SIPS Surgery - Anyone?

Also FYI - SADi has been around for 9 years.

150 pounds in 9 months!  Congratulations!!!   I'm very appreciative of your post.  I am the same...  lowest possible surgical risk, please with limited side effects.  I am also realizing that I am a bit fearful of losing too much weight.  Maybe I need to go back to therapy?  lol   But really... I don't think I've weighed 125-150 since like 6th grade.  I don't even know what that would be like.  175-225 would be okay with me.  More than okay - I'd be thrilled!!   I see my friends showing signs of aging and I don't show those signs yet because I guess the fat fills in.   But if I drop a ton of weight, will I show like 10-15 years of aging all at once?  I want to lose weight to be much healthier, but I'm not trying to Barble...   I'm not sure if I'm expressing all of this correctly...  I'm afraid I will be judged for these statements, but I'm really asking myself what my true feelings are.   I'm afraid of looking really old and gross with too much hanging skin and and showing too much aging all at once...  but I still want to lose weight.   *sigh*

Here's one of my studies from my research for the procedure, Stephanie:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5064262/

Very informative

Something I did when I was researching was to pay very close attention to posters names and what problems they had over time.  I had a whole page of notes of who had what problems over time and how many were still having problems and all that kind of stuff.  OH goes back years, you can really get a good picture with some analysis here.

 

The way this board is organized, you really have to pull apart the posts to find and track the SIPS people, they really should have their own board.*    But, once identified you will find that the SIPS people, when not evangelizing their surgery, complain about BM's and worry about malnutrition about equal amounts as the full DS people.  There is no getting around the fact that you are sabotaging your body's super excellent, world class digestive system into a system that isn't so efficient.   Any bariatric surgery is bad that way.  They are not something that makes your body better, but losing all the fat does make your life better.  I'm not saying it isn't worth it, but everything has a price.

 

Sit down and figure out what price people are actually paying and if that is a price you can live with. 

 

I went with the DS because it seemed to me that while wave after wave of people hit the DS boards with problems, but then wave after wave fixed their problems and went away happy and now only post on their big anniversaries.   DS veterans seem like they almost all move on to living large with their time full of all sorts of amazing things, including a love of food.  I don't know how many that say "I'm eat anything I want and although I'm 20 lbs over ideal, this is exactly where I'm happiest."   The other surgeries all seem to keep their focus in the dreary diet world, and I didn't want to live that way.  I love food and it makes me happy.  Why would I fully give that up if I don't have to?

 

..brandy.

 

Footnote*:

This is my annual controversial plea to remove the SIPS people to their own board.  The advice the SIPS people offer to DS'ers and DS'ers to the SIPS people is only ever accidentally correct, maybe.  We don't know.   Many people don't identify themselves and so unless you spend a lot of time, you don't know if the advice you get when you post here is from people with your own surgery.  That is dangerous.  Hell, I thought I knew somebody was DS and just found out they were SIPS and I had given them advice.  I know nothing about living with a SIPS, I just assumed a plea for help on the DS board was something I could just answer.  I hate this.  It is why I'm not more active here unless I start feeling guilty for not giving back when so many people helped me. 

 

Hopefully SIPS patients will get their own forum. Unfortunately, as with other experimental procedures....i.e the fobi pouch...they go away because surgeons recognize that their "upgrades" were not upgrades at all, but cause many issues (again...fobi pouch, Mini DS, etc)....or the forums degrade into forums where people are all sick....and that is not really a support forum.

You said exactly what I've wanted to say for the last 3 months that I returned to these forums. DSers move on....we don't spend our lives dieting....and many of us take the 10% bounce back and just keep trucking. I actually came back becuase I wanted to lose the 10 percent (20 lbs) that had crept up on me over the years....but I was maintaining a 280 lb weight loss without any effort. The weight came off pretty easy, but now I'm exercising again, weighing myself regularly, and tracking my food. This is a choice......I can choose to be a size 32/33 pants or a 36. I can choose to fit into a medium shirt or a large. I prefer the formers on both of those. I know it's a vanity thing or even a bit of having a distorted body image....but I like the way I look at feel at my ideal weight...and I did not like what I saw at 20 lbs heavier. Although the funny thing is that no one noticed I gained weight and no one noticed I lost weight (the joys of being 6'1'') except me (and my belt).

fyi - Scottie's doctor disagrees with his comments above and recommends the SADi procedure over the standard DS for most patients. I know because he is also my doctor and the same one who recommended the SADi over original DS to me after explaining why he considers it a better option now.

Great post.  Thank you so much for sharing.  I am nervous to go full DS, only because it seems so complex, but I'm getting more used to the idea.

So, climbing on top of the information overload that is needed to make a responsible bariatric surgery decision is hard, but living with a DS?  Well, that is the simplest thing in the world once you figure it out. 

 

Obese people gain comorbidities over time which means daily pills to treat them.  Or you can pretty much count on the fact that getting a DS will wipe out all those health issues (probably) but now you have to take vitamins.  So it doesn't matter, either way you are going to have to take daily pills; just a choice between supplements and drugs. 

 

But the great news is that insurance companies pay for you to have all sorts of tests, so much so that my general doctor considers it a ridiculous amount, but he still signs and they pay it.  That allows you to tune your supplements and address upcoming health problems YEARS before you would know about things before hand. 

 

So, the whole DS things boils down to I have better information on my health and I take different pills than I used to.    

 

Assuming you have no lingering complications (the DS typically runs the lowest here although that is SURGEON specific) that leaves managing your changed health.  The first year will be rough, no matter the surgery.  After you have lost your preordained amount of excess weight, it will take you at least a year to learn how to manage your body .vs. having your body manage you.  So, it took me around two years to figure out my calcium .vs. laxative .vs. forbidden foods .vs. happiness .vs. time in the bathroom pooping ratio and how to be the weight I want to be.  

 

And that brings us to as far as I know, because I'm at 2.5 years and I've hit my stride now.  This is typically when people lay off the DS forums because they just live big for a while.  Then it seems like at somewhere between 6 and 8 years, a percentage will come back because they need to get religious about carbs again and a percentage of those stick around and become the veterans that help the rest of us through this.  Whom I thank! 

 

Do you know what I think the biggest problem the DS really has?  The surgeons give **** nutrition advice, even the excellent ones.  So you have to get your health advice from strangers on the internet.  That is generally not a winning strategy.  :-)  But you get over it when you see just how much these people know about this subject.  But they do set up a good percentage of the patients for problems, unless they seek out this information early in the process.  As long as your surgeon didn't do anything experimental, I've seen records of hundreds of people that have turned it around, but I wish they hadn't have had to go through that to begin with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lots of great info.  Thank you so much for sharing. Speaking of nutrition advice - I have seen advice for low fat....... and high fat... which is it for DS?   Speaking of... I'm going with DS.  Just found out today that my insurance won't cover SIPS.