Jachut

I dont need to hide it, and I didnt from my family and friends but I dont want absolutely *everyone* to know either, I dont tell complete strangers - for many of the reasons you mention luv2teech - I've been successful in other areas of my life and I did/do feel that a weight problem was a weakness, self indulgence and laziness and to be completely honest, in large part it was. What I do now to keep control of my weight I always should have done, I really WAS a fat lazy slob who sat around on her backside and ate too much. I dont necessarily want people to know that about me.

My DH has to start his preop Optifast diet in 4 weeks time. My plans are: no crap food in the house (chips, biscuits) and no nibbly things like nuts or crackers that that he is going to want to eat. For the kids lunches and Snacks at school and after school, I'll have to buy those things in bits and pieces so they're eaten and gone and just go tot he supermarket every dang day. I am planning on feeding the kids easy dinners, earlier at 5pm or so well before he's home I'm going to join him on Optifast for dinner, with a big bowl of steamed veges. I'm going to make a big pot of vegetable Soup, containing the allowed vegetables, and have bags and bags of frozen veges in the freezer so he can quickly microwave a big bowl of broccoli (oh, yummy, lol) if he's just got to eat something. Hopefully I'll lose a bit of weight too with all that temptation gone.

Wow, that's a long way so soon after major surgery, you're one determined lady! When I did the 14.4 kms the other week (about 10 miles) I couldnt eat for an entire day. I had to do liquids. I cannot eat after a very intense session, which is why I try to time my sessions for the afternoon when I tend to get that mindless I just wanna eat something feeling.

I really truly do not believe all the hype about Water. Everythign you eat contains water, as does everything you drink. As long as you get enough, it is NOT necessary to gulp 8 extra glasses a day and there's plenty of expert opinion that will back up my opinion. Water is like everything, Protein included, you need enough but any more than that is just wasting your effort, money and time. Of course you need to stay hydrated but if you urinate regularly enough and its not dark then you're getting enough Fluid. It doesnt have to be plain water. You dont have to guzzle gallons of it as long as you're hydrated enough. Of course I'm talking from the point of view of not eating high levels of protein, you need extra when you do that becuase of the risk of kidney stones.

I feel more like me now than I did before, I really was a thin person trapped in a fat body. I knew who I was, I went through the motions but felt like a bit of an imposter. I never thought of myself as fat on a conscious level but i knew it deep down, and now I just feel like my outside and inside go together.

Even from the other side of being banded, I dont know how people do the liquid diet! I didnt have to do one, and I tried anyway and failed utterly - well, I *was* fainting every time I stood up after 3 days. I couldnt hack it. My DH has to start his in 4 weeks time and wants me to ah, support him! I told him I would but I can tell you right now, I'll be eating food during the day when he's at work and only making it *look* like I had Optifast for lunch! I can state categorically that I would not have the willpower to do two weeks of that diet, I just couldnt do it. So if you're a failure, I'm ten times worse and I've lost 120% of my excess weight. Just keep going, put it behind you and one, two or even three slip ups are not going to mean that your liver is the size of an elephant's! Most people would be fine for surgery without the pre op diet, its a precaution mainly, so dont panic over it, just try to do the best you can. After banding, the liquid diet was a piece of cake!

You even get it from other overweight people though. My girlfriend, who is about five foot four and would HAVE to be 300lb, shakes her head and shudders and said "I couldnt do that". Yet she moans about her weight constantly. She's obviously getting very unfit, at 40 its starting to affect her health and yet she's quite scornful and even jealous of it. But she says she'll do it the proper way or not at all. Her loss, not mine.

When I was a stay at home mother (I'm a sahm and a university student now) I never spent a day at home. I always made reasons to go out. I couldnt stand sitting round the house, I found it so boring and I dont personally get a lot of satisfication from a clean house, spotless floors and ironed shirts in the wardrobe. I took my babies out. I went and visited my mum and my sister a lot, I would window shop, I joined the gym and went every morning (put the kids in the creche there), and when it got too boring, I got a part time job instead. That got me through 8 years or so, then Eliza was born and once she turned one, I returned to study, i cannot wait to go back to work at the end of next year. I still gained a ton of weight, the last 12 years is when I have gradually gotten fat and taken the weight off again. Its a boring lonely life in many ways, and I was kind of forced into it just due to the way the system works in Australia (its not particularly advantageous to have a husband who earns a six figure income if you want to return to work!) and the way I felt at the time about putting my children into child care. Once they were at school, I made friends and was much more active socially, as most of my longer term friends dont really live near me. These days its a whirl of visiting kids, dropping kids off, basketball, football, swimming, two different schools where I have friends, university where I have friends etc. The early days were tough though. So yeah, I still got fat, becuase you do have a lot of time to sit around and eat etc and there were a few years there with a baby and a toddler where exercise went out the window, but at least being so busy made the time a bit more bearable. I'm not really temperamentally suited to playing June Cleaver, lol. Domestic is not my middle name.

