Progress continues, apace. Which, of course, is what progress does. Making that tautological. But nevermind.

I've been able to eat a few additional foods. I've so far gone beyond liquids with:

These have all been most welcome despite my being limited to approximately 4-6 tablespoons of any combination of them at any given time. I've been very tentative as I explore the possibilities, figuring that if it's only two weeks until I'm allowed to eat actual solid food, I might as well just wait for that. The longer I go without it, the longer the 'relatively easy' weight loss will continue, and the lower the surgery risk as far as I can tell.

After a week stuck between 298 and 301, today I was finally below that, and feel like I'm continuing downward. Something had to give, I wasn't eating any more calories. I think it was, as my surgical team said, my body starting to retain fluids to make for dehydration of surgery week.

I think I experienced 'dumping' for the first time, although it's not supposed to be as severe with this surgery vs. say gastric bypass. I had eaten some cottage cheese, and a couple hours later I had a yogurt. After a couple of minutes I felt uncomfortably full, then I began having the shivers and light dizziness/nausea. As far as I can tell, this happens when food gets shoved out the bottom end of the stomach before it's done digesting, and the excess sugar remaining hits the small intestine? Or something like that? In any case, it went away after 10-15 minutes, and I did not throw up. For which I'm grateful.

Constipation, if you'll excuse the brief detour to very personal issues, remains a problem due to the high-protein nature of my diet. I have to remember to have Metamucil basically every other day at minimum.

The mood improvements described in my last update remain in place. I remain optimistic about this whole thing.

I can see the beginnings of my stomach skin beginning to wrinkle/sag. I'm of two minds about this. Some folks have told me to slow down the weight loss to minimize this effect, and reduce the possibility I may have to have surgery later to deal with it. However to be honest I'm reluctant to slow my weight loss right now for any reason, because I'm also told by several authorities that the weight loss is asymptotic, and that the most loss happens early. I'd prefer to lose whatever I can in the first couple of months, before my slowing metabolism, lowering metabolic load and changing fat distribution start to make it more difficult.

Weight: 294 lb