Here’s my third post about my lunch-in-the-office food experiment. What’s the verdict? Are peanuts at lunch time causing me to have moderately annoying gas pains by dinner time? Did skipping the peanut course of today’s lunch allow me to be gas free after work?
Nope.
I’m feeling about the same tonight as I usually feel after a day in the office. Gassy to the point of uncomfortable.
Well… shit.
No, not really. This is good. This implies that I can still have peanuts without worrying about my stomach acting badly afterwards. The bad news is that I still don’t have an answer to why I feel different on days I work in the office compared to days I work at home.
I will figure this out eventually. I’ll crack the code.
In reference to the post from earlier today where I discussed my silly food experiment, I have finished my lunch. I had a little bit of chicken, a protein cookie, a little sugar free chocolate, and a handful of Ritz crackers. No peanuts for me.
Now we wait and see how I feel this afternoon including if my stomach requires me to eat on the drive home, and how I feel when it’s time for dinner, probably around 6:45-7:00pm. Will there be gassy pain in my stomach like there often is when I work in the office and have peanuts with my lunch? Or will I be pain and discomfort (and brutal, violent farts) free (please excuse the TMI, but I included it for the benefit of scientific research, you understand)?
In other health-ish news, I used my CPAP machine again last night. It went well. No issues. More importantly, the SleepWatch app on my Apple Watch tells me that the ratio of restful sleep vs light sleep increased. Yesterday it was 67% restful, which wasn’t bad, I don’t think, but today it was 79% which is pretty wonderful. I like seeing that number in the 70’s, but when it pushes 80 it’s extra special. It had my sleeping heart rate dip at 21% too. Anything above 20% is excellent. Unfortunately, I failed to get six hours of sleep in total (only by a few minutes though) and the older I get the less functional I am when the total is less than six hours. Oh well.
So as far as medical experiments go, we need to see how my stomach feels by the time dinner rolls around, 4-5 hours from now, and how tonight’s sleep goes. There is just so much data to collect. The statistics nerd typing this post is giddy with antici…
This is one of those he-had-gastric-bypass-surgery posts. You’ve been warned.
I am doing a small food experiment today. I am hoping I do not get the results that I expect I will get.
I work in the office twice a week. Over the last couple of months I have noticed a trend. When I leave work I am dealing with some major gas pain. I thought it had to do with me having something to eat on the drive home and then being too stuffed for dinner, but the last couple of office days I have cut way down on the food I eat in the afternoon before dinner, and the gas pain has still been a thing.
I had a (very minor) epiphany on Monday. I think I know what’s going on. I bring the same lunch every time I go to the office. One serving of Purdue Chicken Bites (12 little mini chicken nuggets) that I heat up in the microwave, and then one serving (either 2.0 oz or 2.6 oz, depending on the brand) of peanuts. Combined it works out to 22 grams of protein, which is pretty good for that small a meal. Sometimes I’ll have some crackers or some sugar free candy with my lunch as well.
I have Purdue chicken, in various shapes and sizes, all the time. I have the sugar free candy and crackers all the time too. Peanuts though… in the early days of post-surgery solid foods I had peanuts all the time. Over the last year or so I have sort of lost interest in them and have only been eating them with lunch in the office. My question to myself then is this: Why didn’t that set off a red flag sooner?
Are the peanuts causing the afternoon/evening gas issues? It seems likely, doesn’t it? Today’s experiment then is to not have peanuts with lunch and then see what happens. I like peanuts. They are a good source of protein and they are tasty and while it’s true I have grown a little tired of eating them lately, I don’t want to have to stop. If peanuts turn out to be a problem… well that just sucks. I haven’t thought of an alternative yet. I will. Today I’ll just have a small protein bar with lunch to make up the difference, but going forward I’ll find something else.
We’ll see how today’s experiment goes, and then one day next week we’ll do it again and see if we get the same results. Then I’ll decide what to do going forward.
Until then… here’s an airplane for today’s photo a day challenge pic.
Just running errands and doing chores today. Keeping busy over all. I really wanted to take the cameras out for a walk this morning, but the weather was awful. The light was the worst ever. So disheartening. Oh well.
After a couple of days of weirdness, my stomach has been a team player today. No issues at all. I’m proud of the little surgically altered guy. It did not wake me up last night, which was nice of it. My legs are another story though. Twice overnight I woke up with bad leg cramps. It’s always something when you’re an old fart like me. All I want is to sleep and my own body is stopping me from doing it. What a jerk I am to myself.
