My Non Surgical Weight Loss before Surgery...

Denis Korb

Well-Known Member
Joined
Feb 28, 2015
Messages
110
Location
East stroudsburg, PA
I wasn't sure what this forum was for so I figured I would use it as a Journal of sorts to lend some data on the subject pertaining to my journey for others to see how I have done, what my state of mind is from weigh in to weigh in. Keep in mind that there is the doctors scale, and there is my personal 1000 pound scale I purchased for home use. So any weigh in at the doctors office will have a * next to it. I will start this by going back to 2/18/15 the day before I really went full bore on following a No Simple carb diet.

2/18/15 *566lbs
I hadn't lost anything since the original weigh in @ the Doctors, I was extremely disappointed and made the decision to really buckle down on the "Partially Liquid Diet" given to me by the Nutritionist
This was the diet given to me as a "guide to follow"

The Diet States:
1. Replace 2 meals a day with a protein shake
2. Your 3rd real meal should consist of 1 cup cooked vegetables, 1/2 cup of starch, 1 small piece of fruit the size of a tennis ball or 1/2 cup of unsweetened fruit
3. I may have 2-3 protein snacks a day
a.1 hard boiled egg
b.1/2 cup Low fat or fat free cottage cheese
c.1 low fat string cheese or 1 Babybel cheese
d. 4-6 ounces of Greek Yogurt
e. 4-6 ounces of light Yogurt
f. 1/2 cup tuna mixed with 1-2 teaspoons of light or low-fat mayo
g. 1/2 cup of canned chicken or turkey with 1-2 teaspoons of light or low-fat mayo
I may also have raw vegetables (baby carrots, celery) as snacks or diet Jello

Now here is the kicker, after they gave this to me, they told me I had to eat 2300 calories a day. I don't know about you, but I tried just this diet the first few days, and I couldn't break 1200-1500 calories and that was with doubling the portion sizes.

I settled on a diet that looked like this

I wake up - I drink a protein shake
2 hours later I have 1 cup of 2% low-fat cottage cheese + 1/2 a cup of unsweetened fruit
2 hours later a protein shake
2 hours later 1 can of solid white albacore + 1/2 small onion + 1 tablespoon of Helmans mayo + 6 leaves romaine lettuce
2 hours later a protein shake
2 hours later 1- 18 ounce Ribeye, or 12 ounces roast beef, or 3 chicken breasts, thighs w/a vegetable

My calorie intake per day since 2/19 has ranged from 1450-2400 mostly in the median around 1800. I drank 64 ounces of water a day as required I am taking an equate Multivitamin and no other medication. I have tracked and been completely honest with everything I have put in my mouth right down to the hot sauce on my chicken.

My scale at home told me that I dropped from 550 to 543...(my scale seems to be 10 pounds off from the doctors...not sure why.) Either way I thought I was moving in the right direction. I have not cheated once, I have not eaten any simple carbs, starch, milk, carbonated beverage, bread in any form

Today I woke up 3/10/2015 roughly 21 days after this Diet began. Tomorrow is my doctors weigh in, so today I step on my scale. Guess what it says...550 pounds...I was like WTF! All I can do is hope my scale is broken, because based on all the science that I have ever understood about weight loss, I should be down 18 pounds as of today. I base this on their science...my metabolism test says my resting metabolism should burn 5100 calories a day. My calorie deficit was around 19500 for the week divided by 3500 calories (1 Pound) it should be around 5.6 pounds a week lost...and I ate less then the 2300 not because I didn't want to stick to their number but because I didn't have an 18 ounce Ribeye every day.

This link is to my diet printed from the OH health Tracker
 

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My concern is, that I'm going to be blamed for not losing this weight when I clearly did EVERYTHING in my power to follow their prescription for weight loss. It makes absolutely no sense to me, I documented everything on health tracker on the OH forums. I cant say that I'm not disillusioned, part of me is glad that I was able to effectively eliminate sugar from my diet because I believe its a good thing, but to not see a significant change in 3 weeks...I have to admit, I do feel like I have more energy, and I have been able to do a bit more then I did before...but I want to see it in the scale too...I will have to wait until tomorrow to see what the doctors scale says.
 
