Jachut

Lol, maybe we should all have "time to cut out the cookies" or any other trigger food tattooed so close together and tiny that you cant read it. When you CAN read it, its time to really cut out the cookies! Reminds me of that "welcome to jamaica have a nice day" joke *snicker*

Um, yes, they can change big time. My friend has a big one on her lower back which is now unrecognizeable, completely distorted and dropped and the one on her stomach is now only half there after she had a tummy tuck, looks REALLY weird, like a huge butterfly is being eaten by her scar. Its a bit sad, but really, that's what'll happen when you get to 80 too.

Well, as long as the quality and skills of the surgeon werent an issue, I'd choose close to home. We're lucky here but to me, having to go out of the country to surgery is awful. I simply dont know how people can do it, not being able to just get in the car and drive a few suburbs to their appointments. BUT - and that's a big but, I'm a band patient, not a sleever. I think with a sleeve, that doesnt require constant follow up, out of the country surgery is a much more viable option and I wouldnt choose a band over a sleeve and certainly not a bypass over a sleeve simply to be closer to home. I'd pick the surgery I wanted first and foremost.

Glad you're well. It must be so different being a WLS patient and not obese. I wonder how quickly full energy and stamina will return and whether it will actually make any difference. You're much fitter now of course.

I dont like new balance shoes either, both times i had a pair, i started developing ITB problems in my left knee. I'm on my fifth pair of Brooks Adrenalines - wide, slightly inward rolling feet, they suit me perfectly. I dont even try anything else, just go and buy new ones. Lots of people swear by Asics too but they're too narrow for my feet. but it depends what you're doing - I'm a runner, I wouldnt need such stability if I were doing the elliptical and gym, a more neutral or cross training shoe would do me fine.

I agree, you've probably heard what you wanted to and not really processed the "its a tool" part. There's NOTHING wrong with that, I defy anyone here to say that at least one tiny part of them wasnt hoping for easy automatic weight loss. some of us got it. I certainly lost most of my weight without trying particularly hard on the diet front. But I never got particularly heavy in the first place - a BMI of 36 when I was banded, and naturally, along with that goes the fact that i probably didnt have eating habits quite as disordered as someone who got to 400lb. I also live in Australia, portion sizes out can be large, yes, but we havent quite reached the stage where a human hand cant fit around a McDonalds soda cup and where the car has to have special larger cup holders. By and large our portion sizes are much smaller and the idea that ANYTHING comes in a can, packet or box is a little foreign. I cooked from scratch, I ate fresh, organic produce, and had a basic healthy diet, just with a lot of crap thrown in on the top. All I had to do was cut the crap, which the band helped enormously with becuase I couldnt fit it in! I didnt have to change my understanding of food, the way I shopped, the way I prepared it. I've never had a drive through Breakfast in my life and to me McDonalds was a once a month thing because I wont let my kids overeat that sort of food. So that was the easy part for me. Just eat less, not differently. But I eat bread, cereals, Pasta, grains. We are not told to do Protein first here and to be honest, whilst I dont disagree with the theory behind lowering carbs and such (which I did naturally when I cut out the junk), I think its just another 'diet' behaviour. I'm never on or off my diet, I'm not "bad" or "good" on any particular day because nothing is off limits. so you can see how different we all are, there's no "right' way to lose weight, you just have to find what works for you. I did put in a LOAD of effort on the exercise front. I took up running, and built up to about 8 to 10kms five days a week or so, and I also did/do regular circuit training. I know more focussed strenght training would help me fine tune, but I hate it and to be honest, I think the best exercise is the one you will do. However, I'm starting a boot camp tonight, being at goal weight is no reason not to continue to work harder, challenge yourself etc, I love being fit and I love maintaining it. One way or another, there has to be a lifestyle change or you simply wont lose and maintain that loss. You have to face it, but you dont have to feel a failure because its coming now and not before you were banded. The band's there ready to work with you when you're ready.

I would combine circuit training 3 days a week with maybe 2 pure cardio days. By circuit training I mean free weights and whole body compound moves. It is pointless standing around doing bicep curls that work 1 muscle you need to do stuff like squatting whilst pressing a barbell over your head, lunging with dumbells, pushups, stuff like that. Move fast, lift as heavy as you can possibly manage, and try to put together a routine that goes for say 45 minutes. Include some running on the treadmill or some spinning in it, maybe between sets of exercises. Your heartrate shoudl be right up there - this type of workout is cardio/strength combined, not slow like traditional strength training. On the other days, take it a bit easier, do a nice slow jog on the treadmill for instance. This will be hard and at first the circuits might actually make you feel ill and VERY stiff and sore, but it really really works. Working one muscle at a time on the machines is not nearly so effective - except for the leg machines - leg press, leg curl, squat machine etc. The ones that just work one or two upper body muscles are really not the best use of your time.