As long as you enjoy what you're doing, there's no wrong way to do it. I've been told so many times that to do so much running and not a lot of weights is wrong and that I will burn all my muscle up and wont improve my body composition - usually by people on forums who are not raelly experts, just as I am not. Yet, I love running, I *want* to do it for an hour a day, I've lost ALL my weight and then some, I've got plenty of muscle and actually quite nice definition in arms, back, abs and thighs, and my brief foray into Curves recently (free membership) has totally and utterly stuffed my back every time I've gone, taken me a week to recover, cost a fortune in physio, acupuncture and massage and obviously is just not something my dicky sciatic nerve will tolerate (all that fast movement on hydraulic machines seems to be diabolical for proper form). So yeah, me, fit, healthy and active, failed what I thought of as old lady gym, lol!. Running is right for me. That's why I do it. If you like what you're doing, you'll do it regularly and you'll get good results. Who cares about the finer details? Dont mess with somethng that is working. I just think for the average person, it really doesnt matter whether you do weights first or cardio first, if you focus more heavily on one or the other, etc. And when you search online what you often find is hard core weight training routines, which tell you to not do cardio, or minimise it, etc, it all sounds plausible, but really, what you want is toning, maintenance of muscle tissue, and good fat burning, which requires both some strength training and a lot of cardio. What you're doing sounds fantastic.

I would imagine its only becuase of the liquid calories thing - in which case protein shakes are not recommended either. And they're NOT by a lot of doctors.

Well, they're kind of hard to separate, but really, I care about size more than actual weight, I just want to fit really easily into a 12 (which is about a US 8 to 10), any 12. At the moment, its most 12's fit, but they're just a little tighter than I'd like. So for me now, I dont really care whether I'm 70kg or 65, as long as 12's fit, but I'm not particularly ambitious to go past there.

I dont want to announce to all and sundry that I have a Lap Band but for the first time EVER I felt "looked at" on Friday. I went on a "plan your own day in the city" excursion with Ewan's grade - they had a school camp in the city, it was awesome. Since the kids planned their day in groups of 4, they planned McDonalds for lunch. We ended up at one in the city with about 3 other groups, I knew the other mothers that were helping, so we all ate together. McDonalds is the one thing I can eat virtually nothing of, only the nuggets go down well. So I had a coffee and 4 out of a 6 pack of chicken nuggets, whilst the other ladies had other things. They didnt eat huge amounts either, I dont know many women that WOULD eat a quarterpounder large fries and a thick shake in front of anyone else, lol. They had wraps I think and only one lady ate a burger. It was quite obvious that I was nibbling this puny meal of nuggets VERY slowly! It was quite an uncomfortable feeling. Finally the lady eating the burger said wow, you dont eat much. I just said I hate McDonalds, which is pretty much true.

I think that thin people just dont "get it" often. They seriously cannot understand why you cant just stop eating, and exercise more. They figure they work at being healthy (well some people do) or they dont HAVE to work at it, they're naturally thin and they simply cannot understand what it is like to have an abnormal appetite and gain weight easily. To them, they figure why would you need to have surgery, for crying out loud, just STOP EATING. Sometimes it is jealousy and wanting to remain the "thin" one and there are plenty of parasites out there that feed off you to make themselves feel good. But I find myself doing it now, my sister struggles with her weight a bit and I find myself thinking, just stop eating so much! I've even forgotten what it was like myself!

I was smack bang average at 14. And I didnt really have any physical development until it happened.

It IS the strict diet that's making them lose weight! But with a band you can live that way and not feel like you're dieting strictly, and you dont have to give up absolutely everything. And yes, exercise is a pretty important part of it. Sad to say there's no way to really lose weight and keep it off without changing your lifestyle. But its not as hard as it seems from your side of the fence and those changes do become habits and you dont miss your old unhealthy ones.

