Jachut

The truth is for most people if you eat less calories than you expend you will lose weight. Even if you eat nothing but cake for an entire day. It simply does not have to be so rigid and ruled - eat less, lose weight, its simple. People differ on whether they think a high Protein diet = good nutrition. Its not personally a way I choose to eat, and I can still lose weight. I think it works better for some people than others. If it's what you've been told to do and its what you want to do then do it. But it really jut comes down to less calories. You're no different to anyone else - everyone here has lost weight to some degree or other and you will too, you just need to have a bit of faith in your ability to do that. Also whilst the weight dropped at first steadily and fast, now I'm up down, up down, but more down than up over time. Gaining a lb is nothing to worry about, gaining 10 is more of a concern. Your body fluctuates more than that on a day to day basis. If you're down another couple of lb in a eight weeks time, you're on the right track even though more than likely you'll have had small gains within that time. Its basic chemistry and your body will obey the laws of nature just as anyone else's will. But putting pressure on yourself to get into this item or that by a certain time, well that's just asking for disappointment, go a little easier on yourself. Sometimes you lose little weight and lots of inches and sometimes its the other way around.

So right - yet it is also so normal to do what you're doing. Im a bit in the same place myself right now, although not at any real risk of gaining I'm certainly not losing these past few weeks because despite doing a ton of exercise, I'm just eating the wrong things and eating too much. The difference with the band is that this used to hit me when I"d lost 5kg, not 18. it does make you realise there's only so much the band can do, even if you fill yourself as tight as a fish's proverbial. It still comes down to choices - and you have to make the right ones. Its never too late and it doesnt hurt to have a breather either. You always have the choice to simply move on. Its just a good little reminder that it takes constant work, and vigilance.

The feeling of power it gives me to say no to that food far surpasses the pleasure of actually eating it. You have to work at getting to the point where it has no emotional power over you. I cant imagine how hard losing weight must be if you sit at a table actually being upset that you cant fit more in. You need to learn to be happy with a taste of this and that, and you'll be full afterall. And go easier on yourself. If you're full but ate less than what you would have previously that's a huge achievement. The band is for life, and you should be working on a new lifestlye, not a set of rigid rules. YOu cant go to a restaurant your measuring cup! What matters is where your weight is at a few months from now, not whether you lost 1/2kg this week or 1kg. If its going down over time you're doing fantastically well, one meal here or there matters not at all and you need to learn to enjoy eating out in a different way.

If you average it out over all the people banded though there would be an awful lot that are fairly non compliant, people who dont go back and get fills and people who despite being filled absolutely cannot overcome their desire to overeat foods that do go through the band. i can have a bad day where I can eat every bit as much as I used to if I was having a bad day pre band - chips, chocolate, Cookies, I have no restriction on those things. But I can have a bad day once in 2 months, not once or twice every week now - and that's due to my inner resolve to do this and do it right. Many people have far worse disordered thinking and eating patterns and simply cannot overcome this sort of thing. I've also been able to work a good amount of aerobic and strength exercise into my life and am sticking with it. I've passed that "this hurts" hurdle and love it now and no longer do the type of thing where I think "well I've eaten shite today, so I wont bother going for a run". Eating and exercise isnt connected for me anymore, I love the exercise for its own sake. There's plenty of people around who loathe it and will never get into a routine they will stick with for life. There's also people who got fat for reasons they could not control, metabolic issues for example, that may not be resolved by banding. If none of those apply to you - if you eat well, if you exercise regularly and have no underlying disease or disorders there is every reason to be confident you will surpass this rather depressing statistic.

See, a Ford Expedition is a Ford Explorer in Australia. Why do they do that? I remember being in Auckland and seeing Mitsubishis - the Sigma was a Magna here and the Magna was a Sigma here. Go figure.

A Ford Territory, so a small 4WD, SUV, whatever you call it. Sure you have them in the US but they might be called something different. And a Toyota Camry, again it might be called something different but basically just a generic 4 door 6 cylinder family sedan. We're all too tall in this family to have small cars (even the kids). I used to have Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo but got rid of it. It was a lovely car but a pain in the bum. Heavy, clunky, and what a gas guzzler. And it cost a BOMB to service and repair too, its much cheaper to own a Japanese built car in Australia.

Yeah, I reckon a glass or two of wine a week is no problem, I find if I drink daily (even just one a day) it just doesnt come off. That's because my husband FILLS the wine buckets (oops glasses) and they probably contain three standard drinks, not one. He has no class that one, lol, doesnt realise you dont fill a wine glass full to the brim. I waited about 3 weeks or so and had a drink at Christmas. Ok, more than one, but not all at once. I try not to have anything more than a glass with dinner when I'm out or I start nibbling. It just loosens your resolve a bit much and if there's dips, nuts, chips about, look out!

