Beach Lover

Amazon has them as well

I love(d) bread. Love love love love love love everything bread. Love. Like lovity love love love. LOOOOOOVE. Love love love. Love it love it love it. Ate meals consisting entirely of it. Didn't go a day without it. Ordered extra baskets of it. Only went to restaurants that gave it to you. Bread bread bread bread bread. Give me bread. Knew what time the local groceries took it out of the oven so I could bring it home hot. One for me on the way home, one for the family AT home. Plain, with butter, with cream cheese, with brie, toasted, cold, smeared, bread bread bread,

I quit bread with all the will power of someone who MADE.THE.DECISION a month pre-op. Tried a bit a toast when I moved to food a few months post op. It stuck. Tried it again soaked in Soup, it stuck. Tried it a third and final time and realized I was trying it out of habit, not because I wanted it. Still love the smell, the texture, the crunch, hate the feeling it gives me so I don't eat it. I might pick a crusty piece off at Panera and chew it up really well but I know the swallow is going to suck so I rarely do that. I don't miss it as much I was sure I was. Tortillas get stuck so I make wraps or quesadillas and then just eat the inside. Silly, but true. I can eat a piece of bacon on toast, but I pull off all of the toast and just a few crumbs stick to it. Wasteful.

Try to go without. You'd be amazed. If I can, you can.

Dear Mum,

I was seven when I discovered that you were fat, ugly and horrible. Up until that point I had believed that you were beautiful — in every sense of the word. I remember flicking through old photo albums and staring at pictures of you standing on the deck of a boat. Your white strapless bathing suit looked so glamorous, just like a movie star. Whenever I had the chance I’d pull out that wondrous white bathing suit hidden in your bottom drawer and imagine a time when I’d be big enough to wear it; when I’d be like you.
But all of that changed when, one night, we were dressed up for a party and you said to me, ‘‘Look at you, so thin, beautiful and lovely. And look at me, fat, ugly and horrible.’’

At first I didn’t understand what you meant.

‘‘You’re not fat,’’ I said earnestly and innocently, and you replied, ‘‘Yes I am, darling. I’ve always been fat; even as a child.’’
In the days that followed I had some painful revelations that have shaped my whole life. I learned that:

1. You must be fat because mothers don’t lie.
2. Fat is ugly and horrible.
3. When I grow up I’ll look like you and therefore I will be fat, ugly and horrible too.
Years later, I looked back on this conversation and the hundreds that followed and cursed you for feeling so unattractive, insecure and unworthy. Because, as my first and most influential role model, you taught me to believe the same thing about myself.

With every grimace at your reflection in the mirror, every new wonder diet that was going to change your life, and every guilty spoon of ‘‘Oh-I-really-shouldn’t,’’ I learned that women must be thin to be valid and worthy. Girls must go without because their greatest contribution to the world is their physical beauty.
Just like you, I have spent my whole life feeling fat. When did fat become a feeling anyway? And because I believed I was fat, I knew I was no good.
But now that I am older, and a mother myself, I know that blaming you for my body hatred is unhelpful and unfair. I now understand that you too are a product of a long and rich lineage of women who were taught to loathe themselves.

Look at the example Nanna set for you. Despite being what could only be described as famine-victim chic, she dieted every day of her life until the day she died at seventy-nine years of age. She used to put on make-up to walk to the letterbox for fear that somebody might see her unpainted face.
I remember her ‘‘compassionate’’ response when you announced that Dad had left you for another woman. Her first comment was, ‘‘I don’t understand why he’d leave you. You look after yourself, you wear lipstick. You’re overweight — but not that much.’’

Before Dad left, he provided no balm for your body-image torment either.
‘‘Jesus, Jan,’’ I overheard him say to you. ‘‘It’s not that hard. Energy in versus energy out. If you want to lose weight you just have to eat less.’’
That night at dinner I watched you implement Dad’s ‘‘Energy In, Energy Out: Jesus, Jan, Just Eat Less’’ weight-loss cure. You served up chow mein for dinner. (Remember how in 1980s Australian suburbia, a combination of mince, cabbage, and soy sauce was considered the height of exotic gourmet?) Everyone else’s food was on a dinner plate except yours. You served your chow mein on a tiny bread-and-butter plate.

