Jachut

Absolutely no regrets here - almost 4 years down the track

yes, you would. People liek to get all funny about Water v other fluids but the simple fact is that your body breaks down EVERYTHING you eat and drink into its component parts and takes what you need. There is nothing magic about water itself, its in things you eat and drink and juice, soft drinks, even coffee and tea (if you're a seasoned caffeine drinker, its diuretic effect ceases to a large degree). However, if you take in your water mainly in the form of coffee for example, you probably need to drink MORE coffee than you would water, if that makes sense. The main reason you need lots of water with a high Protein diet is that your kidneys need it to get rid of the toxic substances that build up in your bloodstream when you go on this kind of diet - I mean Atkins or something similarly extreme. Fresh fruit and vegetables contain a lot of water, you should always aim to eat plenty of high water content foods to control your weight. Anything you drink counts. It is not necessary to pour water down your throat when you're not even thirsty, or if you dont like plain water. As long as you drink enough, and your pee fairly clear you're fine and there's no real advantage to forcing more down. All the stuff you hear about water flushing fat out is correct but not correct in the way its represented - water is necessary to support a healthy metabolism that burns fat, so if you're completely dehydrated, you wont burn fat well, however it doesnt then necessarily follow that more is better. Again, you need enough, not 40 gallons a day. A couple of big glasses of water a day, a few coffees or teas, and maybe a juice or somethign plus fresh fruit and vegies is ample for the average person. And for most people when they exercise lots and sweat, thirst usually dictates fairly well. To say that once you feel thirsty its too late is ridiculous, like once you feel tired, its too late for sleep, or once you need to go to the toilet, its too late! Thirst has a purpose and its not to tell you you should have had a drink an hour ago.

See your doc, I agree. Reflux at night is never OK. As for noise, my stomach is incredible when I lay down. Its like all the gas rises to the top or something, I dont need to ah, let it out, its not like that, its just that the minute I lay down all the gurgling and stuff that goes on is incredibly loud. It actually keeps me awake!

A lot of what has been said above I agree with. I felt truly AWFUL a few days after surgery, I had quite liberal post op diet - in that anything that could fit up a straw was a liquid. I was sort of trying to do what people on here do, juice, jello, water, etc. Well, those foods are rubbish! The minute I started cooking again, making decent soups with meat, vegies and pasta in them and blending those up, to the consistency I could handle (watered down with broth) all the faintess, passing out and lethargy passed for me and I lost weight and felt great.

me too. I mean, where the f..k to people get off, honestly? How could anyone have a big enough ego to think their opinion mattered in the slightest? This is something we have all done primarily for ourselves, and to be here for our families. What some other loser thinks isnt even a blip on the radar.

Gleefully, joyfully dump them in a brotherhood bin - so donate! I've never found ebay worth the effort for stuff like second hand clothes, so much hassle photographing, listing etc for a few bucks. I need a million bucks, not a few, so I'd rather give them to someone who can benefit.

No...... its silicone and titanium and pretty much inert in the body. You wont "reject" it in that sense. But some people's bodies dont like bands, that's for sure. Now whether that's something inherent in the person or a case of bad placement, bad surgery, whatever (I suspect both scenarios occur) but some people have nothing but problems. The other thing I've heard SO often is hernias causing issues. Hernias and bands appear to be a very troublesome combination in terms of stuff like reflux and inability to tolerate fills. I know my surgeon wont place a band until said hernia is fixed, but other surgeons have certainly done so and everyone I know in real life who had a hiatus hernia and had a band has had a disaster. One friend got her hernia fixed, band replaced and her second band journey has been fantastic. Anything going on with stomach, gall bladder etc can cause stomach, chest and back pain and it may simply be something like the tubing touching your diaphragm - I've known this to occur as well and be fixed by a surgery to shorten the tubing. Is it possible you've got something like this going on? Its really all got to be thoroughly checked out.

I agree with Steve, as long as you're not having other troubles it sounds like nothing more than a case of not enough fill yet. True, if you never get stuck that's a sign of underestriction but even with NO fluid in a band you can get stuck on stuff if you eat big bites and dont chew. Truly, you just sound like you need more restriction. You HAVE lost some weight, so something's going right, whether its more your hard work or the band. But are you doing all the right stuff? Exercising?

the only scar of mine that is detectable now is the port incision - the others even I cant find (and I know approximately where to look) - so I dont get the advantage of single incision when the other four are so tiny anyway.

Ditto. At any level of restriction if you treat your band wrong you have pain and vomiting as your reward. Its just a matter of learning new habits, it takes time and a little bit of negative reinforcement! A sweet spot to me is simply where you're losing weight well. It does not equal eating a stated amount of food, not being able to eat certain foods etc. It simply means without undue effort you lose steadily, even if slowly.

