 Hi there YouTube family and thank you so much for joining me for today's video. I'm going to be giving you a life update especially about my surgery, my weight loss surgery and where my weight is and how that's all going. I'm also going to be just explaining a little bit to you about what has been going on in my life. I have had so very many of you be curious about where I'm at with my weight loss and so I just thought I better sit down and I better tell everybody how things are going. So as of right now I'm three and a half months post-surgery and if you watched any of my other videos about my surgery you will know that I was on a pre-surgery diet for four weeks before. So really in attempting to lose weight and get it off it's really been four and a half months of really trying hard to lose weight. So in that four and a half months if you guys have watched any of those other videos you will see that I did go down to Mexico and have my bariatric surgery. I had gastric bypass. I know that some people have been really offended by that and I really don't want to offend anybody but that is what I chose to do because the surgery here in the states is so expensive and down there it's a fraction of the cost. I researched and researched and researched before I did it and made that decision and it's not a decision that I made lightly. It's not a decision that I made on my own. My family, I was involved with my family and especially my husband and then also my primary care doctor was involved. So I got a lot of support and a lot of good feedback from all of those people and I'm so thankful to all of you too who have not been really judgmental about where I went and when I did it. Now when I did get home seven days post-op I did have a complication that put me back into surgery which was a bowel obstruction but when I talked to the actual bariatric surgeon that did that surgery over there in Seattle he said that it is such a common complication of bariatric surgery that he sees it quite often and he went in there, he took care of what was going on and I haven't had any problems since. Now what does my daily diet look like? My daily diet is very different than you might think. I eat very, very small meals except for in the morning. In the morning I do a protein shake that has 30 grams of protein. When you have bariatric surgery or weight loss surgery of any kind they tell you to be very, very careful about the amount of protein that you take in and so they want you to get 60 to 90 grams of protein a day. I usually hit somewhere about 70, 75 grams of protein. It is hard to do that though. Since you have had weight loss surgery it is such a learning curve. It is like one day you're just fine everything goes down just fine the next day stuff hurts and you're not eaten as much as you know you should but those are kind of the ups and downs of it. So for the rest of the day that's where my challenge comes in after that initial shake. That initial shake gives me a ton of protein in the morning and then you know throughout the day then my challenge comes in and trying to figure out what else I'm going to get that won't hurt my stomach and it will digest really easily but you know I found that digestion and not hurting my stomach comes more from slowing down in your eating because you can't get really hungry because you don't eat that much. So you get really hungry and you have a tendency to want to eat faster that's a big no-no and you when you eat faster you don't chew your food as well which is a big no-no too. So I'm finding that if I just slow down even though I may be super hungry and slowing down a lot of what I eat can be easily digested. One of the things that they talk about when you get this is making sure you get supplements. Now my supplements are very varied and I have a lot of them. I take a dose of multivitamin but I take double the dose to make sure I get the nutrients of a multivitamin and I take a very high dose of calcium, magnesium. I also take iron, I take extra B1 and B12 and I also take a really good fish oil as well. So I feel like through the supplements I am getting my diet more rounded and the nutrition that I need into my body more. I did choose to do gastric bypass oversleeve because my doctor was a big proponent of that helping me because of my age and he said in the long term gastric bypass patients have a lot more success than the gastric sleeve. The gastric sleeve was originally designed for people that had all kinds of complications and like diabetes or heart problems or that kind of thing because it's a lot less invasive of a surgery. A lot of people ask me, okay, are you exercising? Okay, this is where my downfall comes in big time you guys. I have not started a specific exercise regimen and the reason is because I have so much pain in my back and my hips. I do walk a lot with my husband so that does help but you guys when you think about I was coming off of like six years of non-activity and just laying in my bed when you think about that and trying to build your muscles back up, you know, in three months, four and a half months, it's hard to build that back overnight. So I'm trying really hard to get to the point to where I can have a regular exercise regimen which I know I should be doing and one of my favorite things that I used to do when I was younger was lift a little bit of weights for the muscle tone. So I know that I should be doing all those things and I'm going, those are plans that I'm going to be doing but I definitely get a lot of walking in right now. So I know the big question on everybody's mind is how much weight have you lost in those four and a half months? I'm really proud to say that I am at 89 pounds. I'm almost at 90 pounds which gives me another 60 pounds to go and I know that sounds like a ton but you guys, I don't think anybody realized where I was. I'm going to try and get some pictures to put with this that I can throw in hopefully right here where you can see the before picture which was taken about a week and a half before surgery and then the after picture that you can see. It's been