“I say weight is like a brick wall. And losing weight, eating right, all these things are like using a knife to get through the brick wall. The surgery gives you a sledgehammer. You have to do the work. You’re still doing it. You still have to get through that wall. But you have a better tool. That’s all it is.”

-Megan, 1 year after having gastric sleeve

“You can’t compare your weight loss to anybody else…we all have a different weight loss and our bodies are reacting differently.”

-Julie, 1 year after having gastric sleeve

“It’s a good feeling not to take a handful of pills. My first visit post-op, the doctor took me off the blood pressure medication…and then the cholesterol medication stopped about 2 months ago… I am faithfully back at the gym. I did 20 minutes of aquatic therapy to start. Then I did 30 minutes, and today was 45 minutes. And I’m going to keep going up, I’m not going back down. You can do so much more. You just feel good about yourself.”

-Anna, 6 months after having gastric sleeve

“I go up and down. One week I’ll lose 2 pounds. Another week I’ll lose 4.5 pounds. It just depends on my activity level, what I’ve been eating, how stressed I am, what time of the month it is. Don’t be hard on yourself. If you only lose 1 pound in 1 week, you’re doing great. If you plateau, you’re doing fine. It took you so long to get that big, it’s gonna take some time. You’re not just going to wake up after surgery and be 20 pounds less.”

-Maria, 1 year after having gastric sleeve

“I think people falsely believe that by rerouting your stomach, making it smaller, that fixes it. It doesn’t. It’s the relationship with food that fixes it.”

-Lisa, 3 years after having gastric bypass

“At 6 months, I’m at the point where I can eat anything that I want, so I can gain the weight [back] if I just eat everything that I want and not remember the journey I went through over the last 6 months. I realize I did the surgery on [my] stomach and not on my brain. So, I need to remind myself every day that I didn’t do it for nothing. I did it for a reason.”

-Dan, 6 months after having gastric sleeve

“For most of us, those first 18 months are really easy. The really hard work starts a couple years out.”

-Lisa, 3 years after having gastric bypass

“Listen to your body. When you feel that pouch is full, you stop. Period.”

-John, 13 years after having gastric bypass

“Get moving before the surgery. Try and get moving before the surgery so it’s not so hard after the surgery. You’ve got to get moving or it’s not going to come off.”

-Beth, 5 years after having gastric bypass

“It’s a tool. It’s not the answer to you forever losing weight or all the weight. You really have to practice the eating and the exercising before you have the surgery and then continue it afterwards because the surgery alone is not going to do it. You have to do all that work. It’s hard. People think that you took the easy way out. No, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Because you are changing everything: the way you eat, the way you work out.”

-Blanca, 10 weeks after having gastric sleeve