I am over 15 years out from my RNY Surgery

Wow your doctor had RNY too! That is amazing. You don't hear that too much! I love Disney.....must have been a blast living close to all the parks!!

I agree having my RNY was a great thing, still a battle and hard work but soooo much better and healthier.

Glad you joined.

Best

megan

Yes, Dr. Marema's having had the surgery was like the cherry on the top of the sundae! He has such great bedside manner with his patients because he himself knows personally what the rest of us are going through. From the moment I met Dr. Marema, I had such great peace of mind about my decision to go through will the surgery. I expected a lot of pushback from BCBS (my insurance company) but with the help of Dr. Marema's staff in helping convince my GP to write a letter of recommendation for me to have the surgery, I got my approval from BCBS in about a week! Lots of folks who had the surgery around the same time I did had to fight much longer with their respective insurance companies before approval. It all went so relatively smoothly for me, so it felt to me like it was all meant to be!

It was all such a blessing to me!

So nice to read such positive energy. Just had RNY October 9, 2018. My surgeon also had RNY on himself. Reading this forum is the only support I have outside of the surgeon/dietician office. Thank you again for your encouraging thoughts; some of the ppl have such awful & negative things to say. Wish if they didn't have nice things to say that they wld refrain from commenting at all.

Congrats on your amazing success and thanks for sharing your story! It would be great to see you on the daily menu forum.

Thank you for sharing your story. It helps my journey to know that people still fight food many years out. There will never be a free ride for me either. Each day, I must choose how much to eat and to exercise, even when I don't feel like doing anything. Congratulations on your success!!

I know you must know how fortunate you are to be given such a wonderful tool in gaining back control over food! I stress "tool" because it's only part of our arsenal. All these years later, it's still a battle I wager trying to remember, for instance, not to wait til I'm starved to eat. Every time I do, I eat 2 or 3 bites and I gobble it down so quickly that I get too full too quickly. And then I have to wait 10 or 15 minutes before I can finish eating. It's still frustrating! I still have to do better at eating slower. I think I've gotten into the very opposite habit as I had pre-op, waiting too long between meals to eat. That's just part of my battle. Everybody will have their own issues of course, but still, I'm here pretty healthy nearly 16 years after my surgery and I'd do it all again! This is our chance to really, truly live and to be thankful for every day. That part I've got down perfectly! I wish you the very best and look forward to hearing more about your journey!

Welcome! As a newbie, I always find the journeys of vet's interesting reading. I have tucked away many cautionary tales to hopefully remind myself that perseverance is a requirement. Boy wouldn't I like to he the person who could say, it was easy, it took no effort, I could eat whatever, but I'm smart enough to know that after reading story after story of the "real" struggle, that this is going to take some work.

I appreciate you taking the time to post your story and look forward to more posts!

As you know, this surgery simply provides us a tool! It is not the end-all-and-be-all! We get the chance to start doing it all the right way and to have a second chance at rebuilding our relationship with food and with life in general.

The scariest part for me was that for 2 full months following my surgery, I had ZERO (NO) hunger at all! I couldn't gather up a ginger to save my life, so when I say I had to force myself to eat 2 to 4 Oz PER DAY, I mean I had to FORCE myself! After a couple of weeks of living without hunger, I brought it up to Dr. Marema because (as you can imagine) I'd never had that problem ever in my life (except at those times in my lives when I was sick to my stomach! I truly began to fear that I would be without hunger of any kind for the rest of my life! The Doctor assured me that the hunger would come back, and after a couple of months, it did! But it's a situation I will never ever forget! It took me even longer to get back my energy as you can imagine but it came back too, in time, and then I began to notice that it was soooooo much easier moving around a body that weighed much less and it made me excited to get out and do more and push myself more!

So many memories...

I know it doesn't sound like much but I cannot tell you how much it thrilled me to be able to sit at a booth as opposed to a table at a restaurant. I remember in the bad old days when I'd ask for a table and the waiter/waitress would take us to a booth which I could not fit into and we'd have to have them take us back to the waiting area until they found a table. So embarrassing. I still think about that even now when going to a restaurant, and I remember when I hated even eating in public!

Obviously not all memories are good ones. ?

I was actually hoping I'd be one of those lucky few whose hunger *never* comes back - it was so freeing and so easy to lose weight that way - but alas, it came back at five months out. Boo!

Losing your hunger sounds pretty awesome at first blush, but I began realizing that (even though I had waaaaaaaay overdone), hunger is a basic instinct for humans, and I couldn't live without it. It was a great side effect as far as losing weight was concerned, but I was also very weak and felt horrible during that time. For me, it wasn't about trying to avoid hunger (in the long run) but learning how to deal with the hunger, abd at this point I'm doing pretty well! I've found that my friends and family eat not only an awful lot more than I do, but an awful lot more frequently than I do. I genuinely am still so surprised to just notice all this because at one point, it was ME who suggested eating more often and then I'd eat waaaaay past my comfort zone! My whole new world post-op still surprises me at times. Makes me feel thankful every single day! ?