Eye Opening Experience.... Think this will be helpful from pre-oppers like me.

The other day, I posted a topic about what I can do now, before pre-op diet and surgery. I received a ton of awesome advice from the vets. If you are pre-op you definitely owe it to yourself to see that post and follow this wonderful advice.

One of the suggestions was to download and use My Fitness Pal. I set my goals and intake at 1800 calories/day.

This weekend, I did a little experiment. I decided to eat like I normally eat just to see exactly what I was eating. No surprise the calorie count was in the upper 3,000's and low 4,000's. It was actually amazing to see what is in this junk I am eating. Not only was I high in calories, but also absurd on sodium (no wonder I have high BP), Was high on carbs, but believe it or not, I wasn't too terrible. I was also absurdly low on potassium. This explains why a little over a year ago, I was admitted to the hospital with signs of a heart attack, but it was found my potassium was dangerously low.

One of the biggest eye openers for me, was eating something I thought was healthy, but was actually worse than eating a Big Mac. I was shocked to see a fried chicken Cesar salad from Zaxby's had 750 calories! I chose this because I thought I would do better with the salad vs chicken wings or tenders. Boy was I wrong! It actually discouraged me yesterday when I was actually trying for my 1800 calorie goal. Every time I ate, I was like watch this be 1000 calories. I was almost wondering if I should even eat at all. I ended up about 400 calories over yesterday, though I did not achieve my goal yesterday, I will today.

This was a true eye-opening experience for me. An experience that has me more determined than ever to make the life changes needed to make my upcoming VSG a true success.

I highly recommend all folks who are pre-op or considering WLS, or those suffering regain after WLS to download and faithfully use My Fitness Pal. It is truly the "shock and awe" experience we all need to motivate us to make the changes necessary to be successful.

Sammy

Great advice!! thank you for your story. I am new, at 6.5 weeks PO, and I love to hear about others experiences.

Great learning experience!

i can't use my fitness pal, it's just to aggravating so I made a form that I log everything I eat and drink for the day.  I also purchased a cheap scale off of EBay that tells me everything about the exact piece of food that I put on the scale based on a code that I put in the scale (comes with a code book). So now I can see exactly what I am about to eat.  I also bought a small electric grill/griddle from Walmart so I can cook everything really fast, and cook it with no oils.  Food comes off tasting very good!

Sammy,

The very best way to use these programs is to plan your meal with them.  I can't tell you how many times I've avoided making a bad choice just because of the shock of looking up what I was about to log!

Terry

Great Advice!

I do exactly what Terry says -- I sit down every night and input my food for the next day.  That way I'm not caught off-guard or "surprised" by too many carbs or not enough protein at the end of the day.   

I'm glad to see you getting into the habit of using MFP now...it has been an invaluable tool for me!  

MFP has been such a help to me, I have been using it for over a year.  I am almost 5 months out from surgery and my husband has now decided that he wants to lose weight.  We have dozens of weight loss and diet books at home and none of them have ever done anything to help us.  We were in the book store a couple of weeks ago because he wanted to get yet another diet book.  I told him there is nothing in any diet book that we don't already know and I suggested he start using MFP.  He's been using it faithfully every day and he has lost about 10 pounds in 2 weeks.  He was so shocked to learn how many calories are in the foods that we mindlessly shove in our faces.

I love to use it at a restaurant to decide on what meal I am going to get. 

Being aware of the things we put into ourselves is so important!

I'm pre op as well and I have been making some changes!! I'll take your suggestion the rest of the week and see how it goes!! I think that I may get the "shock & awe" as well!! Good luck to you!

I had a couple of my co-workers today grab a couple hot hamburger plates and eat them, all I brought with me was some good ole slim fast and water. I got curious though how many calories was in a hot hamburger plate. It's not my favorite dish, but still some good eatin'. I took a ballpark guess of 1500 calories. You should have seen the look on their faces when I found out it was darn near 3000!