Stalling and NSV's

So at someones lovely request that I update, here I am. I am smack dab in the middle of the dreaded stall. The dreaded stall, for the uninitiated, hits you like a ton of bricks. ou're losing weight like crazy and feeling amazing about yourself one day and then suddenly BAM, the breaks go on. Suddenly you aren't losing any weight and you're GOING INSANE. You think to yourself, am I done losing weight? Did I pay all this money to lose 44 pounds (21kgs)? You start weighing yourself every day hoping that the scale will move... but it doesn't. And so the cycle of insanity continues.

The big step I have taken against this stall is to just not weigh myself. I'm not going to weigh myself for a few weeks and I'm going to hope that when I do weigh myself again, the scale will have moved once more. I'm trying to remind myself that I'm only about 5 weeks out and I'm almost halfway to my goal weight - that is something to be proud of. In only 10 pounds, I will be half way and that's a huge achievement. Thats what I repeat to myself every time I think I'm about to go insane.

Now on the other hand of all this gloominess we have NSV's! These are what we call non-scale victories. And when you arent losing kilos, a good nsv can feel like it's saving your sanity. For example last night when I was cleaning out my room I found an old playsuit that i got a few years ago and was always too much of a fattie to wear. So I pulled it on as a whim and the bloody thing fit! I could even pull the draw string tighter!

Cut to my jumping around my room dancing around to music and smiling like a fool! Now I just have to wait until it's summer again so I can wear the damn thing lol.

Finally, Today I found something which might be the funniest picture I've seen in awhile so I thought I'd share it with you all:

My laughter basically never stopped after I saw this

Mushies!

I am officially one week into the two week pureed stage and I cant tell you how freakin' awesome it is. I have never ever appreciated flavours and texture the way I do now. After being on liquids a month to be able to eat (most of ) a scrambled egg is so fantastic. My diet's been very simple it's mostly an egg for breakfast, tuna for lunch, meat for dinner or something along those lines. My idea of portion size has changed already, I eat out of ramekins and look at a slice of meat and think "thats quite a lot of food."

Also! In big news I'm proud to say I'm only 1kg away from having lost 20kg - thats 40 pounds! in three weeks! It took me about 6 months to lose that much weight on jenny craig. It's amazing how easy it is when I'm not hungry. I can eat until I'm satisfied and then just stop, instead of eating until I'm so full its uncomfortable.

Honestly? I'm kind of scared how easy it is. Losing weight has been the hardest thing in my life for as long as I can remember, and to see it just falling off - well I wake up most mornings expecting to see the scales show that all the weight has come back on. I guess I still have to work on that.

In non weight loss related news, all the boys have gone from the flat so it's just the three girls left and we've been redecorating! We bought a bunch of cushions and pretty girlie things and made the flat all sparkly and clean, it's basically magical.

Live from hospital

I survived!

I'm not going to lie... surgery was a whole other experience than I was expecting. We woke up at 6am to get me to the hospital where I checked in in a big rush as I was the first to have surgery that day, got hurridly changed into the hospital gown (which for anyone whose wondering... gap at the back. There is no classy way to wear one of those suckers.) and then got wheeled down to the operating room. There's something a little disquieting about getting onto your own operating table, a bit like carrying your own cross to an execution... but they gave me a lovely little pill which made me not care about such technicalities. The anasthetic itself hurt... don't be fooled if they say it wont. Last thing I remember is the anesthetic man saying "now this might sting a bit" followed by my loud exclamation of "OW FUCK" and then... blankess.

I'd later find out that they'd accidently tissued my iv which means it'd popped out of the vein and all the liquids and painkillers were just flowing directly into my hand which is why it puffed up to roughly the size of a baby horse and why I'm only just getting use of it back two days later. 

I sort of fluttered in and out of conciousness in the recovery room, apparently I was in there was longer than anticipated, a couple of hours total, and then the next thing I remember is being wheeled back into my room and my mum coming in with a huge bunch of flowers. I slept most of that day, only waking up when they stuck something in my iv (and then only because of the horrible horrible pain of it all) and to go to the bathroom. I finally woke up at about seven or eight when a couple of my friends came in to visit me and entertained me by waltzing around my hospital room. Let no one say I don't have the best friends in the world.

The next day a nurse blessedly noticed how giant my hand was and took my iv out. Unfortunately I couldn't drink enough fluids because I was horribly sick all day, so she had to put a new one in - but at least this time it hit the vein and so didn't hurt when she started putting things into it. I felt really really crap most of the day, if I wasn't nauseous I was sore, if I wasn't sore I had gas pains, if I didn't have gas pains then my back was hurting from the hospital bed. I tried to mostly sleep through it, and ended up hitting the hay at about 5 until 7am this morning.

Today I feel HEAPS better, I've been walking around all morning and was allowed some optifast and got off my drip for good if I promised to keep drinking water. I think walking around is possibly the key to surgery, it gets rid of your gas pains so fast, its actually kind of amazing. I get out tomorrow if all things go as planned.. they all looked good on the leak test (ugh which the less said about the better) and my surgeon seems pretty pleased with things. I cant wait to get home into a comfy bed and not get woken up at 1am every morning by the nurses coming to take my blood pressure etc.