No offense Denis but that's what many folks here were telling you when you first came to BF, but you were sure you'd lose a pile of weight. Sometimes your metabolism is just broken.

To be honest I didn't follow the nutritionist's plan before or after surgery. I've always had better luck on low carb, so adding starches and fruit just didn't make sense to me. I lost 30lbs on my 3 week liquid diet, which I also added solid protein to until one week before. I guess I'm a bad patient.

Don't believe everything they tell you - mine told me to eat mashed potatoes after surgery. I knew it was a bad idea but was desperate for "real" food and tried it. Oh god in heaven did I feel like shit LOL. Your best bet is to listen to the vets here.
 
Denis, @chevtow is right…..here comes the part where you BLAME YOURSELF again because that F’d up math thing didn’t work! Wow we’re all surprised!.....NOT….It DID NOT WORK BECAUSE you and most of us don’t have “Normal” metabolisms that medical science can’t even begin to explain how those store mechanisms really work. How can an elephant eat nothing but grass and hay and be fat? How can a whale eat nothing but fish and plankton, yet be 95% fat? ALL life forms ADAPT to their environment. Humans with the store gene instead of burn real time have adapted that way because their ancestors did NOT get to eat except once every 3 or 4 weeks after a big hunt. Our society has only been plentiful for LESS THAN 100 yrs and realistically more like 50. It will take 100’s or maybe even 1000’s of years for our bodies to adapt to having food on a regular basis. Unfortunately, YOU and I are one of those people. What I call a “Super Absorber”. Pre-DS, my body metabolized every single GD thing I ate and maximized its efficiency because it was always in the “self-preservation protection mode” The less I ate, the more efficient it became for hording stores of energy and conversion. To lose weight on my pre-op weight loss demand, I LITERALLY had to go to 200 calories PER DAY and I started at 353 lbs. Even at that I would only lose 1 lb per week…WTF….and you wanna sit there and talk about “MATH” with me??? The very day, the very minute after my WLS, I could tell my metabolism changed, and NOT just a little, it was very radical. It changed so much, I couldn’t get any sleep and had to completely stop my thyroid meds just to be able to sleep. I am consuming about 1200 calories a day (or trying to) and even factoring in malabsorption, for my size that is putting me in about a 3000 calorie per day deficit. Guess what Denis…..I’m losing about 1 lb per day now. THE MATH IS NOW WORKING??????????? . i.e., 3500 calories deficit or surplus = 1 lb lost or gained. So, I’m an Engineer and consider myself somewhat of a man of science too and more importantly an observer of “Cause and Effect” one of the most basic foundational scientific principles that I live my life by.

I was not going to respond to your posts anymore or try to help you because you thought/think you already have it all figured out, which you don’t! but, I’m NOT a quitter either and I think you’re probably a good guy also, (just naive and stubborn)….lol, and as long as you are here, I’m not giving up trying to reach you.
 
As a female, I could blame my time of the month...you don't even have that one... It's just what chevtow says, our metabolisms are broken, no different than if you needed surgery to remove your appendix. If it don't work, fix it!!! Sometimes you can't fix something by treating it outside, you gotta fix what's really broken. This surgery doesn't really fix your metabolism but tricks it into behaving normally (except the odoriferous gas). The medical profession have been blaming fat people for being fat forever, leading the population to spending billions of dollars on temporary fixes. It takes the responsibility away from the profession and their flawed science and places the blame square on the shoulders of people who have no power over their metabolisms. Don't take their blame on, it isn't your fault. Weird thing is you may drop again by morning, who knows. Even if you do, you see know what everyone has been telling you, your body is broken and won't respond to the "science" of diet.
 
I appreciate the support, this thread was written to acknowledge the points that were made, however my intention is to continue the diet and adjust based on their recommendations...I have printed the health tracker information from OH forums for the nutritionist for the last 3 weeks, and I will post the results from their weigh in tomorrow. My intention for this thread is to continue reporting results based on their instructions and weigh in's until surgery. Eventually I will post a PDF of my health tracker information for those wishing to do a scientific paper on this subject.
 
