I’ve made Sundays my official weighing and measuring days, and I enter those in the blog’s sidebar. I’m down 14.8 lbs over the last week, and 25.2 pounds from pre-operative weight. I can definitely see it in body shape, and running my hands over my belly feels different.
There has been one other interesting change so far, which I was not necessarily expecting. I am sleeping much better. As I mentioned, I have severe obstructive sleep apnea, so I use a CPAP at night. The CPAP I have reports on various aspects of my sleep, which I can see on an app. One of the aspects is the number of apneas/hypopneas per hour during the night. Under five is considered good. The CPAP therapy was going very well before surgery, with number of events jumping around between 1.5 to 4, as a rule.
I brought the CPAP to the hospital, an used it there. On the night after the surgery, it was just over 1 event per hour. Since then, it’s been varying between 0.3 and 1.5. On a graph, the difference is obvious; the surgery caused an immediate drop in events. I expected the surgery to help with apnea, but I assumed the effect would be weight-loss dependent. I have had a cople of nights where I have fallen asleep before putting it on, and my wife reports that I snore much less or not at all. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I’ll take it.
I’m still not hungry, though I do want food. I miss taste and feel of many of my favorites. Last night, my wife brought home Chinese food from our local cheap Chinese place for the kids, who were having an RPG meeting. It smelled wonderful, and I very much wanted to have a bite…but not out of hunger. I just missed the taste. And–to my delight–it wasn’t that hard to turn away. Knowing that someday I’ll probably be able to eat many of these things again, in small quantities, is comforting.
In terms of food, I have found that Greek yogurt and nonfat cottage cheese go down easily and stay down well. Canned refried beans also do fine, though I do need to eat them slowly. Scrambled eggs are nice, but they don’t sit quite as well; I’ll probably try them again, but slightly softer. I did find that a small digital kitchen scale with a tare feature is much more convenient for measuring out food portions than the tiny one-ounce cups from the hospital.
My energy is coming back; I’m able to take on longer walks, and if I get tired it just feels like normal tiredness, not the deep fatigue that I was feeling before. Actually, I’m feeling quite good.