Although like I said I can eat bread, cake is a killer for me. It absolutely hurts. I dont get a golfball in the chest with it, but I get great pain as it passes through the hole. There's an entire chocolate cake sitting out in the kitchen and I"m not even tempted to go near it.

I dont want to "diet". But I think that for some people, its enormously helpful. Some of us have personalities that respond well to routine and discipline and lets face it, with a band, the consequences of falling out of routine arent as disastrous as they once were because you still cant eat very much. For me, it makes me obsessed with food and figure out ways to sneak in treats rather than eat healthy foods, so I try not to diet like that. But I must admit, I know the points value for nearly any food you could imagine, so many times have I been to weight watchers, and an awareness of points/calories is certainly a part of my everyday eating.

I've been shocking with this, I loathe taking Vitamin pills. I have a good dissolvable one and for the first few months took it religiously and for some reason just stopped, I'm now running 5kms or so a day and doing weights, I would definitely be needing a supplement, but am not taking it. I cant recommend ones though being in another country. But I find I like to drink them a lot better than I like to swallow them and have that horrible aftertaste.

Really only for a couple of hours though. I had my surgery at 8.30 am was in recovery by 9.30 and back in my room a bit later. I was dopey from the anaesthetic for a few hours and slept on and off but they would keep you in hospital for that anyway, surely (I'm in another country). They came in at 1.10 pm I remember to have my barium swallow, and I swanned back on the pillows expecting to be lifted out of bed, lol, but no such luck, I had to get up myself and to my surprise I could, so that's less than 4 hours later. I dont know that I could have out of a normal bed though, I had the back up and a mountain of pillows. For the rest of that day and overnight, I got up to go to the loo, I walked around the room because I was uncomfortable lying on my back and I sat up in the chair, I would definitely have been OK on my own as long as I had access to pain relief if I'd needed it. In fact I was pretty much left alone apart from regular obs and I did buzz and request a sleeping pill at about 1 am because I'd tossed and turned for 4 or 5 hours, there was shite on TV and I just wanted to sleep but was too sick of being in bed on my back to do so easily.

OK, I'm going to go off and convert this now. Currently in metropolitan Melbourne, Australia, its hovering at the $1.39 per litre mark. OK, so $1.39 Aussie dollars is $1.05 US dollars. There's 3.75 litres in a gallon, so we're paying almost $4 US dollars per gallon here. Its a shocker, we run two new big cars (cars are more pricey in Australian than the US too), we need to as we live in a pretty outer burb 40kms from the city, and as its a new large suburb its pretty spread out, so I do a lot of mileage without even leaving the area, let alone all the stuff I do in and around Melbourne. Doug works just outside of the city in an area pretty difficult to access by public transport from here, plus both our cars are salary packaged for tax reasons. We easily do 25,000 kms per year each, so yep, we spend about $200 Australian dollars a week on petrol. We have no mortgage as our house was so cheap but inside the next 18 months, for a variety of reasons we're going to take on a humungously big mortgage, move about 25kms closer in to the city and ditch one car.

Depends. I kind of look at it as whether or not you're losing if you do the right things - I've been in that situation for probably the last 3 months, not a lot of restriction and having to use a fair degree of willpower, however I do think in the last two weeks or so the amount of appetite I have regained is becoming problematic, I'm having huge trouble staying away from food in the afternoons, and suddenly I can indeed get bread and stuff down with supreme ease, I could always eat it but had to go slowly and not eat a lot of it. Sure I could continue losing but I do think I need a fill. How do you really feel? Is it a battle or is it just a matter of keeping a bit more of an eye on things to keep the weight coming off?

I pretty much hit the ground running, I stayed in hospital 24 hours during which time yep, I did need help but once I was home, we all went for a walk, I was fine. I wasnt running marathons but was up and down getting my own drinks etc.

1.4cc in mine, I had 1, then .3, then .1. I dont really have a lot of restriction. I can eat less than I used to and I cant just gorge on bread or meat, I have to eat those carefully but its served me just fine so far, however I think I am getting to the point where I need a tiny bit more, I'm losing very very slowly over the last month - in fact the only reason I havent gained is probably because I'm doing so much exercise. I went to the doc last week and had lost 2.7kg over the previous month so he didnt want to fill me and I didnt really want to be any more filled, but that was so much less than the month previously and I havent lost any more since last week. I do waver on this, I dont want to be any more filled than I have to be but I didnt get the band to not then use it.