The medical profession have been blaming fat people for being fat forever, leading the population to spending billions of dollars on temporary fixes. It takes the responsibility away from the profession and their flawed science and places the blame square on the shoulders of people who have no power over their metabolisms. Don't take their blame on, it isn't your fault.

nicely put.
 
Their recommendations still have you eating a fair amount of carbs. Veggies and fruit have carbs..Fruit has lots of them. Simple, complex...a carb is a carb to me. I don't touch fruit except on very rare occasions...like 1/4 cup of no sugar added black cherries to a protein smoothie.
I gained 15 lbs this past summer by adding fruit to my diet.
Are you tracking how many grams of carbs you're eating on a daily basis? I keep mine under 30g total per day and I track everything in myfitnesspal to make sure I'm hitting all my macros.
 
Okay, I am a type 2 diabetic...was on an insulin pump but the DS way of eating was one I was most familiar with and best for me. For the many years of battling my blood sugars, I TRIED to faithfully follow this advice:
Oh, and the author, Dr. Richard Bernstein, of this particular book is a type 1 diabetic who started out as an engineer and became an endocrinologist.He became a type 1 at the age of 12, he's 81 and has been a diabetic for almost 70 years.
http://www.diabetes-book.com/laws-small-numbers/
http://www.diabetes-book.com/protein-fat/
Curiously, what today seems in our society to be a genetic predisposition toward obesity functioned during the famines of prehistory as an effective method of survival. Ironically, the ancestors of those who today are most at risk for type 2 diabetes were, during prehistory, not the sick and dying, but the survivors. If famine struck today in the United States, guess who would survive most easily? The same people who are most at risk for type 2 diabetes. For those living in a harsh environment where the availability of food is uncertain, bodies that store fat most efficiently when food is available (for example, by being insulin-resistant and craving carbohydrate, like most type 2 diabetics) survive to reproduce.

If you give it some thought, it makes perfect sense: If a farmer wants to fatten up his pigs or cows, he doesn’t feed them meat or butter and eggs, he feeds them grain. If you want to fatten yourself up, just start loading up on bread, pasta, potatoes, cake, and cookies—all highcarbohydrate foods. If you want to hasten the fattening process, consume dietary fat with your carbohydrate. Indeed, two recent studies showed that dietary fat, when consumed as part of a high-carbohydrate diet, was converted to body fat. Fat consumed as part of a low-carbohydrate diet was metabolized, or burned off.

This point needs highlighting:
If you give it some thought, it makes perfect sense: If a farmer wants to fatten up his pigs or cows, he doesn’t feed them meat or butter and eggs, he feeds them grain. If you want to fatten yourself up, just start loading up on bread, pasta, potatoes, cake, and cookies—all highcarbohydrate foods. If you want to hasten the fattening process, consume dietary fat with your carbohydrate. Indeed, two recent studies showed that dietary fat, when consumed as part of a high-carbohydrate diet, was converted to body fat. Fat consumed as part of a low-carbohydrate diet was metabolized, or burned off.
http://www.diabetes-book.com/carbohydrate/
http://www.diabetes-book.com/carbohydrate/
As stunning as it sounds—and unbelievable, given the popular media’s recent love affair with a high “complex carbohydrate,” low-fat diet—you can quite easily survive on a diet in which you would eat no carbohydrate. There are essential amino acids and essential fatty acids, but there is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate. Furthermore, by sticking to a diet that contains no carbohydrate but has high levels of fat and protein, you can reduce your cardiac risk profile—serum cholesterol, blood lipids, et cetera—though you’d deprive yourself of all the supposed “fun foods” that we crave most.* We’ve all been trained to think that carbohydrates are our best, most benign source of food, so how can this be?

What if I, a physician, told you, a diabetic, to eat a diet that consisted of 60 percent sugar, 20 percent protein, and 20 percent fat? More than likely, you’d think I was insane. I’d think I was insane, and I would never make this suggestion to a diabetic (nor would I even make it to a nondiabetic). But this is just the diet the ADA recommended to diabetics for decades. On the surface, these recommendations seemed to make sense because of kidney disease, heart disease, and our elevated lipid profiles. But this is what is known as single-avenue thinking. It seemed logical to insist that dietary intake of protein and fat be reduced, because no one had looked at elevated blood sugars and the high levels of insulin necessary to bring them down as the possible culprits.

