Celebrity Bariatric Patient is an Inspiration

Before & after photo posted on Bart's Twitter feed.

Friday morning on the drive to work I was listening, as usual, to K-Love Radio. It's a contemporary Christian music station and they are on location this weekend for the K-Love Fan Awards in Nashville (which will be hosted by Phil and Jase from Duck Dynasty - love them!).

So they've got a lot of nominated artists on the air with DJs all throughout the weekend. And Friday the K-Love Morning Show crew, Craig, Amy, and Kankelfritz, were chatting with Bart Millard (yes, follow him on Twitter, he's hilarious!) of the band MercyMe about his progress with weight loss surgery. I first heard an interview with Bart about a year ago when he first announced he'd gotten WLS and was really impressed with the way he talked about his experience and how he's changing his life to become healthier.

This morning's interview was equally inspiring and I wanted to share it with you, the WLS community. Here's a link to listen to the interview:

Some highlights from the interview:

• Bart is 1.5 years out from RNY Gastric Bypass Surgery
• He's lost 122 pounds lost. The surgery allowed him to lost the first 70 pounds, then he had to "work at it" after that.
• Pre-surgery medical conditions included: Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea,  hypertension, high cholesterol, the start of congestive heart failure and a family history early mortality due similar co-morbidities. Most co-morbidities were eliminated within two days after surgery
• Weight loss surgery is NOT for everyone. You have to be in the right mental place for it to work. 
• WLS and psychological therapy need to go hand-in-hand. 
• Many people think that WLS is the "easy way out" -- but don't let pride get in the way of what is best for your health and what God has planned for you.
• "If they made a pill to fix alcoholism, who wouldn't take it?  Or if the doctor can insert a pin to set a broken ankle, you'd use that.  So if this operation works to lose the weight and cure diseases, why wouldn't you do it?"

Thank you Bart for inspiring so many of us with your music. And for being the voice of WLS that we can be proud of within our community. So many celebrities who go through bariatric surgery don't say the right things and lead many people astray, but your words of wisdom are spot on and I'm so thankful that you're open and honest about your experience. 

And to leave you with one of my favorite songs by MercyMe -- The Generous Mr. Lovewell. 

Exercise Would Be Nice

I've got my walking shoes packed up and in the car. I've carved time out of my schedule and plan to hit the trails again as regularly as I'm able. It's time to get my butt back into a routine of regular exercise. I've slacked for too long. My weight is steady within my normal weight range, except it seems to be hanging out at the top end of my comfort level -- with a sometimes bump over the top by a pound or two, then right back into the normal range again. But I don't like hanging out in that area and I know that exercise will likely bring me back down to the bottom of that comfort level. Plus, I've been feeling sluggish lately and it makes me wonder if I need to pump up my activity level to counteract that.

As you know, I'm a big supporter of BodyMedia Fit -- (formerly known as GoWear Fit) the armband you wear 24/7 to track your movement, calorie burn, sleep patterns, etc. My armband is several years old and is on its last legs. The writing is all worn off the face of the device and the sound doesn't work anymore. I work my old one for about a year straight and then periodically for another several months -- so I got plenty of use out of it. It still logs all the data, but it's definitely seen better days. So I've just ordered a new one!

This time around I upgraded to the BodyMedia Fit LINK - which has Bluetooth capabilities that will automatically sync with my smartphone and no need to connect the device to my computer to download the data collected as I wear it. The BodyMedia website offers this one for $149, but I bought mine on Amazon for $116 and it comes with 3 free months of membership too.

So if I'm going to be wearing the armband and logging exercise .... logically I need to be logging my food intake too, huh? So I will. I've always preached about FitDay as my food log of choice. But unfortunately, they haven't kept up with the times so I've had to ditch them. I now use MyFitnessPal because it syncs with my desktop computer and my phone. Plus it sync with BodyMedia's logging system and lets me see my daily deficit.

GOALS:

What do I hope to accomplish with all this?  Well, I'm glad you asked. Here are my goals:

• Generate more "energy" and pep-in-my-step from the increased activity and hopefully not feel so sluggish. They say exercising makes you feel more energetic, so let's test that theory. 
• Drop a few pounds. I know my body will likely rebel against this notion, so I'm not shooting for anything crazy like 40 pounds or anything (although that would be nice, I know it's not realistic for my stubborn body). But if I can drop about 10 pounds, that'd make me happy.
• Make sure I'm on track. I talk about what it means to be on track with my eating, vitamins and exercise and it's been a while since I've really logged everything to check myself. So this will give me the opportunity to make sure I'm doing what I should be doing and that my calories/activity are in line.
• Keep me out of trouble -- now that my school schedule has been greatly reduced (only doing 1 class per term going forward, but I took this term off), I find myself with more free time than normal. So rather than use up all that free time in front of the TV, it's better to be productive, right?

I'll keep you posted on how things go...