I've noticed my dark circles are way worse after weight loss, and I do get a bit puffy there. But I have deep set eyes, and my kids do too and we all have that allergic, sinusy type constitution too - asthma, eczema, hayfever in our family. So dark circles are kind of there to stay. But yes, they are WAY worse with weight loss because I've got no fat left on my face and obviously with age, you lose a lot of the fat from your face anyway, my face is a lot leaner than it is when I last weighed 70kg in my early 20's. Oh well, at least I dont have wrinkles. All you can do is use a good eye cream, there's apparently one or two really amazing ones out there on the market but I dont have the funds to be spending over $200 on eye cream personally. For me, its the hollowness that causes the problem, and there's not a really good cosmetic surgery option for that, it all consists of fillers which cost an arm and a leg and dont last anyway.

If I really couldnt eat solid food, and had to stay with mushies, if I couldnt eat anything in the morning, I would say I was too tight. I feel I need to be able to eat a wide range of fruit, vegetables and grain foods, as well as Proteins. I'm not worried by odd things like the bad effect that pureed fruit has on me, or the fact that I cant eat ice cream (weird, it makes my band SO tight). I could maybe tolerate not being able to eat bread, but I like to be able to. It means I have too much leeway at times and have to fight appetite. But this is for my long term health and I dont think not being able to eat too many things is good for long term health.

I think in the end you can really only go by how you look and feel. I'm the opposite, my BMI is normal, but I still carry just a tad too much body fat at 26% (if that's even accurate). I'm not a heavily muscled build despite being a regular exerciser, my body type is meant to be very lean, and I will not look my absolute best till I"m right down the bottom of my health weight range. Other people I know of similar height and weight wear a smaller size, and look much less flabby than I do. BMI itself means little, its ballpark, that's all and there are plenty of people around who are more muscular and can afford to weigh more. But really, unless you're VERY muscled as in training hard, the range of BMI will probably cover it. YOu cant kid yourself that you can weigh 20lb more than anyone else unless you really know that it IS lean body tissue, not fat. But I think shoot for 250 and reasses from there.

Yes, I would have. I knew what good eating habits were and I even practiced them for most of the time. I wasnt physically hungry all the time either. But I had an out of control appetite and I believe I still do. If I were to unfill my band or lose it I would have to work *extremely* hard to keep the weight off. I dont believe I would go back to being a slug on the couch, I really do LOVE my running. So I dont think I would get as heavy as I was. But I would definitely gain.

Lol *mwah* She Smiles. Yes, we are our own worst critics arent we?

Haha, I happened to catch Robin Williams on Parkinson one night when I was in hospital after Eliza was born by caesarean. I had to turn the bloody thing off, I actually popped a staple. Stupid thing is it was only funny because I was trying NOT to laugh!

I went down about a cup size, perhaps more, becuase I was definitely wearing the wrong size bra before and rectified that after the Oprah show on bra size was shown here. So overnight I went from a 20DD to a 16E, and since then I've gone down to 12DD. But they're very flat now compared to before, it takes a lot of support to life them where they should be and when I lie down on my back, I can balance four full coffee cups on my chest (we did an experiment one day). It creeps me out, my boobs disappear under my arms and there's a huge expance of very bony chest, you can feel and see every single rib and a huge dent in the middle where the solar plexus is. And you can SEE my chest thump as my heart beats *shudder*. There is nothing left of my chest and back, I"m really skinny there. You can see all the muscles in my back too. I want to lose more weight from below, just a bit, but I really do NOT want to shed any more from up top or I'm going to start looking sick. I'm amazed there's any boobs there at all, but when they're lifted they'll look fine.

Oh McMadame, I'm glad I'm not the only one who loathes Dr. Phil!

I'm a size 12 now unless its a really top range boutique - smaller sizes. But sussan, target, jacqui E, a definite 12. I was a size 20, to 22, I'm 5ft 10 and 70kg and lost about 43kg. And I *STILL* have lumps and bumps and a bit of jiggle. You really gotta be thin to be able to wear absolutely anything, sigh. The thing is size 12 looks quite "normal" to me, and thin on other people but I dont see it on myself. I still feel big. But I think its becuase I am so tall.

Irene, no it never bothers me, everything I wear is lowish rise anyway, most things come up to about mid way to my navel. And I'm 5ft 10, so I never bump it leaning over the kitchen bench or anything.