The technical answer is that carbohydrates are chains of sugar molecules. The carbohydrates we eat are mostly chains of glucose molecules. The shorter the chain, the sweeter the taste. Some chains are longer and more complicated (hence, “simple” and “complex” carbohydrates), having many links and even branches. But simple or complex, carbohydrates are composed entirely of sugar.

“Sugar?” you might ask, holding up a slice of coarse-ground, sevengrain bread. “This is sugar?”

In a word, yes, at least after you digest it. With a number of important exceptions, carbohydrates, or foods derived primarily from plant sources that are starches, grains, and fruits, have the same ultimate effect on blood glucose levels that table sugar does.

http://www.diabetes-book.com/eliminating-simple-sugars/
http://www.diabetes-book.com/no-no-foods/
Here is a concise list of foods to avoid that are discussed in this chapter. You may want to memorize it or copy it, as it is worth learning.

Sweets and Sweeteners
• Powdered sweeteners (other than stevia)
• Candies, especially so-called sugar-free types
• Honey and fructose
• Most “diet” and “sugar-free” foods (except sugar-free Jell-O gelatin when the label doesn’t mention maltodextrin, and diet sodas that do not contain fruit juices or list other carbohydrate on the label)
• Desserts (except Jell-O gelatin without maltodextrin—no more than ½ cup per serving) and pastries: cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, et cetera
• Foods containing, as a significant ingredient, products whose names end in -ol or -ose (dextrose, glucose, lactose, mannitol, mannose, sorbitol, sucrose, xylitol, xylose, et cetera), except cellulose; also, corn syrup, molasses, maltodextrin, et cetera

Sweet or Starchy Vegetables
• Beans: chili beans, chickpeas, lima beans, lentils, sweet peas, et cetera (string beans, snow peas, and bell and chili peppers, which are mostly cellulose, are okay, as are limited amounts of many soybean products)
• Beets
• Carrots
• Corn
• Onions, except in small amounts
• Packaged creamed spinach containing flour
• Parsnips
• Potatoes
• Cooked tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce, and raw tomatoes except in small amounts
• Winter squash

Fruit and Juices
• All fruits (except avocados)
• All juices (including tomato and vegetable juices— except for some people, in a Bloody Mary)

Certain Dairy Products
• Milk
• Sweetened and low-fat yogurts
• Cottage cheese (except in very small amounts)
• Powdered milk substitutes and coffee lighteners
• Canned milk concentrate

Grains and Grain Products
• Wheat, rye, barley, corn, and lesser-known, “alternative” grains, such as kasha, quinoa, and sorghum
• White, brown, wild rice, or rice cakes
• Pasta
• Breakfast cereal
• Pancakes and waffles
• Bread, crackers, and other flour products

Prepared Foods
• Most commercially prepared soups
• Most packaged “health foods”
• Snack foods (virtually anything that comes wrapped in cellophane, including nuts)
• Balsamic vinegar (compared to wine vinegar, white vinegar, or cider vinegar, balsamic contains considerable sugar)
NOTE: Personally I still use Splenda and found thru glucose monitor testing that honey acted very slowly on my blood sugars. But that was after lots of testing WITH a monitor.

http://www.diabetes-book.com/whats-left-to-eat/

I tried my best to follow this plan...Gave it a good shot from 1997 when I first developed overt diabetes (he had parts of it out on a listserv I belonged to) until 2010 when I finally accepted that no matter HOW much I dieted...it was not enough. I needed surgical help. I am now 60 years old...been on one diet or another since I was 12. I've probably lost a TON (literally) of weight. I was great at losing but lousy at keeping it off. Thanks to WLS, I am NOW able to keep it off.

Oh, and his plan...the DS made sense for me since it was how I had been trying to eat since 1997.
 
