The classrooms are not clearly marked, but I knew which one I'm supposed to be in because there are no thin people in the room. I peeked through the door in the room divider and had the stark realization that I absolutely must get to that side of the divider. In a few minutes, their room was full of thin, chatty, happy people. On our side, people shifted uncomfortably in their oftentimes-too-small-seats and gathered in small cliques of 2-3.
I struck up a conversation with a woman behind me who had not actually met the surgeon yet, but wanted to attend so she could compare him to a surgeon she'd met earlier in the week. "It's 6:30," she said, "where is the doctor?"
It turns out, the doctor didn't lead the session. Instead we had some of his staff - the PA, a dietician and some other folks. I felt they gave a balanced presentation on both the risks and benefits of the surgery and talked really openly about some of the changes that need to be made prior to the surgery so that you have a plan and have time to adapt rather than just being thrown into it once you wake up in the recovery room.
Gone will be the days where I could sit down to dinner with a glass of wine and inhale my meal. Now, that doesn't mean I can't drink and can't eat on the run, but it does mean that I will no longer be able to have any liquids with my meal. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Not even water. They explained that drinking with your meal makes you full before you're actually full and hungrier before you should be hungry. It pushes the food through the small pouch now known as your stomach and makes it more difficult to stick to the plan of eating every 3.5-4 hours.
"Take a chewy granola bar as an example," the dietician said, "how many bites should that take you to eat?" People in the room responded with 3-4-5, some guy even said two. "No," she continued, "I want that to take you 12-14 bites. Now I don't mind how you do that - whether you nibble on it and have it in that many bites or if you literally chop it up into smaller bites, do whatever it takes, but you can no longer pack a granola bar in your bag and swallow it in 3-4 bites."
That may sound like common sense to the rest of you, but not to me. I am always the first one to have cleared my plate. I have no idea how to even let it take me that long to eat something that small. And so, this is why I have the time now to practice.
The dietician drew this really amazing graph on the whiteboard that really summed up the effect of food on our body. "Take a half cup of apple juice," she said, "or a half cup of applesauce, or a small apple, or a small apple with two tablespoons of peanut butter; all will have the same mass when broken down in digestion, but the apple juice has no pulp and will give you a short spike in energy, followed by a big crash. The apple sauce will give you a slower spike, last a little while and then crash. The apple, with the skin, will take longer for you to feel the energy, but once you feel it, you'll have it with you for a while. The apple with the peanut butter is actually the best option for keeping you fuller, longer because it doesn't have a big spike in energy, it's more that it raises your metabolism and keeps it there longer." Now, words really don't explain how well her drawings demonstrated this, but the fact remains that I - for one - don't tend to carry peanut butter around with my apples. But maybe I should start doing so.
I also learned that taking birth control around the time of the surgery can cause blood clots, so if you're staying on your birth control, you'll have to self-inject a blood thinner for the first month post-op. Well, that's going to be a real challenge for me. I don't need the birth control to actually prevent pregnancy - Mother Nature already took care of that - but I do need it for the leveling of hormones. The idea of self-injecting anything completely sickens me. I simply can't do it. So, another monkey wrench is thrown into the plans and I'll need to see my OBGYN to discuss what my best option will be.
We talked about pain management, what to expect after surgery in terms of what we can and cannot do, how the surgery regulates the hunger hormones for about 2-3 years, after which time the success of the surgery is really on how strong the positive habits are that you've formed. And then, the big reveal. They opened the room divider.
The first woman who shared her story lost 220 pounds in the five years since she'd had her surgery. She looked like she'd never been heavy in her whole life. If I had met her somewhere else, I'd have never in a million years thought she'd be able to relate to where I am right now.
An older woman who had her surgery a decade ago shared her story. She'd initially lost 115 pounds and then gained back 50 and has since lost another 70. She said she gained it back by eating "junk" and once she went back to eating like she did after her surgery, the weight just came off. Then she proceeded to rant about some guy who was 500 pounds when he had his surgery and how he'd lost 200 pounds but he was still a "big, fat man." Proof positive that fat acceptance - even within its own community - is a very long way off.
We heard story after story - people who had surgery three weeks ago and people who had it years ago - all told us the same thing. "This is the best decision I ever made, and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner." I was surprised by the honesty so many people expressed, "I used to do surveys to get free donuts at Dunkies" and "Did you know you can get two free donuts at Honey Dew if you buy a coffee after 5PM? Well, I was in line at 5:01 and then again at a different location at 6:30."
I left feeling energized by my decision to do this as well as overwhelmed by the severity of it all. Will I remember all of the rules? I worried. Maybe this is why they want it to take at least three months. Maybe I shouldn't rush this. Slow it down, really absorb it and give myself the best chance of long-term success.
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