Tess415

I found some very interesting tips on treadmill walking while I was doing a search on HIIT (high intensity interval treadmill) walking. Glad you suggested for me to do some surfing on the topic!!!! For anyone else interested here is the link: Treadmill Workouts Using HIIT to Overcome Treadmill Workout Plateaus

Thanks SugarBean. I printed off the reebok schedule and I am going to study it. I went tonight on the treadmill wow... lots of sweat!!!! It felt good!

For breakfast I either have a south beach bar with 10 grams protein, or a cup of fat free sugar free yogurt with a cup of Kashi crunch cereal mixed in it. Lunch and supper could be a Healthy Choice Dinner, tuna lunch kit, Wendy's grilled chicken (no bun) with side salad, subway salad with chicken breast or turkey breast and lately for dinner I've been having cheese cubes and dried turkey sticks they have a lot of protein! Oh, I eat a lot of cottage cheese with pineapple on top. They even sell those Breakstone Doubles they are good and have protein!!!

Sugar- do you think it would matter since I'm only using it to power walk and spice up my walking routine? I don't plan on actually trying to run until I get a little further along. I get such a workout just speeding up the treadmill pace for the 60 sec intervals. I know just from doing 2 of the work outs this week, I get winded and don't think I could actually jog it yet... but I love walking and its a good felling to put a different spin on it!!!!

Fantastic SugarBean! I did the workout at the gym last night on the treadmill and sweated like crazy!!!! I am going to go tonight too. I really want to move this ticker!!!

I want to say that there isn't a day that goes by that I don't look to this thread for support and encouragement.. Even if I don't post every day, I am always reading and learning from everyone. I am grateful to have found a place of acceptance and encouragement. Thank you to everyone on here for the way that we show respect and friendship... it means soo much!! Fenton- this is for you... (actually all of us) I came across this on the home page and thought it would be a good reflection for all of us as we experience struggles with ourselves at some point or another. Please read and enjoy: Get rid of your Dieter's Mentality MacMadame Published by MacMadame 07-04-2008 Get rid of your Dieter's Mentality How many of us have been "on a diet" for most of our lives? Too many, in my opinion. Not just because it's bad for our health or because diets don't work. It's bad for our mental health too. It leads to something I call "Dieter's Mentality." If you have Dieter's Mentality, you need to cut it out because it's going to sabotage your success. This is true whether or not you have had Weight Loss Surgery, are on your pre-op diet or are doing it the traditional way through diet and exercise. Diet Mentality is evil and it puts you in a bad place! What is Diet Mentality? It has four major components: 1) Putting food into Good and Bad buckets First of all, food is not Bad or Good -- it's just food. Some food is a better choice than others, but even then it's really just all food. If you are getting in enough of the essential nutrients and you account for your calories each day, you are doing good no matter if you have a bite of dessert once in a while or not. All food is bad food if you eat too much of it or only eat one kind. It's just as unhealthy to eat nothing but Protein as it is to eat nothing but birthday cake. A healthy diet is balanced and can even include a certain amount of junk food as long as it's a small amount and it doesn't trigger you into bad behavior. 2) Judging your worth by what you eat Making bad food choices does not make you a bad person. Your self-worth shouldn't be tied up in what you eat. Good people make bad choices all the time. Instead of beating yourself up when you make a bad choice, hating yourself, seeing yourself as a failure and otherwise engaging in destructive behavior, just figure out how to make a better choice next time. It's not easy to be dispassionate about your own behavior, but telling yourself that you made a bad choice and next time you'll make a better one is a good start and much healthier than telling yourself you are a bad person and you'll never lose the weight and you hate yourself. 3) Judging your worth by how much you weigh/how much you've lost this week The scale is just part of the picture. If you get too tied up in the scale, you get a distorted view of the world. Weeks where you lose are good weeks even if someone close to you died. Weeks where you don't lose are bad weeks even if you got a big promotion at work and did everything "right" in terms of diet and exercise. One of the dangers of measuring everything by your weight on the scale is that you can convince yourself that making bad choices is okay because sometimes you can make bad choices and still lose/maintain. You can also convince yourself that making good choices is pointless because some weeks you make all good choices and the scale doesn't move. But clearly making more bad choices than good will lead to weight gain in the long run. Anything thinking that leads you to conclude otherwise is destructive thinking. 4) Waiting until you are thin(ner) to start living Stop waiting until you get to goal to start living or loving yourself. Love yourself now. Live your life now. It's easy to fall into "when I lose 25 pounds, I will start..." type of thinking. It's a fine line between thinking about how you will reward yourself when you meet certain goals and putting your life on hold until you meet certain goals. Many of us have had the experience of thinking we were so fat back when we were in HS or college or a young adult and not being happy. But then we got even fatter and we look at those pictures from back then and we realize that we were actually pretty hot. In fact, we'd give anything to be "that fat" right now. Why not love yourself now while you're living your life instead of waiting until 10 years later to tell yourself how good you had it back then?

SugarBean-hope you are recovering without a problem. Don't over do it be safe!!! Today is my 2nd day to do the C 2 5K, I am planning to do it on the treadmill later at the gym tonight, I'll let you know how it went. It's too hot here today to do it outside.