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Their recommendations still have you eating a fair amount of carbs. Veggies and fruit have carbs..Fruit has lots of them. Simple, complex...a carb is a carb to me. I don't touch fruit except on very rare occasions...like 1/4 cup of no sugar added black cherries to a protein smoothie.
I gained 15 lbs this past summer by adding fruit to my diet.
Are you tracking how many grams of carbs you're eating on a daily basis? I keep mine under 30g total per day and I track everything in myfitnesspal to make sure I'm hitting all my macros.

Yes star, if you look at the attached file it shows exactly how many carbs I have been consuming and the number is less then 45 a day plus I eat a fair amount of fiber every day to offset those 45 sugar grams. Anyway, good news is my scale is completely off I lost 12 pounds or an average of 4 pounds a week for the last 3 weeks. I suspect my body was first getting used to the new diet and influx of water before revving its metabolism, so we are off to the races. So good news #1

Good News #2
Geisinger does do the BPD/DS and more interestingly the surgeon is not Dr.Still, on their weight management site apparently the weight management site only represents the doctors that work in the clinic area not the Surgeons. The Surgeon that I will likely be going with is Dr. Anthony Petrick. he is the Director of Bariatric Surgery and Minimally Invasive Surgery, as well as Program Director: MIS/Bariatric Surgical Fellowship. I haven't met him yet, but of the 3 surgeons they gave me as a choice he seemed to be the star guy so I am looking forward to talking to him. His practice specialties are Bariatric Surgery and Esophageal Surgery. He did his Medical School and Residency at Georgetown University in 1989-1996 and Fellowships Surgical Oncology @ Deaconess Medical Center Boston 1993, and Minimally Invasive Surgery University of Pittsburgh Medical center 2001.

According to my PA/Nutritionist I have met all requirements except the weight loss, and pre surgical for the program, so I need to lose another 43 pounds and they will schedule my surgery.
 
Okay I'm feeling really good about this surgery though I do note that OH doesn't have him down for doing the BPD/DS, they only have him doing the DS so I'm kind of confused but the reviews look great... (Edited by admin) I did see some random bad reviews around the internet that complained about his matter of fact manner, but I can handle that as long as he is capable. Someone even compared him to a Dr. House Mentality which I found amusing because I love that show.

Note: Edited a competitors link out...they do not allow us to put links over there so we don't allow their link here.
 
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Okay I'm feeling really good about this surgery though I do note that OH doesn't have him down for doing the BPD/DS, they only have him doing the DS so I'm kind of confused but the reviews look great... (Edited by admin) I did see some random bad reviews around the internet that complained about his matter of fact manner, but I can handle that as long as he is capable. Someone even compared him to a Dr. House Mentality which I found amusing because I love that show.
Okay, the BPD/DS is the same as the DS (altho we would love to change that).

What happened was that Dr. Scopinaro introduced the BPD as a surgery in 1979 in Italy. While it had a FEW good things, it had LOTS of bad. Mostly a very LARGE pouch with no pyloric valve (and it was removed not just moved aside like the RNY). It also had a very SHORT common channel.
Dr. Hess in 1986 took the OLD BPD and changed the pouch into a sleeve keeping the pyloric valve and figured a way to measure the limbs of the small intestines for the best result. But since he was building on the old BPD, the name had to include BPD.

AS you have noticed, calling it a BPD/DS is confusing out in the real world (and online) as all physicians hear is BPD and think, that was a lousy surgery and I didn't think they did that any longer. That's why the push by some surgeons AND many patients push to call it JUST a DS.

That's why you will see DS and BPD/DS pretty interchangeably altho the ones who have the DS would love to change that.

As far as reviews elsewhere, that site is notorious for deleting negative reviews. Take what you read with a VERY large grain of salt...preferably the whole damned salt shaker!
 
I wasn't sure what this forum was for so I figured I would use it as a Journal of sorts to lend some data on the subject pertaining to my journey for others to see how I have done, what my state of mind is from weigh in to weigh in. Keep in mind that there is the doctors scale, and there is my personal 1000 pound scale I purchased for home use. So any weigh in at the doctors office will have a * next to it. I will start this by going back to 2/18/15 the day before I really went full bore on following a No Simple carb diet.