Oh, I think I had pretty unrealistic expectations, I certainly expected weight to fall off me. Lucky for me, in the beginning it did. I dont think I ever got despondent, and I dont think I ever found it truly hard, but then, my eating habits were such that all I really required was portion control, there wasnt THAT much else to change. Apart from my need to be drip fed muffins on a daily basis and they became excruciatingly painful to eat very quickly so I didnt struggle with that. The momentum took me through about 18 months, these days I struggle a lot more to stay away from the chocolate, the ice cream and other slider foods and find my band a much harder tool to use than I did. But then your perspective changes too, what I eat now to maintain is less than what I ate at first to lose, so what I think of as bad eating or overeating makes others roll their eyes. I look at my friends' dinner plates when we eat out and I"m amazed anyone can stuff so much in!

I try to look at it like this: I have (well, had) to improve, i didnt have to be perfect. I dont have to stick to a food plan absolutely 100%, all it took was to change the balance between calories in, calories out over a long period of time and the weight went. Now, I wanted to be healthier. You can lose weight eating nothing but KFC if you really want to. So I do eat well. I think what do I want for Breakfast and the Coco Pops might sound good, but I dont follow every urge like that! But I never put myself on a very strict diet (and we dont tend to approach it like that in australia). I think its really important to work with your strengths and weaknesses. I may not have any real eating disorders, but I SUCK at dieting! I can never stick to any food plan, I just want to eat what I want, when I want to. So I relied on my band for portion control and did my very best but didnt beat myself up. I dont journal, I dont do any of that. Where my strength is is exercise. I was already fairly athletic and had some fitness, and i really put in 150% on the exercise side of the equation. It made up for my less spectacular eating efforts. Its how I continue to manage my weight. Success isnt necessary 3 lb per week or 50lb in 4 months you know, it might only be 2lb per month but weight gone is weight gone and over time, you will become a new person.

Lol, you are and I are rather alike I think Wasa. I would have put her right on the spot and watched her squirm. I like the way you put it, Moonbeam, - people do seem to think that as a lower BMI patient, you dont have the priveledge of being truly fat, you cannot know the pain of it and therefore you have taken the easy way out in having the surgery. They seem to think you should suck it up and REALLY suffer. You'll find that attitude in several thread on the rants n raves board too, people seem to forget that EVERY single one of us here had a BMI of say 32 at one point in time. What would you rather, get on top of it before it gets to 45 or the waits till you're so far gone you need WLS AND seven different plastic surgeries and ten years on fourteen different medications?

See this is where (and I think many might disagree and say the band is just inherently bad) I think it goes off track. True, the band can have these problems. But doctors dont seem to want to work with the patients to solve them! The minute it starts to happen, they go into arse covering mode, and blame the patient, try to deal with them as naughty children, refuse to fill or unfill them and do all sorts of absolutely idiotic things. At this stage of the game if your band has slipped,I'd say there's an awfully good chance that it wasn done right in the first place, or that something has happened in the post op phase to prevent proper healing. That just plain needs to be dealt with. It may require further surgery. That's the problem with the band, but no amount of pissfarting around by the doctor will negate that fact, to put it off only degrades your health and motivation. I hope you get this sorted.

I agree, a sweet spot is simply a spot where there is steady weight loss. you cant define it by amount you can eat or foods you can eat. If you define it by those terms, I have NEVER reached a sweet spot yet I've lost all my weight and then some (went way past the top of my healthy weight range down to a BMI of 22) and maintained the loss for nearly 2 years. But I eat more than half a cup and I eat bread. At any level of restriction if you eat fast, dont chew, take big bites you are likely to throw up. Just as at any level of restriction you will be able to eat ice cream easily.

Lol, when jeans werent so low rise, I always used to buy men's jeans. I hate hate hate jeans that go up to your navel, or god forbid, above! How to look like someone's grandma in one easy step. They are SO uncomfortable and they look SO awful. Not that I want to display my bum crack either, lol. I'm not a fan of stretch jeans either. I dont like the feel of them, they tend to fall down and go baggy.

Nobody ever calculated mine like that, or calculated it at all. I was asked by the nutritionist that I had to see for one appointment what I'd like to be and I said 70kg. She kind of laughed and said that's a bit ambitious. As it happens 70kg is right smack in the middle of my healthy weight range (63-79). She was assuming everyone loses about 60 to 80%, which is realistic to assume. But the thing is with that statistic, its almost ENTIRELY in your control whether you go past it or not. I weighed between 77 and 79kg for a long long time, probably 10 years plus. For me, it was still fat. It may have been a "healthy" weight but not for my build, I'm one that should be in the lower half of my range, I'm tall and willowy and quite light boned and finely muscled. I was chunky, chubby and flabby at 77kg. So I pretty much set my own goal at 70 and have settled at about 68 to 69. Personally, I'd still like a smaller bum, but the fact is I'm verging on skeletal around the neck, shoulders, back and chest and still a bit more voluptuous below the navel. I think for any more improvement I would need some lipo, rather than weight loss because I will just end up looking truly awful above the waist.