As you sat in front of that pathetic scoop of mince, silent tears streamed down your face. I said nothing. Not even when your shoulders started heaving from your distress. We all ate our dinner in silence. Nobody comforted you. Nobody told you to stop being ridiculous and get a proper plate. Nobody told you that you were already loved and already good enough. Your achievements and your worth — as a teacher of children with special needs and a devoted mother of three of your own — paled into insignificance when compared with the centimeters you couldn’t lose from your waist.
It broke my heart to witness your despair and I’m sorry that I didn’t rush to your defense. I’d already learned that it was your fault that you were fat. I’d even heard Dad describe losing weight as a ‘‘simple’’ process — yet one that you still couldn’t come to grips with. The lesson: you didn’t deserve any food and you certainly didn’t deserve any sympathy.

But I was wrong, Mum. Now I understand what it’s like to grow up in a society that tells women that their beauty matters most, and at the same time defines a standard of beauty that is perpetually out of our reach. I also know the pain of internalising these messages. We have become our own jailors and we inflict our own punishments for failing to measure up. No one is crueler to us than we are to ourselves.
But this madness has to stop, Mum. It stops with you, it stops with me and it stops now. We deserve better — better than to have our days brought to ruin by bad body thoughts, wishing we were otherwise.
And it’s not just about you and me any more. It’s also about Violet. Your granddaughter is only three and I do not want body hatred to take root inside her and strangle her happiness, her confidence and her potential. I don’t want Violet to believe that her beauty is her most important asset; that it will define her worth in the world. When Violet looks to us to learn how to be a woman, we need to be the best role models we can. We need to show her with our words and our actions that women are good enough just the way they are. And for her to believe us, we need to believe it ourselves.

The older we get, the more loved ones we lose to accidents and illness. Their passing is always tragic and far too soon. I sometimes think about what these friends — and the people who love them — wouldn’t give for more time in a body that was healthy. A body that would allow them to live just a little longer. The size of that body’s thighs or the lines on its face wouldn’t matter. It would be alive and therefore it would be perfect.
Your body is perfect too. It allows you to disarm a room with your smile and infect everyone with your laugh. It gives you arms to wrap around Violet and squeeze her until she giggles. Every moment we spend worrying about our physical ‘‘flaws’’ is a moment wasted, a precious slice of life that we will never get back.
Let us honor and respect our bodies for what they do instead of despising them for how they appear. Focus on living healthy and active lives, let our weight fall where it may, and consign our body hatred in the past where it belongs. When I looked at that photo of you in the white bathing suit all those years ago, my innocent young eyes saw the truth. I saw unconditional love, beauty and wisdom. I saw my Mum.

Love, Kasey xx
Kasey Edwards is an author from Melbourne. Learn about her books on her website, or follow her on Twitter.
This is an excerpt from Dear Mum: a collection of letters from Australian sporting stars, musicians, models, cooks and authors revealing what they would like to say to their mothers before it’s too late, or would have said if only they’d had the chance. All royalties go to the National Breast Cancer Foundation. (Published by Random House and available now.)

Think so? Hmm that makes sense I guess! Who would have thought all this time all I had to do was give in to the little devil on my shoulder and eat what I wanna eat lol.

Beach lover is right. Stretching is something that is not that easy to do. Our remaining stomach is mostly muscle. The part they took out is the stretchy part.
If a person is to blow it with a sleeve it would probably be by eating very often, not by eating too much at one time.

I really doubt that you have stretched your stomach at this point. My surgeon also told me that it would take a lot of purposeful overeating for a long time to stretch your stomach.

Yes, I definitely do still feel restriction when I have denser Proteins. Sets my mind a bit more at ease to think of that (which I hadn't before).

Do you still feel a good amount of restriction when you eat dense Protein? If so, I would say you've not stretched anything. My understanding is that it would take chronic over-eating to cause stretching. I don't think the occasional over-eating would do it.

I've ordered from netrition.com for years. They have a flat rate shipping price of $4.95. They are fast and reliable.

I have taken 2 colace everyday and probably will for a long time. The combo with the coffee seems to be the most effective for me.

Well it isn't much but it is a loss.
Starting 212
Today 211 1 pound down.
Goal 203 It seems I have slowed down some so I am going a little conservative with an 8 pound goal this time. Hopefully I will beat this!
My last week for the Christmas Challenge I stayed the same......bummer!

I was taken Walmart stool softener. I will make sure to take two every morning from now on. I used hot tea.
Saturday 12/28/2014 I picked my up a cup of sugar free Cappuccino not thinking and within One hour I went to the bathroom.
This is crazy and don't like having to keep track of when I go to the restroom.
Thanks for the help.