I dont eat any less food now than I used to when I weighed 75kg. I refuse to fill myself tightly and rely solely on my band for precisely that reason - I need to teach myself to say no, to eat reasonably, to make good food choices. If I were just filled tight so I couldnt eat much and lost weight automatically, then I dont think that'd teach me an awful lot. I prefer to use my band to just take enough edge off my hunger to help me to cement good behaviours as daily habits. I find myself five months down the track responding differently now to the ways I used to in certain situations. I no longer use food to relieve boredom and I've worked out ways to keep my fridge/mealplans ordered and predictable, something I always struggled with before. I no longer just dont think about dinner all day and then suddenly have to order a pizza at 7pm. I'm well used to an hour or so of exercise per day now and have arrived at a routine that fits in with my lifestyle. So no, I really dont think I'd pile the weight back on - IF I lose the band a year or so down the track. I think new behaviours will have stuck with me. I have never been a binge eater or had an eating disorder and I've never been morbidly obese though. I think my weight problem arose from responding poorly to life situations, not as an inherent appetite or eating disorder that came from within me - and I think that makes a huge difference.

Hmm, a hamburger that stays in one piece and is hard to chew? Probably not worth eating, lol. Think about it, when you make hamburgers from real meat, egg, breadcrumbs and grated veges, they are hard to keep together as they cook and they break apart easily when you eat them. That's because they're not full of "secret ingredients" like fillers, binders etc. I find like Pnut said, if I really think about what's in those foods and what they'll do or not do to my body, it makes them much less palatable. I only wish the kids werent so sucked in.

I'd be starving if that's all I ate. I can eat three squares a day in a large enough quantity that nobody would pick I had a band if they didnt already know. I'm losing (slowly) on that. Those are just tiny little mouthfuls of food several times a day, and yep for sure you'd need to eat every few hours to stay conscious, lol. If that's all you can fit in at the time, then that's how you need to eat, five or six small meals a day. I think the band is deceptive, because you get full quickly it feels like you've eaten a lot more than you really have.

Unfortunately I have no trouble with them, lol. I can even eat a burger. But for me, its a once every couple of weeks event, would be never if I didnt have kids I guess. And the Big Mac, large fries and sundae is a thing of the past. I never had coke with Maccas because you get fat from drinking coke, lol. I can get down a medium fries and a large coffee, but boy do I feel bloated after that much starch. Not a pleasant enough experience anymore to want to do much of it.

I will be although evening time if its going to be in Williamstown is just about impossible for me given the time Doug gets home from work, anywhere from 7-8pm. I live in completely the other side of town, it would be 9 pm before I got there.

You could always do planks initially which is more isometric than an actual contraction of the stomach muscles.

I have to ban all the things I had to ban before, Cookies, chocolate, chips. They all go through easy peasy. I can eat all healthy foods but I notice I'm ever so slightly tighter in the evening and often have to eat dinner very slowly or I block up and have discomfort. And I have to ban entirely eating between lunch and dinnertime becuase I find I'm like a baby - if I spoil my appetite, I cant eat my dinner, and this is a problem because its generally a pretty nutritious meal containing lots of veges of which I eat few during the daytime.

Mine too grrr. Last time I lost significant weight was before I had kids and I went down to a C cup. This time, no way. They're staying big. Its probably got to do with having fed 3 babies.

I am most definitely still a work in progress. Just went to buy new bras today, its actually harder than it was previously. I've gone down a back size, but my bazoongas havent shrunk which means to go down a back size I had to go up a cup size. I'm now a 16E as opposed to the 20DD I was when I started (had a couple of old 18DD's lying round). Its VERY difficult to find a bra in a large cup size but relatively small back size. Not only that but I went in the disabled change room becuase I had my daughter in the pusher with me, and I got to view myself full length from a good 2 to 3 metres away. :faint: Um, what was I thinking? I've been swanning round feeling fantabulously hot, lol. Nuh uh, no way. Still loads of work to do on this old bod. Those love handles and back boobs are still there, just smaller. And I'm definitely certain I'm having a breast lift and reduction, maybe even before I get all the way to goal, say at about 80kg. They are a disaster, mammoth sized and soooooo droopy and saggy, they look worse than half the before pics you see. But boy do they look good in brand new bra's. I cant see my feet, they look like two cantaloups sitting on my chest!

I wouldnt worry. I was happy but a little disappointed in my weight loss - 18kg in 5 months. I was realistic when I started out but we all have that little part of us that hopes that somehow the weight will just magically disappear. Then my surgeon pointed out last week that I've lost 50% of my excess weight in 5 months - that's what he'd hoped to see me lose in a year!