It’s been five weeks since my surgery. At this point, the pain from the surgical sites is gone (although that’s only been in the last week), and as of tomorrow, I’ll be able to eat regular food. I’ve lost just a hair under 30 pounds.

When I was first contemplating surgery, I understood that my eating habits would be changed forever, but I don’t think I really understood the mechanisms behind it. I knew that the surgery itself wasn’t going to be what took the weight off. It would be the diet and exercise that happened afterward. While that’s strictly true, none of it is happening the way I thought it would.

Won’t or Can’t

In the 34 hours I was in the hospital, they tried feeding me 3 times. Each time, I was able to take a few sips of water and about as much food as would fill half a baby spoon. That was it.

Over the next two weeks, I had nothing but liquids – protein drinks and shakes, three times a day for the first week, supposedly going up to five times a day the second. Except that I couldn’t. It would take me half an hour or more to drink the entire 8 ounces of liquid, and by the time I was due to have my next protein drink, I was still full from the last one. And being too full meant risking vomiting. My one goal through this whole process has been to never vomit.

Week 3, I graduated to “blenderized” food. “Blenderized” meant baby food consistency. Which meant a lot of actual baby food. If you add salt and spices, it tastes like food. I put a chicken breast in the blender with an equal amount of chicken stock, giving me about 32 ounces of chicken baby food. Here’s another issue: since I could only eat ~2 ounces of chicken at a time, I had enough for 16 meals. Even eating 4 meals a day, that’s 4 solid days’ worth of food, and who wants to eat the same thing every meal? If I put 2 ounces of chicken and an ounce of veggies in my dish, I was often still too full for my next meal. Sometimes, nausea from pain made eating hard.

Week 5, I progressed to “soft” food. By now, I can eat 4 ounces at a meal – four and a half, sometimes. Any more than that, and I can’t do it, and I’m too full for my next meal.

All this is to say, it’s not that I won’t eat, or that I don’t want to as in I have no desire for food (although that’s certainly true, for the most part). It’s that often, I can’t eat.

What does “rapid” mean?

All the literature I was given said “You will lose 10-20 pounds in the first two weeks, 30% of your goal in 3-4 months, half in 6. You will plateau in 12-18 months.” It seems pretty fast. I did lose 20 pounds in the first 3 weeks. And I hit my 30% goal about a week later. I credited the rapid loss to the fact that I was eating almost nothing but protein and vitamins.

I log everything I eat so I can ensure I’m getting enough protein – too little and you can lose muscle and your hair will fall out. I eat somewhere between 350 and 550 calories in a day (meaning I have never had fewer than 350, or more than 550). So I know exactly how much I’m taking in versus how much I’m putting out. Every day, I’m on the treadmill for between 30 and 60 minutes, although yesterday, I took my first hike since my surgery.

I stopped weighing myself every day after the first day I gained a pound relative to the day before. How can a person eat almost nothing and not only still function, but put on weight? Beats the fuck out of me. Years ago, I read an article dating back to WWII that detailed Queen Elizabeth’s very frugal diet (I presume to prove to people that the monarch wasn’t living opulently whilst her people were doing without) that said that the Queen’s diet amounted to about 750 calories per day. At the time, I couldn’t believe that anyone could function for a long time on that little. Right about now, I don’t think it’s even possible for me to take in 750 calories in a single day, and I’m functioning just fine.

I weigh in on Mondays, and take my measurements so I can see not just how many pounds I’m losing, but how many inches. This past week, I lost a single pound, and gained 2.5 inches in my hips.

Half the game is 90% mental

Here’s the hardest part of the whole thing: Not losing weight, occasionally even gaining, is phenomenally discouraging. Downright depressing. And yet, I can’t angrily binge eat a pizza or down three Snickers in my car where no one will see me. If I eat the sugar, I’ll get violently sick. And at this point, the pizza would likely make me sick as well. Doing anything except taking care of myself will literally make me sick. And the only thing worse than being depressed is being depressed and sick.

Which means that the only thing I can do when I get depressed is to look at the horizon. I can’t afford to think short term anymore. Being discouraged now is just an emotional state. It doesn’t have anything to do with how I eat, exercise, take my meds.

It’s still early days for me, and yet, I don’t feel like the same person I was five weeks ago. We’ll see where that goes.