Saturday, January 31, 2015

Trekking without a Car

So since around thanksgiving I haven't had a car. The only car my family had was wrecked because of the door being to heavy for the hinges. So now we have no car. Yuck!

If you have ever gone for a long time without a car you know how much this sucks. If not it's a lot harder than you can imagine. Before going through it myself I never could have fully realized how difficult it is to have no car. I am very lucky to live in between 2 large grocery stores because that makes getting what I need a lot easier. No long trips in a bus to get groceries

Even though I live in a small city, It is the main hub for the smaller cities and towns for quite a ways around us. Luckily I can take the bus to most places in town. But it still makes travel difficult and doing errands becomes an all day thing even to only go to 2 different stores, in different plaza's.

Fortunately mass health provides rides for members to get to their appointments. But you have to remember to call 3 days ahead and they can't come to get us to take us to concord until 10am and won't come pick it's up if we stay later than 2:30pm.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

60 days left!!!

I am officially ¾ of the way through my pre-op waiting period that started the first day I went to an appointment at my WLS clinic. Out of 240 days from that first appointment to the date if my surgery I have made it through 180 days total and I only have 60 days left until my gastric bypass surgery!!!

Tuesday, January 27, 2015

So little time: My last visit with my nutritionist before my pre op appointment

A few days ago I saw my nutritionist for the last time before my pre-op appointment in March. We talked about the vitamins I will be taking for the rest of my life as well as the protein shakes I will need to take both before and after surgery.

And I found out a few interesting things about protein shakes. Firstly there are way more flavors than chocolate milk, strawberry milk, and vanilla milk. There are also lots of options for lactose intolerant people. Including flavors that do not taste like milk!!!

Personally I can't stand the taste of milk and the thickness of it, so finding out that there are protein supplement powders that taste like juice, and one that tastes like chicken broth, as well as an unflavored variety that can be put into other things is super exciting to me.

Syntrax nectar makes flavors that are specially made to taste like juice. As well as cookie and chocolate flavor

Injury has a powder that taste like chicken broth and one that taste like strawberry juice.

I received samples of both of those 2 unjury flavors as well as several samples of vitamins. I took pictures of my samples next to common items for a size comparison; quarter, penny, pens, & post-it notes.

All the samples

Chewable Vitamins in both soft chew and tablet chew varieties. Compared to a quarter and a penny.

Individual protein powder packets in chicken broth and strawberry sorbet. Compared to post-it notes, a quarter & a penny.


***On another note, 61 days left till my surgery!!!!!!!!!***

Friday, January 9, 2015

My jar project

Since my mother, my god sister, and myself are all having gastric bypass surgery in a few short months I decided to make us each something to help us in our journey.

I wrote many small note tags that ask questions fit the jar owner to answer about their decision to have weight loss surgery goals they have etc. This has been a really fun project and is good to look at in times of doubt.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

My New Years Resolution

Now that the new year is upon us I thought this was the perfect time to discuss my new years resolution for 2015.

For the first time in forever I am actually making a resolution that I'm sure I will be sticking too. Usually in the past when weight loss was my goal for the new year it has been unachievable. Not that I didn't try, because I certainly did, it has simply been out of my reach to lose the amount of weight I need to loose to be healthy. On top of that I live in one of the coldest parts of Massachusetts, which makes the time of year that I can exercise outdoors relatively short considering my need to cut my current weight by at least half in order to reach my goal weight. Most gym memberships are costly and even the college I attend does not offer a free membership to their gym upon enrollment.

Of course those are just a few factors that have made losing weight more difficult. There are so very many more.

This year is different, on March 30th  I'm getting gastric bypass surgery. So no matter what I will lose weight. And just as it starts to warm up in my corner of the world I will be gaining tons of energy from the bypass and should have already lost a bit of weight making exercising easier.

My surgery is in 87 days. I can't believe how far I have come in my journey, but I still have a long way to go!!!