Best practices roundup - What have been your keys to long term weight loss

I am really wanting all of us to share our success tips so that we all can learn from each other. Please share! Do you still follow the pouch rules? What have been your key success factors to keeping the weight off long term?

This should be good!

I had wls (rny) three years ago in August-- I am on maintaince-- lost 170 pounds. Over the winter months I regain 25 pounds. I realize that I had quit working out ( I do not like cold weather) lol. So in Janurary I started back to working out 6 days a week and stop eating bad carbs. I have lost the 25 pounds. So for me I have to work out and really watch my carbs when i do that I can maintain my weight much better..

I'm curious, what does carb intake look like for you?

I can't seem to get it right on my end, it's always too many or too few.

Lilly - fantastic job on taking that weight back off!!!!! For many people this is a slippery slope. They would give up at a 25 lb regain and just keep going.





Like you, I have to be active and low carb it. The pouch rules call for 1/2 of our plates to be filled with lean protein. Then 1/4 to be filled with raw or lightly cooked fresh veggies and the other quarter to be fresh fruit. No where does it specify grains (bread, rice, corn, etc.) which is the staple of the standard American diet - just look at the food pyramid. It is no wonder we are an obese nation between our consumption of grains, refined sugars, and processed foods! just eat real food!





Keep up the good work and thanks for your contribution!

Be happy.

Protein first. Make protein 40%-50% of your daily food intake.

Don't eat with meals. Seriously, you can eat more that way and it gets alot easier the further out you get. It's not even uncomfortable when I do it but I personally worry what it could do to my intestines to wash down food like that. They're really pretty important to me. I don't think my stoma is stretched from it, I still have about 6-8oz of restriction and stay full for about an hour (and satiated a couple more after that) after eating. I even got foamies the other day! I am 6 YEARS out!

Don't eat the white stuff, sugar and flour products.

Don't stop exercising. Find something you like. Lots of somethings, if you can! Make it enjoyable. You'll be doing it for life. When I just can't do anything else, I walk for 30 minutes. I usually get such an edorphin high, my leisurely stroll becomes a power walk. I do it to myself all the time, tell myself I'm too tired, I'll take a short stroll and before you know it, I'm heading up the side of the mountain behind my house. It feels good!

Drink your water and water load before meals. I know carbonated drinks are "forbidden" but I love Coke Zero as a treat. Early on, carbonation was painful. Now it doesn't feel much different from pre-op.

Plan your meals. Always carry healthy meals and snacks if you're out alot. It's very, very, very, VERY easy to pick up convenience foods and tell yourself it's "just this once" and "it won't hurt." We used those lines on ourselves before surgery and they were lies then, too. Worse yet, anything I pick up somewhere always has more calories, fat and sodium than if I had made it myself. I do enjoy restaurants, but whatever you get, it's not going to have the nutritional content of something you make a home. For the life of me, I can't figure out how they manage to inject like 60 grams of fat into a burger. I can make a cheeseburger with a quarter pound beef patty at home and wind up eating only 12 grams of fat. They can even make a grilled chicken breast somehow double the calories. It doesn't math. 

Be happy.

 

 

Those are all excellent tips Firemuse - thanks so much. I still have trouble with not drinking water with my meals. I have to practice my water loading technique until it becomes habit.

My nutritionist had recommended 100 g of protein a day. She said to balance protein and carbs at every meal 2:1. So that means 50 g of carbs a day. She said it was very important to achieve this balance at every meal. I believe she said calories should be 1300 or less. i used fit day.com to do this and it worked very well.

She recommended 80-100 oz of water every day. And 1-hr of exercise.

The above is not easy to do but it works.

I follow the principals of The paleo and primal blueprint diets and just eat real food. I also like the high intensity short duration exercises that mark sisson, primal blueprint, recommends. This has caused me to lose more weight than working out an hour a day with body for life. It is also easier to fit into my schedule.

I enjoy sprinting. Who would have guessed that?!? I've also wanted to join a women's crew team and will take lessons next Summer. I just had a tummy tuck so I cannot do it this season. I also enjoy taking my dogs for walks and easy hikes through national parks. So, yes, find activities that you enjoy!!!

