So my hubby and I attended the required seminar today. We learned about the band, sleeve, and bypass. Both of us still want the band. Unfortunately they told us that my health insurance requires the 6 month medically supervised diet (ugh). I was hoping that this wasn't the case because it seems like it's so far away. When you know what you want the rest of your life to look like, you want it to start as soon as possible. I know the 6 months will fly by though. The coordinator will call us within 2 weeks to schedule our consults. A psych eval is required since they are a center of excellence. They do not require that a specific amount of weight be lost, and the insurance coverage goes off of my CONSULT weight and not my weight at the end of the 6 months. This is good news because I am right at 40 BMI and was nervous to lose any weight and then be excluded from coverage for the surgery. They do a 2 week liquid pre-op diet and the surgery is outpatient, so no overnight stay.

So when talking about our weight loss journey, I told my husband about the Couch to 5k running program. I have always hated running, but since watching some you tubers go through the training, it seems more doable. The fact that there are specific goals and that you are gradually increasing your running time makes it seem way less unpleasant than going from sedintary to running. Because we did not want to drop below that 40 BMI mark for fear of not getting insurance coverage, we were talking about starting this after recovering from our surgeries. However, now that I know that the insurance coverage will be based on our consult weights, we can start the program any time after that. Then maybe it wont seem as overwhelming after surgery to try to change my diet and my exercise habits all at once. And the more weight we can lose now, the less we need to worry about later I guess.

So now I am excited and I want to go buy a jogging stroller for the kids and some new running shoes. I found the downloadable podcasts that have the couch to 5k intervals on them so you can just listen to it and know when to start and stop running. This would be nice so that I don't have to watch a clock. Since it is getting cold outside, We will probably start at the gym until spring time.

Oh, I had a question, does anyone find that they have a problem with their port sticking out too far once you have lost weight? The surgeon talked about the fact that it's usually not a problem but that they do have some "low profile" ports that don't stick out as much. I don't know if this is a common problem for those who are now smaller.