Most liquor stores carry sugar free syrups.

I really enjoyed reading this! He did a terrific job showing us your life together and your journey through this process. You have a terrific husband and I see many wonderful years ahead!! Tell him thanks for sharing his feelings and thoughts with us!

Hi guys. I asked my husband to write something for my blog. Like a "WLS from a spouse's point of view" sort of thing. I will preface this by saying, my husband is my rock and I love him to pieces (sure, some days I want to push him off a cliff, but...).
This is what he sent me - I wanted to share with this audience because we all have loved ones that drive us crazy at times. I think sometimes we open up in a different way when we put pen to paper as opposed to speaking to one another. What would your spouse or significant other write if you asked them to? I was surprised by what I read here...
The wife recently asked me to write a little something for her blog. Not much on writing more than witty quips in response to my friends Facebook posts, my first response was a “oh sure” and then to politely ignore the request. It’s a tactic that works I’d say 75% of the time. I was hoping that she would be so excited (or distraught) about weight loss/lack of weight loss/not pooping/pooping/someone else pooping or not pooping, she’d forget that she asked. So a week passed and then I get a, “So I’d really like you to write a post for my blog. You know, from the spouses point of view.” I thought I was home free with her focus on the stall. Guess not.

My wife's weight has never really been an issue for me. We met over the phone and had a 3000-mile long distance relationship before the Internet and unlimited phone service. We worked in the same industry and developed a relationship over months of hours-long, bank-account-crushing phone calls. We have always said that if we had come across each other in a bar or other typical meeting place, we wouldn’t have been each other’s type, physically. Since we fell in love before we ever met, we got what we got. Which by the way, I was pretty happy with upon our first meeting. So when she informed me of her thoughts on surgery I tried hard to keep the slack jawed WTF look off my face as much as I could. I initially thought, “Your going to cut out most of your stomach just to lose a few pounds. What?” What I didn’t realize is that it wasn’t a few pounds. Much like your surprise when someone comments on how much your child has grown because they only see him once a year, I hadn’t noticed she had gained a hundred pounds since we first met. She had always just been my wife, my best friend, the person I would spend a long wonderful life with. My attachment to her has always been so much more than physical, and when I look at her I still see that 25-year-old girl I fell in love with. So when she told me how much she weighed I thought, “Holy shit, when did that happen.”

My blessing of the surgery wasn’t without hesitation. I know what obesity does to a body over time and have witnessed it first hand in my father and mother-in-law. The breaking down of joints, the insulin injections, heart issues and on and on…I know, preaching to the choir. But what if something happens during surgery and I lose the love of my life? What if our boy loses his mother? The mere thoughts made my heart hurt. How would I ever cope if something tragic actually happened? But you can’t live life on the basis that something bad MIGHT happen. Its what kept my mother from fully experiencing life and I always hated that. I wanted to have the healthiest wife possible as we get older. I wanted her to be comfortable in her skin. I wanted her to wear clothes she likes, not just the ones that hide the most. I wanted her to not feel awkward around others. I’ve never really struggled with weight. Sure I could lose more than a few pounds, but it falls off with little effort. I don’t fully understand the angst that the weight causes my wife but I know she isn’t as happy as she could be because of it. Life isn’t a dress rehearsal. You gotta make the most of it. So I agreed, reluctantly.

After coming to grips with the minimal risk involved and nervously waiting for good news from the operating room, it’s been a pretty easy journey for me. I’ve had to do very little except listen. Listen about the surgery, shakes, stalls, pooping, not pooping and then pooping again. My wife is hard-core about obtaining information off the internet. So much so, she once gave her GP a tutorial on thyroid testing and the latest acceptable ranges for each test, which came as news to her doctor. Still not sure why we had to pay for that office visit. So nothing came as a surprise. It made my life easier knowing that if anything came up post op that might freak me out, she had the stats on how many patients experienced the same thing, why it happened, how long it will likely last, and what the next day, week, month has in store. Easy for me, but I know it hasn’t been easy for her and that each day brings a new challenge. I am so grateful for what she is willing to put herself through for a healthier future with our son and me. Recently she’s been in the dreaded stall, but it’s subsided, and she has a little pep in her step. I love the gleam in her eye when the scale tells her what she wants to hear. I love how she gleefully shows off how crappy her clothes fit. Mostly I love that each day she seems to feel more comfortable in her skin and happier with herself. What more can you really ask for?