I've got mixed feelings on these machines. One, theyv'e been around for a while and they havent really taken off in gyms. Which tells you a lot. Two, there's lots of private exercise studios around that focus on these things. I did a trial of 5 sessions for a small fee. What I found was that I did feel like I'd exercised, but not to any great degree. The exercises I was able to perform on the platform were not the usual heavy weight whole body moves that I'm more likely to do - I'm more into functional fitness and do things like squats with presses, sandbag training etc. You could only stand round doing things like bicep curls, not really very effective exercises for losing weight and really changing your body. I felt like I'd lifted some weights but not like it was any harder than normal. that I believe tells you a lot. You FEEL it if you work harder. Its like saying you do the ellipitical instead of the treadmill because the readout tells you you've just burned 800 calories in half an hour. If you REALLY burned that much in half an hour, you'd be aware of it. So being exhausted when you get off the treadmill after half an hour and being NO more exhausted when you get off the elliptical, there's simply no way you burned double the calories. As it is with these plates. I felt the same as I normally would, well less so actually. The kind of workout you could do on them was not as strenuous or difficult as my normal ones.

Kind of, but also a bit different. I know logically I'm thinner and some days I feel fantatic. I also have days where I still feel big. so between those extremes, I suspect my own picture of myself in my minds eye is inaccurate. I suspect I think I'm bigger than I am but I just cant quite think of myself as a thin person either. But I have adjusted to knowing my body's size in any given situation. I know where I'll fit and where I wont, lol.

If they make you look and feel better then go for it. But as far as loose skin goes, the damage to your skin is ALREADY done. It was done as your weight increased. You cant prevent it now, after the fact, by wearing anything or applying anything to your skin, nor can you prevent it with exercise or Vitamins. Those collagen bonds are either broken or they're not. The loose skin results from gaining weight and stretching it out, much much less so from losing it.

Definitely any food you can overeat or any food you tend to choose over healthier alternatives because you just cant be bothered trying to get down what you should be eating. I'm a bread eater, so I do eat sandwiches. But a tuna and salad sandwich is hard to eat, slow, dangerous, takes effort. I can eat about 5 rice cakes, slathered with butter. More really. Naturally I tend to "feel like" rice cakes more than I feel like eating the sandwich. Less nutritious, much more fat (love the butter on top!), virtually no Protein, all carbs. Bad choice. So for me, rice cakes are slider foods. So are healthy foods like cheese, yogurt, soup. I eat them so I dont have to bother with harder things. Doesnt mean they're bad, just means i need to make sure I eat a balanced diet and not always choose them. Then there's the foods you can eat when yo've just pb'd - chocolate, ice cream, pudding. Not so good.

To me, the banana would be the most worthwhile part of a Protein shake. If i ever drink them, they've always got a banana blended it. Fibre, potassium, Vitamins, minerals and antioxidands - good food. Limiting donuts is one thing, limiting healthy fruit and veg is just silly.

very frustrating and very normal. Its called 'first bite syndrome". For me, I suffered a fair bit with it in my first year and then never again. DH suffered for about 9 months and hasnt had a problem in a year. Everyone in real life that I know with bands had a bit of this in the first year or so. It does seem to pass once the band's been in there for a while. In the meantime, it can really help to have a hot drink before you eat and also, make your first bites teeny tiny and wait to let them go down (even teenier and wait even longer than your band sized interpretation of this) before you start to eat more normally

The important thing is getting back on track. Its amazing how little damage these one off binges do if you get right back on the wagon instead of doing the old "well, I've wrecked this week, so I'll start again next week". at 3 weeks though, you could do some damage eating that much, although if you did it and didnt have pain and vomiting, you're probably fine. But believe me, that size binge will be a thing of the past soon. However, you still most definitely CAN go off the rails no matter how restricted, so you need to work on the why's of what you're doing.

