average weight loss

I'm 6 weeks out and have lost 30 lbs post-op. Looks like we're both doing the same.

I look at it like this, I wouldn't have lost any if I hadn't had the surgery.

There is good news and bad news about this surgery.  Results will vary.  The biggest success stories you hear about are from people whose weight melted off right after surgery.  I was not one of these people.  But it was not necessarily a tragedy for me.

 

My top weight was 450 lbs.  I lost my weight very, very, very slowly.  I was in a panic, because I had been told that there was this weight loss window that closed after eighteen months.  So, needless, to say I was very depressed when that window "closed" on me still weighing 300 lbs.  I could not afford to tweak my surgery with revisions, so I figured that, even with such disappointing results, 300 lbs. was better than 450 lbs and went on with my life.

 

Little did I know that I would start losing weight again.  I would lose about ten pounds, get all excited about it and then get frustrated, because I ended up frozen again for several months.  Then the process would start again.  Finally, I just stopped fighting it and continued on with my life to the point where I didn't pay much attention to it.  I just got slightly smaller clothes.

I am almost ten years out and I am still losing weight, albeit by centimeters.  This was about two months ago, when I had to take back some clothes I had not tried on, because my size was suddenly too big for me and I had to get smaller shoes, I finally got on a scale.  (I had tossed mine out of sheer frustration).  I weighed myself on a doctor's scale and found my weight had dropped all the way down to 215 lbs.

 

There was something familiar about that number, so I charted my plateaus and I can safely say that each point was the weight I had started dieting before I had had my WLS.  I had been a horrible yo-yo dieter.  There wasn't a diet I hadn't tried before my WLS.  So, I not had several, several set-points and plateaus to deal with, I have several more!

 

My best advice to the slower losers is not to get too bent out of shape over how slowly the scale is moving.  It will go down at its own speed.  Your best bet is to work on your muscle tone, because you will be surprised how little there actually is eve though it was supporting a lot of fat.  Also, you need to rebuild your muscle or you will freeze your butt off.

Pay attention to your nutrition and physical fitness and the rest will take care of itself, so keep the faith.