LSD thoughts

Well, I've been off the dreaded Liver Shrinking Diet for 3 days now, which is awesome! Getting ready to get started with the next phase of my nutrition plan - the Nutripoints system. I'm sooooo not psyched about this. It doesn't work well with what I like to eat (which I know is not healthy things, but still) and involves a lot of cooking, which I rarely do. I'm not happy with my nutritionist, because she doesn't seem terribly willing to be flexible and help me figure out a way to make it work for me. Her two comments were, "Maybe you're not ready for the surgery yet" and "Well, this is the program we do here so this is it". It's not a program that I can do post-op, so I'm feeling pretty negative about it and trying to get past that for right now.

But back to the ever-exciting LSD. Since it was a new idea to have patients do it this far out from surgery to "jump start weight loss and get them motivated", I've been collecting my thoughts. Not that anyone has asked. But I may share them anyway.

Positives:

• I lost 16 pounds in 2 weeks.
• I didn't die. Which is to say that I learned that I can live through it - and that, while I was cranky, I could have fun even when it wasn't centered around food.

Negatives:

• I was very cranky and irritable the entire two weeks, although not really hungry.
• It was inconvenient - I couldn't go out to eat with friends, had to be sure I had my special foods with me wherever I went.
• This far out from surgery I'm not sure I'm comfortable telling everyone, and it makes it hard not to. I didn't really want to just tell half-truths - "It's part of a new diet program I'm doing" or make up stores - "I'm not feeling well", but I did both some. I did end up telling some people that I wasn't ready to tell (co-workers).
• I didn't get to have my surgery at the end of it, and went a little wild food-wise the day after it was over.
• It was hard to be motivated to do it, since jump-starting my weight loss did not seem like a good enough reason to me to be put through this. It did not make me feel motivated. I can understand having to do it to shrink the liver for surgery, but this didn't make much sense to me which made it much more difficult.
• I felt like I was secretly being tested to see if I could do it.
• My nutritionist, who put me on the program, didn't have a complete understanding of what the diet was supposed to be, so for the first week I had to eat that nasty sandwich every night.

So, overall, despite the fact that my jeans are a little bit looser, this was a very negative, discouraging experience for me. And people telling me that other people had harder diets (I don't believe it for a minute - NO ONE else I have ever heard of has to do this for four weeks. And people who have to do all liquids usually only do it for a day or two) or that this was a good thing to get me prepared for surgery only made me more irritated. I'm having a really hard time with the whole thing right now and questioning everything. It's hard planning for something which is so far away. My surgeon's support group meets once a month and I've been to two already and will go to one more before my surgery. Then there's one the day after I have my surgery (I'll still be in the hospital, so won't go) It's hard seeing everyone else losing so much weight when I'm so far out and not really being able to relate to much of what they're saying. On my online message board I see people come in new and have their surgery quickly while I don't get to do that.

So, I'm sorry - I feel like a lot of my posts about this are negative. I've been trying to make all these changes - exercising 5 days a week, giving up diet soda, giving up FOOD for two weeks, now this Nutripoints thing - most of which have been very, very hard and I'm just not feeling better because of it. It's been about 6 weeks since I first started exercising and 4 since I gave up soda and I have yet to feel better. In fact, I feel worse. I'm very much an instant gratification junkie and this is hard. I'm going to try and post positive things next time :)