I'd look at it like this. With a general anaesthetic surgery and post op pain medication, you're definitely going to have to pump and save milk to feed your baby while you pump and discard for a week or so. Then you've got issues with eating barely anything, being in ketosis etc. You probably want to avoid ketosis whilst breastfeeding. Ketones do pass through in breast milk. Now lots of people can express easily and have a bottle of milk for their baby in 10 minutes. Personally, I was a very good cow as long as it was taken directly from my breast, I could not express milk to save my life, not for any of my three. I simply could not get a letdown to occurr. I woudl work for 50 minutes for 50 mls of milk. If it was me and I was having surgery, I would have to wean my baby, it's that simply. I could never express enough to feed a baby for a week and I couldnt express enough to keep my milk supply going in the post op period. It just wouldnt happen. I had to wean when I went back to work, it was all or nothign with me. As long as you're prepared for that, and for the fact that you may simply not be able to produce sufficient milk on such a low calorie diet (everyone's different) then there's no reason not to go ahead. But if breastfeeding means everything to you, then you have to be realistic that you're taking a risk.

I'm fascinated by these things, we dont have them here. Oh, there's coffeemate, which is a powder, hidden on the bottom back shelf in some supermarkets but here, we just put a dash of cold milk in coffee. Does nobody do that? Not a criticism at all, just one of those cultural oddities.

Sigh, been there. Not quite so bad I guess, but DH was about to be retrenched, there appeared to be no job on the horizon for him, my second son was just about to start school and I was going back to work. Then I got pregnant. I was pretty upset about it too, it wasnt ideal, it was going to be tough financially and I just plain did not WANT three children. I too scheduled a termination, but I simply couldnt go through with it in the end. I couldnt condone it in my situation because I agree, I just didnt feel I could make the decision about a child's life based on something temporary like finances. I really really feared for my long term emotional and mental health - and consequently my marriage - if I did it. Well, it has been tough. It may not have been struggle to put food on the table tough, but it put paid to a lot of our ambitions and hopes for our life and set us back 10 years in progress - and I really really get why you'd be so upset about it happening at 40, I thought 35 wasws bad enough. DH did get a job, a really good one, and I was stuck at home for another five years - dont even ask about our retarded tax system here in Australia that made it absolutely not worth my while to work. So I went back to university to do what I always wanted and am now about to graduate as a teacher. Our worse gripe now is that we're trying to book a holiday and all the resorts in Bali, thailandm, Fiji want to make us book 2 suites to house 3 kids, which doubles the cost of everything. Things have a way of working out. I've taught myself to run and run a half marathon with 3 young children. I ran with Eliza in a jogger stroller. I went ahead with what I wanted to do and studied although its been hard at times. I put aside my feelings that babies dont belong in childcare and forged ahead, because I felt that was just how it has to be when you're blessed with an unexpected child. I also ate very carefully, exercised and gained NO weight at all during that pregnancy (with the blessing of my doctor). You can do it, especially with a band. She was a healthy 8lbs. I really empathise with you, but I do believe it'll be a blessing in years to come. They do bring all their love with them and just create their own space in your heart and your life.

dont forget in any community theres' always a lot of obese people who protest that they dont eat that much. And you know what? Sometimes its TRUE. There's plenty of people here who have done all the right things and not lost weight because their body's just dont respond like they logically should. I know to maintain my weight now, I eat about 1800 calories a day. That's simply NUTS for a 5ft 10 150lb woman who's on her feet all day and runs for an hour a day on top of that. I should be able to eat at least 1000 calories more - all the charts say so. But I cant. And I know I eat a helluva lot more than most here, carbs included. 2 weeks to get used to eating different? If that's really the case most of us would never need a band. Most of us cant EVER get used to eating different without surgical help. We need our bands in there for LIFE to keep the weight away. those are the reasons why we do it - becuase for many of us our bodies arent working quite right, and for MOST of us, we simply cant change our eating habits and set appetites permanently without some help. ALL of us could get used to exercising regularly though.

I'm flat chat at the moment - I'm working full time doing my last teaching placement to finish my degree. At night, I'm applying for graduate positions - being an Australian, you'd understand the ridiculous beaurocracy and tedium of the public service, lol I've also been introducing my 14 year old son to the gym in what spare time I have.

I dont think it matters how much weight one has lost or how fat one was, everyone here can understand why that means so much to you. Well done!

I am a carb eater - I still eat breads, cereals etc but I only eat wholegrain organic versions. I too avoid bad carbs like white bread, rice, Pasta. And I just plain wouldnt eat bread, pasta and rice in ONE day. I dont for a second believe we need as many carbs as most of us ate. But I feel awful awful awful without any carbs in my diet and I dont believe its that healthy either. I dont know how many I eat in a day but its MUCH less than before being banded. But seriously, i wouldnt even bother counting the carbs in brussell sprouts. To me, those are a healthy food, end of story. I dont limit fruit, vegies etc at all other than the amount I can fit in my stomach.

