Fenton

BB, it's not so bad. You just have to commit to liquids only, and get on with it. It helps to know WHY you're on a liquid diet. Two reasons, basically: 1. When you eat solid food, your stomach gets stretched. If you're a hefty fellow, chances are you've been eating solid food for some years now, and your stomach is big and dilated. A few days on liquid diet will mean your stomach has time to get used to holding smaller volumes; it'll probably get a bit smaller before the surgery, making things a bit easier. 2. More importantly, the body stores a lot of fat in the liver, making the liver swell up in size. Since the liver sits on top of the stomach, the bigger the liver is, the harder it is to do the surgery: you want to make things as easy as possible for the surgeon, because that means less work for him, and less discomfort afterwards for you. Worse, a fatty, swollen liver is also more fragile and can be damaged during surgery. Finally, one of the fastest periods of weight loss is while we're on the liquid diet - you'll jumpstart your weight loss, and get a sense of how it feels to lose weight quickly. So, I guess, three reasons. Suddenly switching to liquids is a bit of a shock to the system - you may have hunger pangs, but if you do, just tell yourself that that feeling means your body is burning off fat. Good luck with your diet - come back and post often! You're among friends here.

A-Dub: I thought that in Australia "you drink to excess!" was the highest possible compliment? COuld I be mistaken? Re: your Bush-style posting - I see it less Bush-style Shock & Awe, and more like going quail hunting with Dick Cheney, where we end up peppered with "friendly fire". I'm glad you're reading hte book, though. Encourage friends and neighbours to pick up their own delightful copies! Angelic, the Peanut Butter is called "PB2 Powdered Peanut Butter" - a google search will find it for you instantly. It may not be locally available, in which case youll have to pick up a case of four. I think after my case is finished, I'm going to try the reduced fat PB at Trader Joe's - not QUITE as few calories, but I'm thinking it might be closer to the flavour I want...

A-Dub! Where have YOU been? You're usually so garrulous - I assume because you drink to excess - that when you're silent, I notice IMMEDIATELY! In other news, I managed to buy a Wii! Next up: Wii Fit...

And Lynn, BNLisa's right: we're all waiting with baited breath for your triumphal entry into Onederland. You must post immediately upon your arrival!

I'm ambivalent about working on the restaurant thing. Sure, it'd be nice to lose weight faster, but I'm losing at a good clip, and I don't really feel any privation. I'm not even a third of the way into my journey <tm>; I was realizing the other day that LONG after you guys have hit goal, and gone on about your lives, I shall still be plodding away here - eek! But I know I will have - and FEEL - privation later in the process, and for quite a long time. So I'm OK with my periodic induglences, for the moment. I do know that eventually I'll have to give them up.

OMG, Amanda! Impressive!

Great! You may be a little uncomfortable tonight and tomorrow, but that'll quickly pass. Indeed, I slept fine my first night back home. I think you're really going to enjoy this process...

Personally, I sinned liberally today. (Not, like, sinned as a liberal (which I clearly am), but I sinned profusely.) I got trapped by a neighbour who wanted to have dinner with me; I'd promised it some time ago, and the time had come to pay up. We went to a fish restaurant, but I ate too much. They brought all sorts of extra stuff - bacon cheddar biscuits, tuna terrine with toasts, shrimp done like Buffalo chicken wings complete with blue cheese sauce - but worst/best of all was that they brought three Desserts, and petits fours AND green apple candy floss. SO I ate too much. I'm going to relax for a little, then write for a while, then go for a long walk to try and do some damage control. And I feel icky.

Whoa, Tess! Nice work on the fitty, there! (That's how we say "fifty" in NYC. And in L.A., and anywhere in the country where the rap music has penetrated...) Ah, K-Pod! I admire your life of kayaking and Jello shots! And hope's right, Harley: we're all going to be watching to see how you do. My money says you're actually going to LOSE over the next week - sure, you may have a splurge or two, but you've got game, and I know you'll push yourself to burn it off on the trails...

Congratulations! And so YOU begin... walking!

I love Amanda's point that Alcohol is the gateway drug to chips...

Whoa - a whole lot of WooHoo there, Amanda! That's a great suggestion re: the drinking. I'm not a drinking man, but I do try to have at least one glass of red wine a week - good for the heart. I'd like to have two a week, but I don't buy wine for myself, and only have it when I'm at a restaurant, and, since I'm trying to limit my going out... I think the idea of having something to fiddle with is an excellent one, too; they give the same advice to smokers trying to quit.

A one pound spike is GREAT! I went up a pound last week, which was horrible, because it drove me out of Morbidly Obese and back into Super Obese. Which was great, because it made me say Lifestyle vacation OVER. I got back on the horse, and, when I weighed in yesterday was down 3 lbs. Yellowstone will be a great place to burn up calories, too - walking, hiking, climbing. If you're worried about the drinking, you could set yourself a limit, and try to stick to that. Or maybe just plan ahead and bring, whatever, a case of Diet Snapple Iced Tea, and allow yourself one night of excess drinking. I'm sure that you can figure out a way to manage the situation... Wow, though! A WEEK in Yellowstone! That'll be fantastic!

Good Lord, those are kind of spectacular numbers! I'm glad it all went smoothly, and you're feeling well and enjoying your progress...