Before I get back to the housework, I think I am going to finally put in a vacation request at work for our staycation in September and our next trip back to Disney World in January. I think it’s time, don’t you? There. I just did it. Hopefully my boss doesn’t have a heart attack when he sees two week long vacation requests at once. They are spread out. It’s okay. I’ll wait a while before I put in for the second planned Disney trip. That’s a full year away.
The Red Sox winning streak ended last night. They played Cincinnati, who are pretty terrible this year, and lost. It made me sad. Here’s hoping for vengeance in today’s game. I want to win by 90, at least.
I have made it through lunch. I think I am mostly okay.
As expected, at about 11:00am today I started feeling uncomfortable. I had a snack of a protein bar and felt better. I then had a second snack and felt a lot better. I finished that by 11:37, which seemed a little too close to lunch for comfort, but I was feeling okay so I thought it was worth the risk of spoiling lunch. I started eating lunch at 1:09. I wasn’t feeling all that hungry, but I wanted to power through to stay on something like a schedule, and to put off another empty stomach ache issue for a little while longer. I had some microwaved chicken and some peanuts. I finished at 2:01, feeling a little stuffed. That was half an hour ago and I still feel a little uncomfortably full. I’m okay though.
The bigger concern right now is that something like five of the last six nights, including last night, I failed to get six hours of sleep. I’m tired. I feel really tired. I need to find a project for the second half of the work day that I can really dig into and be too enthralled to worry about being sleepy. I think I know just the thing to work on.
I expect to start feeling hunger pains at a little after 5:00. That’s normal. I just have to make sure I don’t over do it if I need to have a snack. I don’t want to ruin dinner again. I probably will, just out of nerves about the way the last couple of days have gone, but hopefully I can keep things under control until I get home. I miss my wife a lot today, and I want to have a nice dinner with her.
Hello folks, here comes another gastric bypass post. Another my-digestive-system-is-no-longer-quite-human sort of post. Sorry. Just bare with me. There will be a cat photo or two as well. Your patience will be rewarded with little four legged fur balls.
Okay…
I’ve mentioned at least 100 times over the past two years that being hungry hurts now. I eat breakfast. All is well. Three hours later I start having a stomach ache. I eat a snack and the stomach ache goes away. I eat lunch, then three hours later I have a stomach ache. &etc, &etc, &etc*. I told my doctor about it. She smiled at me as if to say, “duh!” without actually saying, “duh” and said, “right… you’re hungry.”
My response was, “Huh… duh.”
The downside, of course, is that I can no longer tell if I am having stomach pain because I am hungry, or if I am having stomach pain because something is wrong. I have to have something to eat to know for sure. If I have a snack and the pain vanishes then it means I was just hungry. If I have a snack and the pain stays the same or (more likely) gets worse, then something is wrong. It’s simple and all, but it does up my stress level a little when it happens.
On the days when I work from the office, I usually finish lunch at around 2:00pm. The hunger pain hits at around 5:00pm. It’s not always three hours. Sometimes it’s a little more, sometimes it’s a little less. Every so often it’s a lot less and I am feeling it at two hours. I guess it depends on what the last thing I ate was. So at work, I eat until 2:00, then around 5:00 I’m hungry enough to feel discomfort so I have something to eat. Usually I wait until I am in the car heading home. Everything is fine at that point except…
On those drives home, I often find that I eat a little too much. By the time I get home I am plenty full and I have ruined my dinner. I usually have a little to eat for dinner with Jen, but not a lot. Two days ago, when I got home I was really stuffed. I cooked dinner for Jen but I didn’t have anything for myself. I managed to have a snack an hour or so later and then fell asleep really early. I ended up going a long time without any food. I mentioned in a post yesterday that I woke up around 2:30am with a stomach ache and I had to have a snack before I could go back to sleep.
Did skipping dinner on Wednesday night mess me up? That’s my question now.
Yesterday I could not get ahead of things. I ate breakfast and was feeling empty stomach pain about an hour and a half later. That felt WAY too soon. I had a snack and then felt it again an hour later. That went on all day. I just couldn’t get out ahead of it. I think I had four or five instances of empty stomach pain throughout the day. I had a pretty substantial snack before I went to sleep. That was at 10:00pm. I was asleep a little before 11:00pm and I was feeling fine.
Until I woke up with a stomach ache at 2:00am. That lead to the usual question: Am I hungry or is there something wrong? I had a snack. I was just hungry. That’s two days in a row where I needed food in the two o’clock hour. Let us hope that this is not the start of a trend here. I don’t want to do this again. Clearly I will if I have to, but I really do not want to.