Well, you cant even really have any other type of WLS and not have to "diet". Sad to say, you simply cant eat nothing but crap, no matter how small your stomach is and be healthy. With bypass and DS you have to watch the sugar/fat combo anyway you you can feel very ill, with the sleeve you can have issues with lactose, with ALL of them you can slip in way too many calories if you choose slider foods. And if you want to lose weight without putting any effort into exercise and waste away all your muscle and look like an empty gaunt bag of skin at the end of it, then I guess that's a choice you can make. With ALL weight loss surgery, its a tool, nothing more. Weight loss may be automatic to some extent with all of them, but your health and long term well being, not to mention your looks, take a bit more effort than that. The lapband maybe requires a little more user effort, but I'd argue that banded patients by and large look pretty healthy and good after their weight loss too. Its slower, you lose less muscle, they dont tend to have that awful scrawny look like they're wasting away from a disease rather than just getting healthier. Which is worth the extra work, I think.

Yes, I know people who've had bands 7 to 10 years who are doing fine, but those people are few and far between. The band has been done for a long time in Australia now, but the modern adjustable version of it really didnt get popular until four or five years ago, even though it was available easily enough. But the advice given to me is that the materials the band is made of are designed to last a lifetime, but its highly unlikely that the band actually will. Then most likely scenario is that the balloon will fail at some point and begin to leak. The band was the option that I had so I dont let that worry me. If I have to have another surgery down the track to maintain my weight loss then I'm not really phased, but I must say our medical system is such that if I need a revision, I get it, no questions asked, no money to be paid. I find it quite humerous to read the comments of a lot of the band's critics, saying that they wouldnt choose a surgery with such a high risk of repeat surgery, only to notice they've got a list of cosmetic surgeries as long as your arm in their signatures. Put in those terms - if you're expecting breastwork, a tummy tuck etc, why on earth would you worry about a short op to replace a band?

You sound filled just right to maybe a little bit too tight - not being able to eat salad, meat OR bread must be a little frustrating. Unfortunately the band simply does not work quite so logically and nicely that ALL foods are restricted equally. We cant have cruskits in the house, lol. Last week we bought some after ages and I age six, yes six in the space of five minutes, slathered with butter (in fact rice cakes also, both those and cruskits are simply a convenient delivery system for butter to me!). I only stopped because they were all gone. Sooooo easy to eat. There will always be foods like that, going tighter and tighter in the hopes that you band will eventually take the willpower out of it for you and stop you eating chocolate is simply guaranteed to fail - you will always find yourself unable to eat anything healthy first and start resorting to these foods to stay alive. I would even say that perhaps you could get a little bit removed. But from here on it, its down to 2 things - good choices and exercise. Fills from now are top ups, not quests for tighter restriction. And if you push it, you've seen what can happen, not something you want. It seems once you push your body past a certain point with the band, to the point where you have unpleasant side effects, that its not uncommon for there to be no going back. Its not always as simply as removing fill, as you can set of a cycle of intolerance to fills that you cant recover from. so take it easy and dont let anyone talk you into fills you dont need. When I was still on a schedule where I saw my doc every six weeks, I told him when I didnt think I needed a fill, and I'd maybe only lost 3kg in that space of time. After the first 9 months or so, then I just didnt go back until I needed a fill and now its simply once a year for a review. By the way, I was no star loser either. It was most often half a kilo a week for me too - not even that, it'd be nothing for a couple of weeks then a kilo and a half overnight kind of thing. I still lost 45kg or so and got way down to a low BMI and now I couldnt care LESS how fast or slow I lost it. Its gone for good either way.

Sad to say, if you lose weight by restricting calories, there's only one direction your metabolism will head in and that's DOWN. You have to do your best to counteract it - exercise and build muscle - but the fact is that your lighter body not only needs less to maintain it, so you have to forever and ever eat less than you did, but your body also gets used to an artificially lower calorie level and learns to run very efficiently on that. I think I did the right things - I lost on 1500 calories or so, I ran lots and I did do minimal strength training. I still do those same things to maintain - same amount of food, same amount of exercise. What caused me to lose 100lb ago is now what I have to do to maintain. And when I look at the charts, any 5ft 10, 150lb woman doing my level of activity should be eating over 2,500 calories a day. I can promise if I ate more than 1800 to 2000 on a consistent basis, I'd gain pretty quickly. I cant get away with eating 2,500!!!