See you later 2010 and some updates!

I will not miss 2010.  Between broken pipes, broken floors, lightening and broken bodies... 2010 has been a year.  It has not been all bad.  There have been some great great times mixed in with the bad and I'm thankful for it all.  Well, maybe not this one. I've learned a lot, made some of the best blogger friends ever and DH and I have never been better.  Even still, I'm looking forward to ringing in 2011 and a fresh new start!  I think we are ringing in the new year on an upswing.  DH and I are both moving to a healthier lifestyle and are determined to make 2011 a year of good health (even if that includes some surgeries!). DH and I even have little party hats for New Years Eve.  Granted, DH is trying to sleep off a horrible cold right now, but still, we are still wearing those hats tonight!! I'm sure he will love that!  Hahahaha!  I'm not sure we will make it to midnight, but we will see!

I'm three weeks post-op from my WLS and doing incredibly well.  I am SO thankful that everything has gone so well.  I have yet to feel any hunger and still need alarms and reminders to eat.  I'm eating food for nourishment only and that is great.  I'm eating 2 oz. meals, three times a day.  My food staples right now are refried beans and string cheese.  See... nourishment only.  It is not about taste right now!  Eating still takes me a long long time.  Two ounces takes about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on if it is beans or cheese.  I still set a two minute timer between each bite and wait.  I feel like I sip water and/or protein drinks all day long!  Sipping 64 - 80 ounces of water/liquids takes all day.  Literally, sipping, from a sippy cup or sports bottle.  I use the sports bottle for most drinks and drinking too much at a time can cause some serious pain.  Luckily, that hasn't happened much for me.  So, I just sip, sip, sip and sip some more.

I am just now finally getting in all my liquids and all my protein (at least 70 - 90 grams a day).  It seemed like the first several weeks, no matter how much I sipped, I could NOT get all the liquid in.  I struggled with this so much and I was always coming up short!  The protein was equally hard, but once I started to eat more cheese, it got a bit better.  For my protein drinks, I'm mainly doing milk with dry milk mixed in.  It taste good to me and gets me to my protein goals the majority of the time.  I haven't found a protein mix or drink that I like more than the plain old milk/dry milk combo.  I bought samples of things to try, but I just gag when I try to drink them.  I'm a water and milk gal and it is really showing here.  I'm far from perfect in the liquid/protein department, but I'm getting better day by day.  It's kind of like a one step forward, two steps back process.

Energy wise, I go up and down.  I feel that slowing and steady I'm getting more steady energy wise.  I'm trying to get lots of sleep at night and I find myself not needing or taking long naps during the day.  I'm up and going most of the time, but some times I just feel so weak and tired.  Those times are few, but they stop me in my tracks.  Yesterday was one of those days.  I didn't want to do a thing.  So, I rested and then told myself it was time to get off the couch!  I go to the gym everyday (yay!) and I am walking for 60 minutes.  It feels great to get my exercise groove back!   I love love love it!  The gym is very close to me, which makes it easy.  There is no excuse for me not to go.  I use to find every excuse to just drive right by, but no longer.  I even have a fellow WLS buddy and some church friends that go there.  It's great to meet my WLS friend and walk and talk for an hour.  It makes it fly by and she had gone through exactly what I'm going through! I signed up for personal training sessions and I'm so excited.  I have always done best when I worked with a trainer, so I'm excited to get that going again.  I use to really want to be a trainer (in my skinny days), so I try to soak up all the information I can while I have them one-on-one.  I had a session this morning and it went great.  We had to take it easy due to my current lifting instructions, but I still felt so energized when I left the gym!  Whoo hooo!

While I feel I am doing the absolute best I could be doing right now, there have been many challenges along the way as well.  Christmas was one of them.  I wanted my surgery right before Christmas, so my recovery time would be while DH was off from teaching over the holidays.  As wonderful as that has been, being just 2 weeks post-op at Christmas time was hard.  I was still in some pain at the time, but I wanted to act like everything was A-OK when I was around both of our families.  Then, there were the big family meals.  I'm comfortable around my family, so fixing food and eating my little 2 ounce portion with my family was no problem.  We even had my seminarian friend Dominic over for Christmas dinner and it didn't bother me a bit to have my little cup of refried beans.

While that dinner went fine, I was worried about being the only one not eating at my in-laws for their big Christmas dinner.  This caused me way too much anxiety!  Seriously, ask Ann.  I think I emailed her a zillion times about what I should do, how to act, what to say, etc!  She was a great help!  Being fairly new to the family, I just wanted to blend in and you don't really blend in while eating from a tiny little cup and a baby spoon.  So, we just arrived a tad bit late and I avoided the whole situation.  DH was so kind to go along with the plan and it worked great.  He was still able to enjoy the meal with his family, but a few others had finished and I didn't have to be the only one not eating!  I also sat through a meal with my sister-in-laws and DH at a favorite restaurant of mine.  I just sipped on water and it went well.  While it was a little awkward, it was good to get an experience like that out of the way.  I had no desire to eat anything, but I hate feeling like the outsider.  It is a feeling that I have to get use to for the time being.  Not fun... but having my jeans fit better makes it all worth it!

I think that is about all the updates I have for now.  I meant to post this on Christmas, but it just did not happen.  So, better late then never.  Merry belated Christmas everyone and Happy New Year!!  Bring on 2011!!!