We’ll see how it goes today. I had a pretty big breakfast (for me) in the car on the way to work today. I finished it at 8:11am. Let’s see how I feel around 11:00am today. Hopefully I won’t be hurting until well after that. Fingers crossed.
Now, as promised… when I got up at 2:00am, Robin Sparkles the Cat was sitting on the cat tree in the living room, right near the pantry closet where I keep my snacks. It was like she was waiting for me. Good kitty.
295/365
And just for completeness sake, before I left the house at 7:30am today, I opened some windows. Lily Pad the Kitty took the opportunity to pose for me, so here’s a picture of her as well. Good kitty.
*That is the correct, deprecated way to abbreviate the word “etcetera” isn’t it? Was it &etc or was it &ct? I tried googling but didn’t see anything. I know it’s been hundreds of years since that abbreviation was considered proper English grammar, but I’m old and stuffy so I want to bring it back.
Bellana is back in Vermont. She left last night and stayed over one of her friends’ house in order to cut down on her morning commute today. At our house she was three hours away from work, and today is a work day for her. I get it. It makes me sad to see her go, but I am also really happy we had her for a few days. Even more so as we had Harry for a few days before that, and their visits overlapped so we had them both for a day. That made me really happy. That was an extra good night.
Jen is working from the office today. I am working from home. That means I am here by my lonesome, just me and the cats. I have a podcast playing on my MacBook and it’s streaming to Home Pods scattered all over the house. I don’t have to pause the podcast if I need to get up and leave the room. Heh heh. Technology is cool. When Jen comes home I’ll shut off any streams that are anywhere other than Harry’s room/my office space.
The Great Heatwave of 2024 is going to become official today. The forecast calls for the temperature in my little city to hit 99 degrees. That will be three days over 90. Heatwave: Confirmed. It is 9:10am right now and it’s already 83 degrees. It’s going to be fun.
The forecast for the rest of the week? Rain and clouds and awful. Back to normal, I guess.
After complaining about crappy sleep for the last week or so, I finally topped six hours last night. In fact, I topped 7.5 hours. It was broken though. I fell asleep at 9:30pm. Not by choice. I just couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and zonked out. Normally I try to eat something before I go to sleep out of fear that my stomach will get so empty over night that it will hurt. A snack at bedtime avoids that problem, but I didn’t have one last night. My last bite to eat last night was at 7:49pm. I woke up with a bit of a stomach ache at 2:30am. I had a little snack and felt better, but I couldn’t fall back to sleep until well after 3:00. Oh well. I felt really tired when I woke up today (almost an hour later than I had planned) but I feel okay now. Here’s hoping I won’t be totally exhausted today.
I’m done with my doctors appointment. My two year post gastric bypass surgery followup is complete.
To quote my surgeon, “I can’t believe it.”
What did I learn today? From a sugar avoidance standpoint, eating fruits that contain a lot of natural sugars (looking at you, apples) should be okay because it’s a complex sugar that breaks down differently than your more junk food sugars. Also, staying on the topic of sugar, if you’re having a low blood sugar episode it’s okay to have some sugar to fix it, even though the amount of sugar my diabetic step son was told to take in that situation is exactly the same as the amount I’ve been told will trigger dumping syndrome. Somehow my body will process that sugar in a different way when it’s combating an over abundance of insulin in my blood than when the insulin levels are okay. How? I don’t know. I’ll probably still avoid more than the tiniest amount of sugar. Finally, when I ask the question, “is this stomach pain because something is wrong or is it because I am hungry” I am apparently asking a question that all of us ask. It’s normal and common to not be able to tell the difference. You just have to get used to it and hope that someday you’ll figure it out.
My next follow up is one year from today. In closing, as I was leaving I overheard my surgeon talking to another staff member. They were both looking at me and the words “I can’t believe it” were uttered for a second time. I also heard one of them say, “he doesn’t even look like he needs to be here” or something like that. Yeah. Good work, Doc. I couldn’t have done this without you, but if you want to make a red head feel like a million bucks weight-loss-wise, then saying you can’t believe it is a really good way to do it.
Photos!
This was waiting for me as I was about to walk out the door to go to the appointment. Good morning, bird!
259/365
The clinic is in this building. Let’s do this!
In closing, you bet your ass I am doing some sugar free celebrating tonight.