Harley, why ARE you doing this to yourself? I wondered where you'd got to for the last couple of days... I think one of the problems of this Way of Eating is the sense that we're really restricted in what we are allowed to eat. While that is, in some ways, true, the fact is, at the end of the day, with a little effort we CAN eat what we want. The thing is, if we eat too much, we'll put ON weight. You keep on what you're doing, and it'll all be pointless - all the time and effort it took to learn about banding, to get insurance approval, the pre-op diet, the surgery, the recovery, the liquid diet, the mushy diet, all your first posts in this conference, all would be destroyed if the weight goes back on without thought. I think the thing is that you CAN incorporate things like the occasional piece of taffy or the occasional piece of cake into your dietary "budget" - you just have to make allowances for them. If you have a piece of taffy, try and make up for it by having less calories elsewhere, or (better) by doing more exercise. I think the Forbidden Foods mindset is a dangerous one for dieters - it makes life feel like suffering, when what it really should be all about is the pleasure we take in losing weight, becoming healthier, approaching goal, becoming more attractive, more energetic, etc. Focus on your goals, limit your intake of junk, and if you do eat junk, try to make up for it by increasing your exercise. We all know you can do it, Harley. So... JUST DO IT!

That's FANTASTIC that your BP and meds have dropped/been cut so much! Do you feel better at your lower doses? I think that's probably the best NSV of all - a genuine improvement in health, even if you don't feel particularly different...

Haha, Wisshi! The same thing happened to me today - except I wasn't playing softball, I was at work. My pants fell down, but no one could see because my scrub suit top is now so freaking enormous on me that it hid the pants' slide until I could grab them and pull them up...

Purple! How did I miss your story? Did you get the dress shortened? It seems the least your husband could do is to take his remodeled wife out to dinner in her remodeled dress...

One pound to Onederland!!! How do you chant in cyberspace? Lynn! LYNN! LYNN! LYNN!!! LYNN!!!

I think 35 pounds in 10 weeks is a huge weight loss - that's 3.5 pounds per week, more than the goal of 1 - 2 pounds per week. I have lost 60 pounds in that time period, but thats because I'm carrying a huge amount of excess weight, and I'm carrying it aggressively and pretty fast for long distances every day. I think it's unreasonable to see a 3.5 pound weight loss as "slow"! That's really, really FAST! I know my WL rate is going to drop soon (since I'm now down a total of 86 pounds since I started, that 86 pounds less for me to carry ergo less calories burned), so I'm planning on joining a gym and really pounding away at the machines. And Tess is absolutely right - journaling your intake is an excellent way to make sure you ARE taking in what you think you're taking in. It's a simple equation: if you're burning more calories than you take in, you're losing weight. And if you're losing weight slowly, either you're taking in too many calories, or you're not burning enough. There are rare instances where you're not taking in enough calories/protein, and the body starts to drop the metabolic rate and break down the Protein, but I'd wager that for the vast majority of solidly stalled bandsters, the problem is that they're not realizing just how all the food they're taking in adds up... hope, we'll all hold your hand psychically when you go for your biopsy. And brothers are HELL!

No! It was interesting! It was TRIPPY!!!!

Oh, blah blah blah! But, yeah, it's a painful and a sensitive issue, and ultimately a matter of life or death. We can't let ourselves get worked up over How Society Sees Fat People - our anger or pain will change nothing. Instead, we have to concentrate on how good it feels to go kayaking, or to buckle a normal seatbelt on a plane, or donate huge bags of clothes (as I did this weekend!). On how good it feels to be finally going in the right direction...

Now, being fat absolutely IS easier for men than for women - there is far less tolerance for overweight women than there is for hefty dudes - so you may feel I'm being unreasonable, but I have to say it again: I'm grateful for the social stigma of being overweight. Right now, I'm most concerned about saving my life, of living beyond 50. But as my weight comes down to safer levels, I'm going to rely on that social stigma to keep driving my loss. If someone looks at me funny because I'm fat, inside, I'm going to thank them for that, because it's only more motivation for me. And at some level, I find myself almost wishing that women I've known hadn't loved me despite my weight; defusing that pain doesn't really help me to get where I need to be.

I have to say that, while I sympathize with the Fat Acceptance folk, and believe that a lot of what they have to say as advocates for people who have weight issues is useful (and, with a starting weight of almost 500 lbs, how could I not?), at the end of the day, I think that their message is potentially harmful. While much of the immediate pain of being overweight comes from the issue of being less desirable, the fact is that fat people lead shortened lives that are filled with progressive illness and social withdrawal before their premature deaths. Being fat should no more be accepted than should having cancer - these are serious problems, which require us to become engaged in our lives and our health, and to take the sorts of actions that all of us here have taken.

K-Pod, I sympathize with a lot of what you said, but at the end of the day, I think it's a question of mindset. If we spend our lives looking at other people, and comparing our snap judgements of them to ourselves, we're always going to end up dissapointed. There will ALWAYS be someone we can find who is thinner, prettier, smarter, richer, better at golf etc etc etc. What is key is how WE feel about ourselves. Society punishes fat people for reasons that are probably fairly primal - I suspect it goes back to tribal living, where a fat person would have to have consumed more than their fair share of the food, and, being overweight and less active, would probably have contributed less in terms of labour to the survival of the tribe. I suspect that the stigma of obesity is pretty old (yes, I know taht there are/were societies where fat was valued as a sign of health, but the majority of images of beauty through the ages show thin people as beautiful). It is, of course, cruel and unfair at some level. But the pain society inflicts on fat people can be useful - if fat people were cherished in our culture, how many of us would be here on this board?