When I was losing weight, I worked hard and was continually amazed that I could do it. I mean, after so many failures - including with the lapband, it was almost too good to be true.
I have been at goal and maintaining since Feb 2013 - almost a year. I haven't lost my focus or even my sense of wonder about it. My body continues to change and become more and more normal. I feel the remnants of the 300#+ slowly fading away and being replaced by a normal/average looking body. I have been told that I don't look at all like someone who was ever the least bit overweight (who knows what that means exactly but the speaker was referring to my thin calves - no cankles...LOL)
What I do sometimes notice is a certain "worry"... like what if I regain? Will I handle it as well as so many others that post here regularly have (ie keep working the sleeve and relose that gain) or will I repeat my old demon pattern of just throwing in the towel and giving up (like I did with the lapband)... and I have no doubt the regain this time would probably put me at 400#. It is a scary thought actually.
Anyway, I don't spend alot of time thinking about the negatives, but maintenance is a different kind of headspace. It is really learning, and adjusting and finding that new life at goal weight. How to keep it without being consumed by the Quest for a certain body size (weight or whatever).
I think my primarily goal for 2014 is to maintain, one more year. I like to think in smaller chunks - I can visualize maintaining throughout 2014 so that is what I focus on. I would also like to increase my muscle/reduce body fat percentage. I don't even know what it is, so I would like to get measured and assess my progress in that way.
Not really a new years resolution as those always seem to fall by the wayside. Mine is more a mindset - I don't have a choice, I have to maintain for one more year.

Hello All,
Thanks so much for all of the suggestions. I even looked up Borland and Umbach. But today, my insurance was verified and guess what... I HAVE COVERAGE!!! I am so happy that I wont have to self pay. I have a Pre-Op appointment on 01/10/2012. I will keep everyone informed probably in another thread or topic.
Thanks again everyone!

I am so excited I just got the call from blue cross blue Sheild Federal that my request was approved and my letter will be mailed out. My doctor submitted the docs on 12/30/13 and I was approved 01/02/2014. I am scheduled to be sleeved on 01/14/2014. This has got to be my year.

I forgot to check in with you yesterday! I stayed the same no loss for me.........but no gain either. I will check in with you tomorrow for the Valentine Challenge.

Pull your meal out and set the rest out for your family. I honestly have lost my desire to eat a bunch of different foods anymore and sometimes find cooking for my family and just picking or not eating what they are having at all.

Wow!! I just checked out the site and couldn't believe how many flavors you could chose from!! Thank you!

I have bought sugar free flavored syrups at netrition.com That is also where I order my creamy vanilla Isopure Protein powder. They have lots of low carb/sugar free products. Local is a better option if you can find what you want, but their shipping is not too high. I do an order from them every 2 or 3 months. They have many things I have not seen any other place. Happy shopping.

You can try lollicup.com. I personally like the salted caramel.

I can only find the So Delicious at Natural Grocers (our other store in town is Albertson's and they don't carry it). I've seen it in grocery stores when I've been on travel. It's in the same section as the other coffee Creamers. Your local store may be able to order if for you
The Caramel Macchiato is my go-to drink for coffee and the syrups unless I just want vanilla.
I've been using the syrups in my shakes for a while - the shakes get so old. I need to jazz them up a little.
I use Peppermint in a hot chocolate Protein drink.
I use the vanilla if I'm making homemade whipped topping and coffee.
I put some Raspberry in with cottage cheese or ricotta cheese for a "dessert"
chocolate Syrup is good when added to a chocolate shake, with some PB2 powder - tastes like a Peanut Butter cup. My husband will put the chocolate in his coffee with some vanilla. That's not my favorite.
Hope this helps!

I do love my coffee! I've been a coffee drinker since I was a kid.
I like the Salted Caramel better than the plain Caramel. I've never had a Caramel Latte from Dunkin Donuts. I do like a Caramel Macchiato from Starbucks though...(insert evil laugh here). Here's how I make it...
I make some strong coffee. I heat up 3 tablespoons of So Delicious Coconut Creamer (it tastes just like fat free 1/2 and 1/2 - no coconut flavor at all - you could use fat free 1/2 and 1/2 or soy creamer) and 3 tablespoons of milk (I use 1%) in the microwave (45 seconds on high) and stir in about 8 ounces of the strong coffee. Then I add about a teaspoon of the sugar free vanilla and a teaspoon of sugar free salted caramel. OMG - yum in a cup!!!!!!