Buy the best and smartest scale you can find and use it every day. I highly recommend Garmin Smart Scale. This is really about weight. When your weight is the ideal amount for your body, everything else becomes easier. You feel light, full of energy, confident, and able to cope with whatever life throws your way.

Being over your ideal weight affects your body, your energy, your moods, your self-confidence, and the way others perceive you. It makes everything in life harder. After weight loss surgery, it is pretty easy to get to your ideal body weight. But it is very difficult to stay there after the magical first few years of surgery are gone. That is when the scale starts creeping up and your health and happiness start creeping down with it.

Make weighing yourself the top priority in your day. Don't ignore it or try to tell yourself that it is not important. Make exercise the next most important thing you have to accomplish. Think about what you are eating and why. If you do this without a plan for success, you are really planning to fail.

Five years after achieving their ideal weight, about 95% of people without surgery have gained their excess back. About 50% of those with surgery have gained at least half of their excess weight back. Be one of the people who get surgery, lose the weight, and then work to keep it off for life.

I don't invite unsolicited opinions so noone has ever said this to me.

I don't talk about my surgery much now, because it was so long ago, but like most of us, I didn't shut up about it for a year or five

As I have often said, the surgery is an easy way to lose weight, keeping it off for 17 years is most definitely not easy and I have had times I've regained A LOT, but I've never given up and have always managed to claw my way back to a normal BMI.

For the first few years, I rarely told anyone. I do remember one person saying I took the easy out. I had to explain that I worked harder to get wls. My body was so messed up because of decades of yo-yo dieting causing my metabolism to be severely slow. Wls didn't mean that I would keep the weight off. I had to learn a healthy lifestyle in food plans and exercise, just like anyone else. When you're 4'11" and over 300 lbs, the chances of losing that much weight is almost impossible.

I don't have much need for other people's opinions on my medical decisions so it's not been an issue. I didn't need anyone's approval when I had my gallbaldder out and I didn't need it for this either. Some people know, some people don't.

If anyone asks about my diet, which can look strange, I say low carb, high protein, sugar free and I try to stay around 1000 calories.

Thank you for your advice!