@christygb @colleenyoung Hi Christy, and welcome to Connect to you and your sister, @birdienanie. I was a liver transplant recipient in September of 2016 - now approaching my third “transplantiversary”! had been trying to lose weight and had been, very gradually, but knowing I was facing very major surgery I decided to try harder. Plus my cirrhosis was caused by fatty liver which I’m sure was due to my weight. So, I stepped up the healthy eating and exercise.

The aids that really helped me were “MyFitnessPal.com”, a application where you record EVERYTHING that you eat. If you are not honest you are cheating yourself. You provide your weight and some other vitals to the program and at the end of each day it gives you an approximation of how much you will weigh in 5 weeks if you continue following what you did that day. If you don’t eat enough it won’t give you that information because it’s not healthy to starve yourself either. It really can be an eye-opener to know just how many mindless calories you are consuming. By doing it I learned a lot. I still use it sometimes if I gain some weight back, but for the most part I’ve learned just what I should and shouldn’t do. If you exercise you can record that too and it will figure that in. At the time I had a “Misfit” fitness tracker and it synced with MyFitnessPal automatically. I still wear a fitness tracker but I can’t get my current one to sync but you can record what you did manually.

My second aid was the fitness tracker. Using it gave me more incentive to reach the goal I had set for myself. There are fitness trackers in every price range. The “Misfit” was very good and reasonably priced. I just checked their website and they no longer have the tracker I had but they do have one, the “Ray”, which is $79.99 and right now is 20% off! I’m sure there other brands also that are in that price range or even less expensive. For me, that really helped to keep me active.

My last aid was my scale. I bought a scale a few years ago that not only gives you your weight but is also gives an approximation of the fluid you are retaining. It helped me because if my weight went up but then I saw I was retaining fluid I realized it was just temporary water weight. When I bought the scale on Amazon it was around $45.

I hope some of these ideas might help you, they sure did help me. My PCP was very impressed with how well I did, and I am keeping it off.

I am very impressed with your selflessness in wanting to be a donor for your sister. Will they allow a live donor to donate both organs? The wait for livers is not nearly as long as it is for kidneys so even if you could just donate that when she got the call that they had a liver it would be great. I waited about a year and a half for a liver. My niece’s husband just had a kidney transplant after about 5 years of being listed and having dialysis.

Please just ask if you or your sister have any questions, that’s what we are here for. I wish I had known about this resource when I was waiting. I hope you will keep us appraised of the progress that you and your sister are making as you move forward to these transplants.
JK