I was an emotional eater in my former life. I still have to protect against that. I was a processed food junkie, and like any junkie, the habit is hard to kick. So I don't keep any junk food in my house. It is not there to temp me. It is easier to ignore it outside my home, like at entertainment venues and restaurants. For me, one meal can lead to the next binge. It can be hard emotionally and physically to recover from that.

Namaste,

PS meditation is excellent for peace of mind'!!!!

Sounds like you got it going on!

I follow paleo/primal too. My nutritionist sucked, so I never got the 2:1 ratio information, but after alot of trial and error I figured it out on my own just recently and that's how I eat as well. I eat 1200 calories (I am 180lbs, not thin by any means) per day but on exercise days, I eat as much as 1500 calories.

I'm working in some of the tips for leptin resistance too, such as eating 30+ grams of protein within an hour of waking up. A protein shake before my breakfast (egg and cheese omelet) does that.

I don't do an hour of exercise. "An hour" is a useless measure to me. I do strength training and work all my muscles to exhaustion 3 times a week and do alot of walking or leisurely hiking the other 2-3 days a week. No power walking for me. I enjoy the scenery (I live in Colorado, that's what I'm here for!) and enjoy the endorphins!

I still drool over donuts and the like. Cake, cupcakes, all that stuff. I can have no appetite at all and if I see a donut in the bakery section of the store, I feel this pull like OMGIHAVETOGETTHAT oh wait, I really shouldn't, BUTIHAVETO! No, just keep walking. Remember how tight your pants gets after a donut binge? Yeah. KEEP WALKING.

It's a constant thing. But when I'm eating sugar and bread, it's SO much worse than when I'm not. It's so much easier to resist when I'm not in the vicious carb cycle. I felt sorry for myself this winter between dealing with anemia (now upgraded to "just" mild iron deficiency) and then a lack of money because it all goes to tuition and then I had an old debt I cosigned for come bite me and then I was losing all my hair from the lack of iron (I'm vain about my hair!) and I was constantly so stressed out. I have no health insurance to truly treat the iron problem, and that's stressful. I visited my mom in another state which is an emotionally charged thing for me and on top of it, I hate flying. I just felt like such a failure in life. Everything was awful all at once. I binged on donuts and got NO exercise. I tried Atkins and had even less energy then before and that compounded everything else. I was on the right track doing low carb, but I hopped the wrong train. It did not go where I needed it to end up!

I'm really surprised that I didn't gain alot of weight. I gained none on the scale, but in reality, I think I swapped about 5lbs of lean muscle for 5lbs of fat.

Firemuse, I had iron deficiency anemia last year. It took many months to resolve. I could not even get out of bed on some days. And mine was only a mild case. I had to go back on iron supplements. A Bariatric surgeon - not the one who did my surgery - told me a few years ago that I could stop taking them because they were making me constipated and that I did not need them because my iron was fine. That was some very bad advice.

I am in the same weight range as you. It is relieving to find someone else who eats right and exercises and is still not a lightweight. I just really do not get how this can be, but there you have it. Were you a yoyo dieter before or had you ever lost a lot of weight and regained it in your life?

I am going to try your tips for lepton resistance - thanks a bunch for that!!! I take a lot of supplements and they truly make a difference in my health. 

As for carb type foods, it is nice to be able to make those items om almond and coconut flour on occasion. But I really have come to enjoy my high protein foods. I have celiac and so there is added motivation for me not to eat the white stuff. It really makes me feel awful on many levels. And weight regain for me is fast and furious if I eat this way. I recently fell off the wagon and had a weight regain but since my tummy tuck I have been eating right and dropped most of the regain. I have a few more pounds to go. The nice thing is that I am back into my skinny girl pants, which for me is a size 12 jean, and size medium shirts! I am 5'7" and healthy at this weight but not gonna lie I wish I was thinner, LOL. I am happy that I have always been at this weight rather than one of the wls patients who got really thin after surgery and then had a rebound regain of 20 lbs or more. That would have been hard for me to deal with emotionally.

Coco necking with patients on this site really helps a great deal. Thanks again for sharing your tips.

All these tips were very helpful to me.