. Mine was 17%, close enough for their approval (but not mine). Dr. Khalili repeated what the nurse said, that as long as you lose 75% of your excess weight in the first year, you’re considered a success. When I look at it that way, I feel a little better.

Plus the nurse told me menstruating women’s bodies try to hold onto their fat. She said I will see the biggest difference at my 3 month follow-up. Okay, I’ll have to take her word for it and be patient.

What issues have I had? Well, since I was given license to eat meat a couple weeks ago, I have also had more food issues. The first time I ate steak tips was horrible, and had me wishing I had a DS. I had a stuck feeling, with vomiting which produced mostly foamies for about 1 hour 15 minutes.

However, determined not to let steak tips kick my butt, I had steak tips again two more days in a row. I cut them up to about half an inch and spent more time chewing, and, Voila! No problems this time!

I started eating bran crackers for regularity. While these are for a good cause, I’ve found that the usual junk food (crackers and chip-type foods) goes down smooth as liquid. I have to be careful about those because they also taste hella good. By the way, I am allowed to have crackers in limited quantities, so this is not cheating.

I got into an interesting debate with some long-term RNYers on a Yahoo group who are militant advocates of protein drinks. They state that not only do they still drink multiple protein drinks a day (with predigested whey) but they say it is necessary for all of us because we malabsorb protein from food and therefore can never get all our protein from food. Well, I bowed down to their experience (and I do have respect for it), but when I asked for scientific data to back up their claims (about requiring protein drinks), they got indignant and said they didn’t need any because their claims were based on life experience. Whatever!

Saying you have experience from being around lots of other RNYers and therefore don’t need scientific data to prove what you say is a cop-out. The whole reason these surgeries are available to us is because scientific data has shown them to give obese people a much better chance of losing weight and keeping it off than the traditional regimen of diet and exercise alone.

Sure there are doctors and nutritionists who give their patients crappy advice (such as: Don’t drink protein drinks. Take TUMs for calcium, and get all your vitamins from food.), and who obviously are not experts in bariatric nutrition, but you don’t need to do much research to find out why their advice is wrong and dangerous.

For example, you don’t need to search Google for long to find out why you need calcium citrate and not calcium carbonate. So I’m very leery of people who say “I don’t need data to back up what I say!” That’s B.S.! Bariatric surgery and nutrition is medicine and science; it’s not religion.

Research is what caused me to choose this surgery, so I’ll be damned if I’m just going to believe whatever someone tells me without any proof whatsoever. Research has also told me that my surgeon’s program is good based on their recommendations. That doesn’t mean I don’t think I need to research anything else. I’m an analytical person and a writer, and I love doing research, especially when it’s about something that directly affects me.

The reason I do need protein drinks now is I do have difficulty getting my protein in from food alone. If that’s the case for the rest of my life, so be it. I can live with it. But geez this is not about following rules. It is about doing what has been proven to be healthiest for your surgically altered body, and that’s where the rules from the best surgeons/nutritionists come from. And if someone is making a health claim that is true, they shouldn’t have any difficulty giving some sort of objective data to back up what they say.

Experience is very valuable but it can also be very subjective. Look at how many “diet aids” are sold through testimonials/experience that turn out to be pure useless crap.

Okay, end of rant…