a very long journey but I'm really enjoying the journey and I'm loving what it's doing to my health, to my life. I cannot begin to tell you the amount of pain that has decreased. I really only have like I said pain now in my hips and in my lower back. My fibromyalgia pain it does flare when I get super stressed or when I get super tired. I get all of those fun things. I get the fibro foggy heads still it's just all kinds of fun but everything has been diminished. I would say my fibro has been diminished more than 50% in getting almost 100 pounds off which is huge for me because honestly I was in my bed and I was all I was doing was laying in my bed and eating and feeling sorry for myself. So I'm so glad to be able to get out of that funk and to start a new chapter of my life and I'm so blessed to have a husband and my family that has been that has been supporting me and that continues to support me. If you guys have any questions about any of this please leave those comments down below and I will be happy to answer any of those. Okay the other thing I want to tell you is yes I did move. I moved from Washington State to Utah. That's the new background on all of my videos. I feel like it's a lot lighter in here. I love that my walls are white. Some walls in my other house where I was in Washington were gold and it would make me have a yellow cast in every single video and it didn't matter what lighting I used or what I tried to do I just looked yellow. So I feel like my lighting is so much better and that I'm using a lot of natural light and the light that's bouncing back to me is not yellow. So I'm really glad about that. I love our new place. It's much smaller than our old place. It's one level where my other place was upstairs downstairs. I hardly ever went downstairs because I was hurting so bad with my hips and having to travel. Now I can clean this house like in a matter of an hour or two and just feel really good about that and being able to be just steps away from my kitchen where I can make healthier meals and be able to improve all the way around in my health. Also I know that some people are going to be asking why did you move. The biggest reason that we decided to move is I do have aging parents here in Utah and they are in their 80s and I wanted to spend as much time as I possibly could with them which has turned out to be such a blessing already. Spending time with my mom and my dad is just precious to me so I'm glad that I'm able to do that. Also this is where I was born and raised until the age of 18. I lived here in this little town and then when I was ready to raise my own children I bought I brought them back here and I raised them here for about another 13 years and then went up to Washington. In addition to this being a weight loss update weight surgery update video I do want this to be kind of an introduction video to all of you as to who I am and why I am doing YouTube. So really quickly in a nutshell I've been doing YouTube for almost four years. I'm coming up on my four year anniversary of it and I decided to do YouTube number one because I wanted to get into something that I was so passionate about and I was disabled at the time and so this just worked out perfect because I could do it from my home and it would make up is something that I've always been passionate about. I've always had an intense love for all things beauty skincare hair care that kind of thing so I decided to get into that and then when I found YouTube it was like just a light bulb went on over my head and I absolutely love it and I have just learned so much myself and I love passing that on to you but the other thing is is that when I looked around on YouTube there was hardly any women that were over the age of 40 showing how to put makeup or skincare use skincare on an aging face and I was like this is silly because the women that have the most disposable income and that really have a lot of time on their hands are the women of my age. We have raised our children and we have worked our whole lives and so now we have time for us and I really think that that is important as we age you know sometimes we can get down on ourselves and I think that makeup can make us feel really good skincare can improve the way we look and then other things that we can do can really help bolster our confidence and our self-worth and then we can put our very best selves out there and when you do that and you're able to put yourself out there you get so much back and it just makes you feel so good and especially if you have a chronic illness it's just such a blessing to be able to do this. Okay so that's why I did start YouTube if you want to know anything about my skin tone or what my skin type is I do have dry skin and I do have more so dry skin in the winter and I did have very dry skin as I started retinae a few years ago my undertone to my skin is neutral leaning towards cool and then my skin is normally light and the summer it's between light and medium because I do use a self-tanner but right now what you see is just my skin so it's very light even though it's a little bit bronzed up today so that is my introduction video in a nutshell the things that have happened to me probably in the past year or so and how things are going with me and I want this to be an introduction to people that come in to look at my channel so I hope that you did enjoy this please give this video a thumbs up I would really appreciate it if you would do that it does help me out so much and don't forget to subscribe and click that little bell that's next to the subscribe button because it does help you to not be unsubscribed but more than that you'll be notified of every video that I do through the week which I'm trying to do three a week now I finally got everything settled down fingers crossed we're going to be doing this three times a week if not more I'd love to do more for you guys so that's everything hope that you did enjoy this video today please take care of yourselves I love you all so very much you're the best part of my day and I'll see you all in my very next video bye guys