I can’t believe it has been two years. It simultaneously feels like yesterday and a thousand years ago.
Saturday (two days ago) was the two year anniversary of my weight loss surgery. The full gastric bypass procedure that my guts and I went through on May 4, 2022 has changed my life, health wise.
When I list off the best decisions I have made in my life, Marrying Jen is first by a landslide. It is first by a tidal wave. Not just marrying her, but going on that first date, moving in together, meeting the kids, all of it. That’s number one and nothing else even comes close.
It’s a close call for the second most important decision in my life. It might be going back to school in 1997 and everything that came with it over the following seven years or so that lead to my Bachelors degree. If it’s not that, then it’s getting the gastric bypass surgery. From a health care stand point, the surgery is definitely number one. Even after all of this time I still cannot believe how different I feel. It’s starting to become less impactful as I am more and more removed from my former self, but I’m still close enough to the changes that when I stop and think of it I still can’t believe it.
I weighed 452 pounds when I started the process. I weighed about 431 pounds when I actually went under the knife. On Saturday I celebrated the second anniversary by stepping on the scale. I weighed 211.2 pounds. One decimal point placement away from a Rush reference. Ah, hells. I am down 220.2 pounds since surgery and 240.8 pounds since deciding to have the surgery. My brain can’t wrap itself around the idea that I have lost more weight than I currently weigh. I lost the equivalent of a mildly overweight adult male.
It hasn’t been easy. It will never be easy. I am always at the mercy of my newly redesigned stomach. Every now and then it’s going to rebel and show me who’s boss. It happened last Friday and it destroyed me for about 18 hours. Here we are three days later and I am still not quite right. I had a plan for lunch today and I scrapped it because my stomach was feeling weird. It was a little pain, a little gassy discomfort, and a little bit just a sense of being wrong. I’m on edge right now for all things stomach so I errored on the side of caution and went with something very light and simple and small for lunch. We’ll see how I feel in a few hours when it comes to dinner time.
Would I recommend this surgery to everyone? I don’t know. I don’t think so. The variables involved are a combination of how bad is your situation and how difficult is the post-processing. I almost went through with this thing a few years before I did, but the idea of all of the restrictions post-op scared me away. Never eating sugar again? Never drinking soda again? No, I wasn’t up for that at the time. Then in 2022 I was in such a terrible state with my weight that suddenly those brutal restrictions (not to mention the changes to how you eat and when you eat and how you chew and how you swallow your food and all of that) seemed like a small price to pay.
It worked out for me. I don’t want to be the kind of guy who encourages people to go through this sort of thing. You need to come to that conclusion on your own. For me though… I would do it all again in a heartbeat. No question. No hesitation. It is the best decision I’ve ever made for my health. Apart from being with my wife and my family, it’s probably the best decision I’ve ever made, period.
Wish me and my new digestive system a happy 2nd anniversary. Many happy returns, you wild and crazy, temperamental stomach.
Yesterday was weird from the get go, stomach wise. I felt a little off, but not too bad.
Then I had lunch. I was off enough that I should have avoided lunch, or at least the normal lunch that I ended up having. I took my last bite, according to my food tracking spreadsheet, at 1:54pm. 10 minutes later it started. The “off” stomach turned into real stomach pain. I tried to ride it out, but by a little before 4:00pm I had left work sick.
The drive home was a nightmare. The stomach pain kept getting worse. I had to pull over once for a surprise foamies, then again for a foamie false alarm, then again to actually puke into a cup. It was a little paper coffee cup and my aim was spot on. I was impressed with myself.
When I finally got home I ran to the bathroom, puked again, cleaned up the mess, and went to bed. I’d sleep for 20-30 minutes then have to move to a new position. Always on my side curled up in a ball. If I straightened out the stomach pain was too much.
Fast forward to this morning. So far I’ve had a few ounces of water, the first anything I’ve had since 1:54 yesterday. It is 9:21am now and I am feeling okay. A little like a wrung out dishrag, but okay. I have a ton of errands to run this morning and I’ve already given way too much information so I am going to wrap this post up now. I might have more thoughts on this mess later. We’ll see.
The moral of the story is this: When I see my doctor in two weeks for my two year check in she is going to ask me if I have had any Dumping Syndrome. This time I think I have to answer yes. Shit.
Oh yeah, and today is the actual two year surgery anniversary so I am glad I got that crap out of the way yesterday so I can celebrate today. Yippee, babie! Happy Surgery-aversary to me!
Inside the Red Head's Head 