Hmmm, I would have thought peanut sauce was low carb anyway, lol. Nothing added would mean organic Peanut Butter, something that's basically peanuts and oil. But that sort of thing doesnt *really* matter in a recipe, however, make sure you use a low salt one. The amount of salt in things like butter, or peanut butter, can really throw a recipe out if there's salt in it in other forms.

As you get older you get more confidence in yourself and worry less about what others think, but running in public is a daunting thought! When I was 18 or so, I used to run regularly, I was a bit bigger than I am now, at the top of my healthy weight range but I thought I was huge, lol. I used to run only early morning or late at night. I wouldnt run in the daylight for anything. Nowadays, I just plain dont care. I enjoy the feeling of knowing I look like a runner, I no longer stagger, jiggle or go beet red and puff hard. But at first, i ran at night. I was absolutely scarlet when I got home, I looked scarey, I breathed like a steam engine. I preferred to do it under the cover of darkness. It didnt take me long though to gain confidence - a couple of fun runs really helped in that regard, running in public surrounded by others in the daytime. I went through a stage where I was quite large still, well, still had big boobs anyway and they got LOADS of attention. I was so embarrassed by them flopping up and down, but nowadays, I dont have any left, lol. People tend to leave me alone and not yell out stuff anymore because they're not assulted by the sight of my tits flapping around and I also these days I guess I look like I'm a serious runner. You'll get there, it takes a bit of guts to put yourself out there, but you're worth it and you really do have to just do it.

I lost HEAPS of weight after my surgery, so much so that I didnt end up having my first fill until almost 12 weeks.

Yes, it is, lol. Well, not harder in that it becomes gruelling or anything. But I lost about 70lb the first year and 30lb the next. The second year where I lost 30lb, I continued having fills so I was more restricted, thus eating less and had built up to running 10kms at a time. So I'd gone from very little restriction, able to eat anything and NEVER pbing whilst running 3 or 4kms four or five times a week and losing PLENTY to being much more restricted, having my diet more limited and running 8 to 10kms four or five times a week for a loss of less than 1lb per week for that second year. What I eat now to maintain woudl have had me losing weight like CRAZY in the first few months. Especially if I'd done as much running! But I got there in the end, went WAY past goal weight and BMI of 25 right down to a BMI of 22. Its not harder, but its doenst happen as easily or quickly if that makes sense.

I run (outside) for about 40 minutes to an hour about five days a week(6 to 10kms). that's my basic routine. I switch it around a bit - sometimes I jsut go out and run and other times for a period of a few months I include more interval training type runs (REALLY hard). I was doing a bit more strength training too but to be honest, I've experimented and I feel running keeps PLENTY of muscle on my lower body and i ust throw in some core work and some pushups and dips 3 times a week or so *(15 minutes after a run). this gives me the sort of body I want - lean and toned. I've found strength training tends to bloat me out a bit and make me look "thicker" and definitely a few pounds heavier, so I've kind of gone back to just running. it was also starting make exercise time consuming and a bit of a chore, whereas I need no encouragement to go out and just run. its the old, whatever you will actually DO is the best exercise for you. I love running.

To be honest, this would worry me. But you'd need a medical opinion on that, me saying it would worry me doesnt make it a problem. I was the oppostive. I have a cast Iron gut. Everyone around me can be dying of food poisoning and I will come through completely unscathed. I never vomit, I rarely get stomach bugs and when I have, half the time whilst everyone else is barfing up a lung, I'll only have diaorhhea. I kind of instinctively knew banding would be good for me (mind you, I could have been completely wrong!). And it has. I dont have half the trouble others seem to, I'm not a sweller, not sensitive to fills etc. an experienced surgeon might be able to tell you how other patients have fared.

Its the "I dont understand why people are still getting bands" that prompted me to post too. People are still getting bands because they have a choice. We should be glad for that choice. I have no problem with people who've had bad experiences posting throughout this entire forum. Lets face it the band has not turned out quite to be what theyd' have hoped, it has a lot of problems and I'm glad to know more about the alternatives. But lets keep it realistic and un-emotional. The banded folk here are not all complete idiots who have made an inferior choice. I know this is the VSG forum and all, but it gets tired. Most posts are considered and informative but that was just derisive and I'd expect better from a moderator. It wasnt about the doctor it was a remark about idiots who choose banding.

Fanny, you're the only one that'll get this, but I'm rolling round laughing at a Fanny on a Brazillian waxing thread. Imagine sugar in your bits for days! Exfoliation anyone?