First off, for those that are still having problems post surgery I'm really sorry you are going through that. My thoughts are with you! I wish your experience could have been as smooth as mine was.
First off, I leveraged the boost in weight loss from my initial recovery and have maintained a rigorous exercise program ever since. I now exercise 6 days a week and I'm loving it. I mention this not to brag, but because there were some interesting effects on my exercise routine as my anemia slowly recovered.
While I was anemic I was really sluggish. No matter how much I exercised, I never got to the point where I felt like I had enough energy. After my anemia subsided (it became obvious my hemorrhoids were the cause because I bounced back a few months after surgery) I started feeling like I had tons of energy during my workout which was awesome!
Now for the weird part -- my anemia did more than just recover, I went completely the opposite direction. My GP took me off iron tablets. After that end it went like this; 6 mos after surgery my iron levels were normal but trending up. A year after surgery they got really high, to the point where my GP was telling me needed to monitor this, and follow up in 3 mos and if it was still going higher we needed to do something about it. Luckily 3 mos later the upward trend dissipated and by the time of my next follow up in January this year, I was back to normal range and had stabilized. What I think happened was my body became so adept and hanging on to every scrap of iron it could, that it just went a little overboard after I fixed the problem and that it takes some time to stabilize. Everything is back to normal now, and I had perfect labs on my last follow up.