One week till surgery

Hasn't that snuck up? I've been counting down to it for so long that it had sort of assumed this mythical status in my mind, and I'd fogotten it was a real thing that was really happening. But yup.. I'm happy to say that one week into my pre-op diet and I'm feeling so much better. I'm about eight kilos down in a week which is... just insanity. I've started using bio-oil to rub on my skin, its supposed to reduce stretch marks and loose skin, my mum swears by it and if nothing else it's making me smell really good.

I've also been getting ready for the hospital, buying pajamas and that kind of thing. Is it weird that I don't have pajamas? I just dont like my legs to be covered when I sleep.. makes me feel trapped. But yay! I went to Peter Alexander (this fancy pajama store we have in NZ) and tried on a bathrobe and some pajama pants, and both were too big. That's never happened to me. It was awesome to be able to ask the woman if they had a smaller size in something.

I'm sort of suspicious about it all to be honest... it just feels like its too easy. Admittedly the first few days I was going crazy but now it's all just a breeze. I actually have to remind myself to eat the protein shakes because I'm just not getting hungry. The only way I really notice is when I start getting light headed and shaky. I think that's probably not actually a good thing, but its still pretty exciting to someone whose always been hungry and pretty much never missed a meal. I haven't cheated really, I will admit that I stuck my finger in some pasta sauce my mum had made, but I'm telling myself it doesn't count because it was basically tomato sauce and veges, both of which I'm allowed. The thing bothering me most might actually be the no milk thing. I hadn't noticed how much coffee/tea sucks without milk.

If anyone has any helpful hints about things I should take to the hospital by the way, I'd LOVE to hear theml.

Pre-op diet

So we're two days into my pre-op diet and I'm not going to lie... it's harder than I figured it would be. I think mostly because (TMI forthcoming) I just got my period and all I want to do is eat fast food and chocolate. Instead I've been trying to kill the cravings by eating veges and frozen raspberries. The frozen raspberries are good to suck on and get a bit of a sweet fix, they're not exactly chocolate but it's working.

Basically my days have been going like this so far:

get up
mix strawberry protein shake to take into school
sip during class
go hang out in my office and try to do some work
mix protein soup up
go home and make veges
nap
have a protein shake and veges
sleep

I'm actually shocked at how tired I am. My legs feel heavy and sore, and I've noticed I'm already starting to get grouchy at people. I'm only two days in and everyones telling me it's going to get easier - and I'm hoping they're right. I've got work tomorrow but I might call in sick, I don't know if I can deal with eight hours of customers yelling at me and standing on my feet. To be honest... tonight I may have snapped and eaten some of the soup meat in some vege soup my mom made. I'm a bit annoyed at myself but.. it's only two days and I just have to get over it.

Yeah, it's going to be fine.

Baked Ricotta

So in the spirit of trying to be as ready for surgery as possible (I start pre-op in exactly a week) I've been testing out recipes for things that have lots of protein that I can eat after surgery. Yesterday I went on a mission out to the mediteranian store in town to go and pick up some ricotta and made baked ricotta. Now I don't usually like cheese so I was pretty skeptical that it was going to be any good - but then that's what I thought about protein shakes too and it turns out that they are awesome. So with that in mind I made two types of baked ricotta, a sweet version and a savoury version. And it turns out it was sooo good. Like seriously delicious. It didn't taste cheesy, it just tasted like whatevr I put in it. I'm actually like a bit excited about getting to eat it for the mushy food stage now, who would have thought I'd ever be excited about mushy food?

Savoury Baked Ricotta:
300 grams of ricotta
1 teaspoon of garlic
1 egg
A dash of milk
Rosemary
Mixed Herbs
Thyme

Sweet Baked Ricotta:
300grams of ricotta
1 egg
A dash of milk
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1/4 cup sugar (use equal for a healthier version)

Pre-heat your oven to 180c. Mix all the ingredients together in a blender (I did it by hand but it takes much longer to get it smooth this way so if you want to do it fast use a blender) until smooth. Pour into pre-greased muffin tins (I used big muffin tins to make three of each) and bake for about 40 minutes or until golden brown. Take out and let cool slightly before you eat. Enjoy!

The good thing about making it in muffin tins instead of a ceramic dish like my recipe suggested is it makes it into simple, easy 100gram portions for you so you don't have to think about serving sizes so much.

Busy busy busy

So the count down has 'begun'. Of course in reality I've been counting down since I first got my surgery date, I started counting down from 15 weeks. But it's getting really close now, exactly four weeks away, and less than thirty days. I'm starting to get scared for real now - I keep thinking in my head about all the things that could go wrong, just your usual panic I suppose. I've never been to the hospital before (hate them!) so it's going to be a bit scary to have such major surgery my first time. But then again I have a big group of friends who're all going to be visiting me the whole time, so maybe it wont be so bad.

Luckily (or unluckily) for me though, I don't really have that much time to worry about being scared because I just have way too much stuff to do before then. I wrote a to-do list and I have about twenty-seven things that need to be done before I start my pre-op diet in fourteen days. I want to get everything out of the way before then so I can just focus on not cheating etc and not have to try and concentrate on schoolwork, but man do I have a lot to do. I've got about four assignments due in the next two weeks, including a thirty minute presentation for one class, as well as doing weekly reports on the on-going nucleur review confrenece.

Whoever said that being a student was supposed to be fun?