~Pam

A flower needs sunshine

I discovered an online photo editing tool called PicMonkey. It's got some great features and a fun interface ... I created the above photo/quote using one of my own pictures and a quote I found on Brainy Quotes.  The PicMonkey site is billed as a fun tool to use in creating your own photos to be added to your Pinterest Boards. So check out my Pinterest account for this one being added to my pile!

Have a beautiful day!
~Pam

Freezing Strawberries

I love strawberry season! It's a bit early for Michigan Strawberry season (that's in June-ish), but it must be the season somewhere because my local grocery story recently had a huge sale. Whenever I find berries on sale -- strawberries, blackberries, raspberries -- I buy up a whole bunch and freeze them.

Frozen fruit is great for making smoothies by replacing ice cubes with fruit for a rich flavor. You can also freeze banana chunks and yogurt cubes or even leftover fruit salad, pureed and transformed into smoothie starters.

So I bought about 15 quarts of strawberries ($15 investment). Just hull the strawberries, cut them in half and spread out on a baking sheet. Then freeze for a few hours until the fruit is solid and then transfer to gallon size zipper bags.

Once finished I ended up with 3.5 gallon bags of strawberries. When I checked the price of this amount at the store, it would have cost about $35 for that much!

I Hate WLS Fad Diets and So Should You

Bariatric Food Pyramid for long-term guidance. Source

How many years of dieting did you endure before you decided to have weight loss surgery? For me, it was about 20 years of dieting. With that many years of habitual obsession with the number on the scale, it takes a lot of hard work to break that mentality of dieting. But even inside the WLS community, there's a plethera of WLS Fad Diets that some tout as the solution to a stalled scale, plateaued weight loss, or a freak-out about a stretched pouch. This blog post is my attempt to bring together several resources I have already talked about on this website. 

Yesterday I had a conversation with my friend Nikki over at Bariatric Foodie about weight loss surgery patients who were trying the 5 Day Pouch Test (5DPT) to lose weight and "reset" their pouch. UGH! Nikki and I share the same view on this crazy fad diet and other such hogwash. Don't do it! Don't fall victim to that old dieting mentality. Nikki was quicker on the uptake than I was in writing a response to this discussion. She explains the 5DPT and Cottage Cheese Test and why they don't work. Go to Bariatric Foodie now and read her post. 

So if WLS Fad Diets aren't the answer... what is?

When the scale stops moving, when you hit a plateau, when you're battling portion control, when you can't get a handle on emotional eating .... the solution is simple. Eat right and move your bootie. The solution is simple, the execution is the hard part. So trying to take shortcuts with WLS Fad Diets is never going to get you the results you want, they will just set you up for failure and disappointment. So why not skip the fad diet step and jump right into the "eat right and move your bootie" stage instead.  

Here are some helpful information to get you on the right track:

Back to Basics

This article gives you 7 simple steps to make sure you are doing all the right things for your health. Go through the list and honestly evaluate your behavior and make adjustments as needed.

Breaking a Stall

If the scale stops moving, this list is a great resource to figure out what might need to be adjusted. Weight loss is never a linear experience -- you have to make constant adjustments based on what your body is doing at any given time along the way. 

Battling Emotional Eating

I firmly believe that the weight loss surgery we have - the physical surgical part - is only about 10% of the weight loss process. The other 90% is all about getting your head screwed on straight. So if you're battling emotional eating and need some tools to help you win that battle, this article can get you started on the right path.

Understanding Your Pouch

For RNY patients our pouches start out being about 1-2 ounces in size. But over time the pouch grows and adapts to the trauma we inflict with the surgery. So it matures and expands naturally as part of the adaptation process. Understanding how your anatomy changes over time is essential to adjusting your behavior as your guts change. This article is a good starting point for you to study the biology and anatomy lessons that go with having your gut rearranged with WLS. 

Intestinal Diagram

While you begin your study of biology and your anatomy, check out this diagram of your digestive system and where nutrients are absorbed along the way. This diagram helps us understand better the importance of taking vitamins for the rest of your life. 

Bariatric Food Pyramid

Dr. Sharma is a leading obesity researcher and doctor practicing in Canada. His blog is filled with many valuable resources for those battling obesity - in whatever way they are fighting the battle, whether it's WLS or some other method. He has re-published the Bariatric Food Pyramid which explains the type of diet we should be following for the long-term. (Originally published in the medical journal Obesity Surgery in 2010.) I've also included an image of this pyramid on this blog post, but please go over and check out Dr. Sharma's website for lots of great information.

Nikki's List of Resources

In that blog post over at Bariatric Foodie about the Fad Diets -- scroll down to the bottom of the post where she lists several additional resources for intelligent, balanced, healthy approaches to weight loss after WLS. Visit websites like Melting Mama, The World According to Eggface, and ObesityHelp for solid information about how to live life after WLS in a healthy way.

Thank you for letting me rant about this topic. I'm very passionate about it and I just want to make sure that you're healthy and going about this WLS thing the right way. Avoid the Fad Diets, just be healthy. 

~Pam