Only regret not doing it sooner.

Well, I am a scientist, and Kairk is pretty much spot-on.

If you go on a very low-carb (>20 / day) diet or fast, your body will fully deplete it's glycogen stores in 1-3 days.  You also might feel fatigued or "foggy-brained" during that time, but it will pass after blood sugar levels stabilize.

I spent two decades of my life trying to control my weight and failing.  Like many of you, I did rollercoaster dieting - gain / lose / gain / lose.  Before WLS, if I never regained a pound I lost, I would have weighed 40 pounds!

So, about 10 or 15 years ago, I said if I ever get my life in order and maintain my weight loss, I would get a tattoo that I'd see in the mirror each day to remind me not to slip back to old habits.  Well, I realized I've been about my goal weight for more than a year now.... so I went down to the torture palace, I mean, the tattoo parlor, and got this:

It's on my left upper chest, and is about the size of a CD.

I thought they don't let you get a tattoo if you're sloshed?

Used to have that issue - taking a magnesium pill at night fixes it for me.

If you recently posted about eating deep fried cake, then I apologize, but I was not specifically targeting you and did not see that posting.  I picked the example of the "fried chocolate cake" simply because I found it to be an absurd concept, in general, especially for a WLS patient, and humorously created by Paula Deen (of course).  That felt 'safe' to mock, as I wouldn't have imagined someone getting most of their stomach surgically removed and then have deep-fried chocolate later a couple months later.  

I try to not target any specific people when I post.

I definitely get what you're saying... I have my days.

Well said, Lisa!

Why not check out Paula Deen's Chocolate-Covered Stick of Butter Popsicle?  

That's a fine line, that is.

So, hello, welcome to this little corner of the internet.  It's a small corner, to be sure, free of cute kittens and *****graphy, which is pretty rare these days.  This little internet cache is for us surgical weight loss patients, pending and present.  A place where we can share ideas, gather information, and provide support with only modest exposure to advertisements.

Let's chat about support.

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about what "being supportive" means and I'd like to open a dialogue and address those. I like to work from the back-end, so I'm going to discuss from the view of being "unsupportive".

It is not unsupportive of someone if they disagree with you.  This is a pretty simple one, but just look at interactions between Rupublicans and Democrats to see what insanity can ensue from disagreement.   Yes, it can be easy to feel like someone disagreeing with you is personally attacking you - and who knows, maybe they are?  But when someone shares their truth with you, they aren't being unsupportive.  You can accuse them of being wrong (be careful of this), but they are trying to help/support you.  Sharing what we believe to be true ("carbs are evil" or "carbs are necessary") isn't a personal attack.

It is not unsupportive to lack commiseration.  Let's put on our big-boy/big-girl pants, and all agree that we sometimes do this, myself included:  we come clean about some dumbass thing we're doing ("Is it ok to eat fried chocolate cake?") or such, and we want a 'there-there' pat on the back.  Well, getting commiseration on the web i****and-miss, folks.  There's no body language or tonal inflection, so people never are certain if you've just had an astounding revelation that changes your life forever, or if you're just fishing for permission to eat fried chocolate cake.  Honestly, if you feel you need to wade around in your mistake and temporary embrace self-pity for a while and share commiseration, use the right tool:  seek our your friends and/or a therapist.  That's why you have them.  Seek kindness from people, face-to-face, not from the internet.

It's not unsupportive to receive a wake-up call.  Another time of honesty.  At different periods of our lives, our heads have been up our asses, as the saying goes.  You are a human being and thus extremely fallible.  Some mistakes are small, and some are gigantic, like our former butts.  Someone may hold a virtual mirror up to your face so that you can see the image you are showing others without realizing it.  This can be extremely painful to be on the receiving end - I've been there with egg on my face, feeling like a fool.  But it's not unsupportive for someone to hold up that mirror to your face to try to help you.  In fact, doing this in person, face-to-face, can take a tremendous amount of bravery.  (Not so much bravery required to do on the internet.)  The fact of the matter is that a subset of you are eating crap, too much of it, and you're not going to get to goal - there's a vague, untargeted wake-up call from me.  And if you don't believe that, just look at forum postings each month from different people who come back months or years later, regaining.

Ok, so.... what then do I think being unsupportive really is?  I've got two big ones:

It is unsupportive to personally attack someone.  This includes name-calling ("you're a dumbass") or bringing in some personal element that isn't related to the discussion ("how could you be right about anything, you can't even hold a job").  If you feel you have to go to these places (whether you are giving or receiving information) then log-off.  You're not functionally supporting someone if you're attacking their character.  When providing critical feedback, it's vital to focus only on the behavior ("you're eating more than 3 ounces of food at a time") rather than the abstract ("you're an idiot for overeating").  

It is unsupportive to remain silent and not share your truth.  Ah ha!  Well here's where I'm just a big old hypocrite, because I pretty much do this fairly consistently now.  I'm not at the top of the vet chain, but am getting up there with almost two years out of surgery, a year out from my lower body lift, and being weight-stable at goal for over a year.  I see tons of posts and have information and experiences that could help them, but I don't share them.  Two reasons, one is defendable and one isn't.  The indefensible reason:  they are highly repetitive.  Honestly we should all gather up and write an FAQ (but that's for a different time).   The defensible reason:  A negative feedback gets set up when you do share your truth with someone, and it's received as a personal attack (because they disagree) or too mean (because I'm not commiserating) or bullying (by providing a wake-up call).  Still, I'm a hypocrite here and I'll own that. 

It's interesting how personal some of us take critical feedback and how with others it's like water off a duck's back.  I wrote this post over a year ago about how you have to maintain a militant-like mentality if your goal was/is to get to 100% excess weight loss.  My view is that this post is highly supportive; others were mixed.  Some find it supportive because of the content, others posted (in neighboring threads) that it lacked support because there was no gentleness or commiseration.  

I think we need to remember that the vast majority of the time, even if what we reads feels bad, it goes from a foundation of trying to support one another.

I'm almost two years out, and there's no way I could eat the amounts that you are.  I could never fit all that in my stomach.  

Recommendations:

1)  Change your relationship with food.  Toss the pizza and fried chicken wings out the window.  Don't put junk in your body.

2)  Do not eat to satisfaction.  Weigh our your portions, eat that portion, then stop.  Do not eat more.  Eat 2-3 ounces of lean meat and then done.

You're right - it is too much.

Good luck.