2/18/15 *566lbs
I hadn't lost anything since the original weigh in @ the Doctors, I was extremely disappointed and made the decision to really buckle down on the "Partially Liquid Diet" given to me by the Nutritionist
This was the diet given to me as a "guide to follow"

The Diet States:
1. Replace 2 meals a day with a protein shake
2. Your 3rd real meal should consist of 1 cup cooked vegetables, 1/2 cup of starch, 1 small piece of fruit the size of a tennis ball or 1/2 cup of unsweetened fruit
3. I may have 2-3 protein snacks a day
a.1 hard boiled egg
b.1/2 cup Low fat or fat free cottage cheese
c.1 low fat string cheese or 1 Babybel cheese
d. 4-6 ounces of Greek Yogurt
e. 4-6 ounces of light Yogurt
f. 1/2 cup tuna mixed with 1-2 teaspoons of light or low-fat mayo
g. 1/2 cup of canned chicken or turkey with 1-2 teaspoons of light or low-fat mayo
I may also have raw vegetables (baby carrots, celery) as snacks or diet Jello

Now here is the kicker, after they gave this to me, they told me I had to eat 2300 calories a day. I don't know about you, but I tried just this diet the first few days, and I couldn't break 1200-1500 calories and that was with doubling the portion sizes.

I settled on a diet that looked like this

I wake up - I drink a protein shake
2 hours later I have 1 cup of 2% low-fat cottage cheese + 1/2 a cup of unsweetened fruit
2 hours later a protein shake
2 hours later 1 can of solid white albacore + 1/2 small onion + 1 tablespoon of Helmans mayo + 6 leaves romaine lettuce
2 hours later a protein shake
2 hours later 1- 18 ounce Ribeye, or 12 ounces roast beef, or 3 chicken breasts, thighs w/a vegetable

My calorie intake per day since 2/19 has ranged from 1450-2400 mostly in the median around 1800. I drank 64 ounces of water a day as required I am taking an equate Multivitamin and no other medication. I have tracked and been completely honest with everything I have put in my mouth right down to the hot sauce on my chicken.

My scale at home told me that I dropped from 550 to 543...(my scale seems to be 10 pounds off from the doctors...not sure why.) Either way I thought I was moving in the right direction. I have not cheated once, I have not eaten any simple carbs, starch, milk, carbonated beverage, bread in any form

Today I woke up 3/10/2015 roughly 21 days after this Diet began. Tomorrow is my doctors weigh in, so today I step on my scale. Guess what it says...550 pounds...I was like WTF! All I can do is hope my scale is broken, because based on all the science that I have ever understood about weight loss, I should be down 18 pounds as of today. I base this on their science...my metabolism test says my resting metabolism should burn 5100 calories a day. My calorie deficit was around 19500 for the week divided by 3500 calories (1 Pound) it should be around 5.6 pounds a week lost...and I ate less then the 2300 not because I didn't want to stick to their number but because I didn't have an 18 ounce Ribeye every day.

This link is to my diet printed from the OH health Tracker


Good luck with all this, but frankly, I had bariatric surgery because I did not want to spend my life on a diet. I just don't see the point of this torture.
 
The requirement of my insurance says I have to do it spikey. So I will continue with the program for the most effective weight loss...and honestly Im fine with the diet, I actually am eating more now then I ever really did before.

Oh yes I forgot Weigh In *554.2lbs

My next appointment is on 3/18th
 
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Never heard of Petrick - ever. If he's a DS surgeon, somehow he has flown below the radar of a lot of very knowledgeable vets for 12 years.

Ask him detailed questions:

1. Approximately how many DS's have you performed?
How many in past 2 years?

2. Do you offer the DS for any patient who meets the NIH criteria for bariatric surgery?
Do you limit its availability to those with BMI > 50?

3. Do you perform the DS laparoscopically?
Open?
Planned two-stage procedure?
If so, what are your criteria for requiring a planned two-stage procedure?

4. Do you have self-pay plan for patients with limited or no health insurance?
Does this include a follow up period?

5. Do you do revisions of other bariatric surgeries to the DS,
Adjustable Band?
Sleeve?
VBG?
Gastric bypass?

Other doctors could do your surgery WITHOUT this torturous diet.
 

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