Gotta watch the amounts!

So things have been going good so far. Tonight though, really makes me wish Monday would get here faster!! I made my family a rotisserie chicken and OMG… I wanted to have a bite. It was so moist looking it was killing me. I could have put a piece in my mouth and chewed it and spit it out, but I think half the enjoyment in food is swallowing it, so I refrained. It was hard! I’m not “hungry” i’m just bored!

I have been living on homemade fatless mushroom soup and split pea soup. I don’t think those exactly fit in the guidelines of my full liquids, though I don’t see how it would hurt. I can have cottage cheese and oatmeal which definitely has chunks and texture but nothing else? Doesn’t make sense to me. The pea soup has no chunks whatsoever, so it’s pretty much like a cream soup, and the mushroom soup is just like what comes in a can except better. I just don’t understand who comes up with these lists of things we should and shouldn’t have. I did well with both though, except tonight I had a problem with soup. I don’t feel hungry and after I eat it doesn’t feel as if I have eaten anything. So I had 1 cup of pea soup. Well, that was too much but I knew it after I ate, I felt nauseated. I will cut it back down to 1/2 cup. The good doc told me the other day to take 30 minutes to eat my 1/2 cup of food. I’m sorry, but even when computing and eating at the same time, and eating off of my baby spoon, it is not possible to take a half hour to eat 1/2 cup of cottage cheese. Does anyone but me understand this? The same with soup… even if I use my baby spoon, and wait 30 seconds between each bite, I can only take a max of 15 minutes to eat something. This WILL be dramatically different on solids though, it will take me that long to eat, if not more. Even when I had the lapband, I always took 45 minutes to eat meat and stuff like that.

I can’t wait until Monday or Sunday if I feel like I’m going nuts to start my pureed foods. I want some darn chicken salad and tuna salad. I got my cupboards stocked with refried beans and my dairy drawer stocked with yummy cheese!! And OMG only one week and a couple days til we can eat REAL food!! Oh yeah, and hallelujah for chili time on Monday!! I will be disappointed if I cannot tolerate chicken. I have spent the last 4 and 1/4 years of my life not being able to enjoy chicken because of that darned band, and I’m finally looking forward to being able to eat it again. I realize it may be hard at first, but I hope I can handle it.

I’m doing pretty good getting in my protein via food and keeping my calories under 700. I’m just so sick of protein drinks, I am only going to use them at the end of a day if I am short. They say taking protein before bed is best anyhow! I also realized that my horrendous bad breath is caused because I am in a state of ketosis, which is awesome. I tried so hard on one of my diets to get to this point. Atkins forces you to go into ketosis to lose weight. When you are in ketosis you burn fat for energy. I have officially lost 13lbs so far. The doctors office scale is 3lbs heavier than mine though, but the loss is still the same, i’m just started out 3lbs heavier there and still remain the same. The home scale says 229, the docs office says 232. It has always consistently been a 3lb difference. I think I will use my scale though, it always sounds better! Only 9lbs til I get below my lowest weight since I was in school!

I hope all of my fellow October 5th’ers are doing good too. I am finding this to be so much better of a recovery than when I had the lapband in. I asked my husband last night, “aren’t you surprised I haven’t had a mental breakdown yet?”… because when I had the lapband, i couldn’t stand it… I was hungry and my stomach would growl, but there is nothing you can do about it when your stoma is closed shut because it was swollen! It was mentally horrible then. Now it’s just a breeze, and am thankful I am not hungry!

The craziest thing though!? Every thing on t.v. reminds me of food and wanting to eat. I see a strawberry shortcake cartoon commercial, I think of strawberry shortcake and eating it. I seen a cartoon pizza on spongebob, and instantly thought of eating pizza. I don’t know why, because I never ate these things before (at least for the last 4 years) and I have no plans on indulging later on either!!

I am doing pretty good on my water. I am NOT going to allow myself to stress about it though. I have been nuts about getting in exactly 64oz a day. While it is important that we get fluids in, I never drank that much a day before my surgery, so if I’m short a few ounces, from this day forward i’m not going to lose sleep over it. I don’t know why I have been stressing so much over it. I pledge to drink as much as I physically can without going nuts over it. The same goes for protein, while it is important, before surgery I didn’t get this much in per day, but I also promise to try my hardest to get in at least 60g of protein, but I’m also not going to kill myself if I have a day where I didn’t meet that goal. I have found that the more I drink of water, the less I want of anything else, so I need to strike a balance in there somewhere!

I will update again soon! Wow, I can’t believe I’m about 2 weeks post op already!! Time is gonna fly!