Unexpected side effect of my WLS

I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you another wonderful side effect of this surgery. It has absolutely nothing to do with me though. Since I started getting serious about this surgery and working towards losing the 30 lbs I had to get off pre-surgery up to now, Tanner has lost almost 20 lbs!

We really started changing the way we ate; cooking more at home, limiting eating out to one day a week (Friday) provided Tanner worked out at least 5 days the preceding week and ate healthy the rest of the time. A friend warned me against rewarding him with food, but I mentioned that I thought the lesson in this exercise was more about how you CAN indulge once in a while as long as you are eating healthy and being physically active the rest of the time. Initially, it was a shock to Tanner’s system (more his head than anything else) because we ate out quite a bit as a family and he wasn’t all that thrilled with eating “boring” meals at home. Starting off, we did a lot of lean cuisines at home because I was still pretty exhausted and cooking took a lot out of me so I can’t say that I blame him referring to dinner time as boring. Now that I’m feeling healthier, I have been able to create quite a few recipes and borrow others from the internet which makes him feel like we are indulging without really breaking our caloric bank. I hope to eventually start adding these to my recipe blog. I’ve put it off because I always forget to take pictures when I’m cooking, but I think I’ll just start uploading what we are eating because I know low carbers (VSGers in particular) are always looking for ways to get their protein in. Don’t get the wrong idea though…what I’m eating isn’t Martha Stewart special by any stretch of the imagination.

Not only has Tanner been walking on the treadmill at home (at least 30 minutes at a time, often almost an hour), but often elects to walk without even being reminded to walk! He has also been going swimming with me almost every day and taking a water aerobics class with me. He gets excited every time he weighs himself and sees the numbers going down. It really is cool and I’m hoping this might mean that I can still have a positive impact on his diet and exercise habits before he gets too old and moves out on his own. Guess we’ll have to see.