First of all; thank you for this and God bless your sister because I know she hasn’t had an easy road. I quit even telling anyone that I had his surgery because of responses like your sister gets. It’s not an easy fix. It's a hard battle no matter how you lose weight; there are no easy fixes and nothing last forever without effort put forth. I had health issues so due to this reason I'm glad I did it.
I had this done back in 1993. Due to the cut in my stomach I ended up having 2 hernia surgeries; then they ended up putting mesh in my abdomen area to prevent it from happening again; so far so good on that part.
I was told I would no longer have to worry about gaining weight and that I could eat whatever I wanted and be skinny. That sounds like a no-brainer for someone who had battled weight for over 30 yrs.
I could not eat for 30 days afterward and my first meal was on Thanksgiving; I was so excited, I took two bites got sick and that was that. I had to learn to eat all over again. To take smaller bites, chew better, I couldn't have anything with sugar in because that was instantly being sick. No one ever told me that some foods would make you sick or that how you chewed your foods would matter. It took me a year to lose my weight; I bought all new clothes. I got a tummy tuck with one of the hernia surgeries. I looked good. Of course, no one told me either that it was common to lose about 20 or more pounds and then gain it back before stabilizing to one weight. There went my new clothes
I work for a hospital and I've met a lot of people who have had this surgery and most of them if you saw them; you'd never think they'd ever been on a diet. You can train your body to tolerate sweets and greasy foods again and that’s why most of these people gained back their weight. To me that is a dumb thing to do. I didn’t go thru all of this to train my body to tolerate what caused the problem in the first place. My friend says I’m the only success story she knows but she also knows that I have to work at it.
If you don't watch your food/drink intake even with this you can gain it back. After a few years I had gained almost 50 lbs and was so upset with myself that I went on the South Beach diet; it follows closely the guidelines we use with the surgery. I still have to watch what I eat or the pounds will come back.
On top of that I have other health issues. My body doesn’t absorb vitamins like it should so I’m deficient in Vitamin D, Calcium, Zinc, Iron and who knows what else. The doctors are still finding new things that are repercussions of this surgery. I give myself Iron shots every month and I have to take lots of vitamins. I can be fine one day and the next day my levels will be drastically down. I have osteoporosis but due to the vit D and calcium levels going up and down I can’t take the meds for it.
I’m sorry that this is so long. As you can tell this subject is very dear to me first of all because I’ve had to deal with people’s perception of me for having it. I’ve had to deal with the facts that the doctor never told me about and I still have to watch my weight like everyone else. God Bless everyone who has ever had or does have a weight problem.