I read that many kidney transplant recipients will gain weight post surgery due to either better appetite or side-effect of medication. For me, my weight has been pretty steady at ~80 kg since the beginning of February. Recently however, I have been gaining a bit of weight, about two to three kilograms in the past two weeks. Since I am still using the Fitbit Aria scale, all my weight data is recorded online:
It is hard to read the time scale, but this is one year’s worth of data. Right after surgery, I weighed 80 kg. That dropped to a low of ~76 kg, and now I am up to ~83 kg. The fluctuation is only about 5% either way, but I am not sure if I should be worried. While I was in the hospital recovering, the transplant dietitian did say that I need to eat a lot of protein, so I can heal properly. I also do not think my diet has changed recently so I cannot explain why my weight has been slowly increasing over the past four months. This does put me back into the “overweight” category using the BMI calculation.
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In WordPress, you can put a “feature image” at the top of the post, and you can choose from a bunch of stock images. I entered “scale” as the search term, and had to go through over 10 pages of images until I found a bathroom scale (see above). About 3/4 of the images were of snakes and lizards.
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Updated: 4:30 pm
Oops. I should read my old posts before writing a new one. I posted a month ago that post-transplant weight goes up or down, but a webpage at NKF just mentions weight gains. I guess if you had too much fluid, that would probably fix itself right away once your new kidney starts working. It does seem there are more drivers for weight gain over time pos-transplant.
I also found a real research paper about this topic. The results were:
There were 181 (48.4%) female patients, 334 (89.3%) with white ethnicity and the mean age was 44.4 ± 12.8 years. The mean BMI pre-transplant was 24.7 ± 4.1 kg/m2, and 35 (9.9%) patients were classified as obese; 119 (33.6%) as overweight; 187 (52.8%) as normal weight; and 13 (3.7%) as malnourished. After one year of follow-up, the mean BMI was 26.2 ± 5.0 kg/m2, and 61 (17.3%) patients were classified as obese; 133 (37.8%) as overweight; 148 (42.0%) as normal weight; and 10 (2.8%) as malnourished. Weight gain was observed in 72.7% patients, and the average increase was 7.12 ± 5.9 kg. The female gender, lower pre-transplant body weight, lower number of hospitalizations, and a kidney received from a living donor were associated with weight gain by more than 5% in the first year post-transplant.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243394
So, after gain after one year was 7 kg. I have gained 3 kg after 5 months so it is pretty consistent with the research paper. I will ask the UCLA transplant team on Wednesday when I up there for an appointment to see what they think.
Life with chronic diseases 