I talked to the human resource person at my husbands employer and got the name of the person at Aetna that handles all of the accounts for his company. I contacted them after the paperwork went in. I found if you call the number on the card you get any Tom, Dick or Harry:crying: and they don't look far enough into the computer to answer most questions especially if you get denied on the first try, or want to really make sure you are approved as a double check before your actual surgery.

The music on the couch to 5k Itunes is not music like the top 40 hits, its more like background music and this guy tells you when to walk and when the run intervals are so you don't have to watch the time yourself. I found it enjoyable.

Busy-I found on Itunes if you type in couch to 5K it gives you a couple to pick from. I down loaded the 2 most popular ones. I did my first set tonight, it went very well, I was really sweating:w00t:

I have Aetna and I went to the free seminar for lapband Aug 2007 and my actual surgery wasn't until March 2008. I am a nurse and had a pretty easy time navigating through all of the hoops. It can be very frustrating at times, you just need to hang in there. Aetna is my secondary insurance thru my DH. My insurance has no coverage for WLS. However, all of the pre-op testing was covered by my insurance with the usual co-pays. Then Aetna picked up the customary balances minus my co-pays. (Dieticians were not covered, but I had a dear friend who is a Registered Dietician and she did my referral and follow up prior to surgery) There was a 3 month high intensity MD supervised weight loss period or a 6 month weight loss period with less hoops to hop thru; but I did the 3 month plan and my Lapband MD did the 3 month documentation for $25 a month and sent it into Aetna. In the end, all I have to pay is 90% up to a max of $2000 for the year...I thought that was great!! My entire hospital bill cost me $1061 and $161 for each surgeon so far. If I can give you one piece of advice that would be to get an actual person in charge of your case at Aetna to be able to contact and ask questions, it really helped me to have a name/number of someone on that end especially as I was waiting for final approval!! As it turned out, this very person had gastric bypass a couple of years ago and was very sympathetic and supportive in my cause!!!! I wish you good luck and good health!!!!!

Thin crust pizza is hardly a solid protein that would satisfy you like chicken or tuna etc... You could have added a small salad or a vegetable, cottage cheese or something with some "girth" to it to give you that fullness your wanting to sense without overdoing the pouch. I really notice the difference between certain food as far as feeling "full" when I eat what I think is the right portion. Pizza hardly ever satisfies me by itself.

For me... it varies. I've only had one fill so far. The majority of the time if I eat slow like I'm supposed to then the satiety kicks in, and I get busy onto something else until its meal time again. Then there are days where I graze, where if I actually sat down and ate my Protein for a meal like I should it would give me more of a fullness. Now, as far as over eating, it would depend on what you are over eating with...cookies, candy chips, etc... all are mostly sugar and you could eat a ton of it and never feel full. It won't fill your pouch. If I am out with my family to a restaurant and am eating protein and picking at fries, Pasta or anything that has some girth to it even breads or rolls, I will feel stuffed and may even end up being in some discomfort from overdoing it. The best thing to do is plan, plan, and plan out your meals!!! Eat the proper portion, make sure it takes you 20-30min to do it. No liquids with your meal. Then move on to something else besides eating....like LBT!!!!

Hi Lynn...no nothing wrong with the site, I was trolling around on it earlier today. I guess the shamrocks are having a quiet day.

Hi Harley! I can't complain about today, only got into the 80's here today. Just came back from our Children's Community Theater, the did a 101 Dalmations play and it was really cute. Grades 3 and up.

Well, I down loaded a couple of podcasts to my ipod, and tomorrow I will start my first day of the couch to 5K. I am not planning on running, but using it to power walk for now. I am kind of excited to try this out!!! I'll keep you posted. Thanks for the suggestion Sugarbean!:tt2:

HELLO...Where is everyone tonight?

TXDiva and Russ: Congratulations you guys rock!!!!

I think your way sounds way less painful to secure them!!!:thumbup:

Wow... that's impressive!!!! I'll check it out... I might need to buy some duct tape to secure "the girls", and keep myself from getting 2 black eyes!!!LOL:lol:

I know what you mean about not wanting to have PS. I am trying to keep open mind though. This lady weighed 575, and got down to 260 and had such an unbelievable amount of skin!!! Her forearms and calves actually hang on her, but they only did the upper arms with the total body lift!! I just pray that I won't be too bothered with the skin thing... but I won't know til I get there. I will check out the thread for the couch to 5K... that sounds like a good idea in the future for me, I would like to get down to about 250 before attempting to run... don't want to hurt myself!!! I really like to walk... just me and my Ipod!!!

As I'm sitting here in my family room, typing on LBT, I am also watching "Big Medicine" on Discovery Health Channel. They are showing gastric bypass, and this lady had an unbelievable amount of excess skin after her weight loss, and had a total body lift!! This is a really neat show!! Wed at 10pm.

SugarBean-WOW. That must feel great to be able to run!!!! :thumbup::thumbup: I can't imagine running... That is so wonderful!!!!

NYCM-Sorry to hear about your MIL, that doesn't sound good... I know what you mean about ice cream. I have certain trigger foods, and I just can't keep those things in the house!

OK fellow shamrockers... I had a mental thing go on these past few weeks, and I am going to share... It will probably be lengthy and I apologize ahead of time. As I posted before, I went on vacation to Gatlinburg and had a fantastic time. However I made some really poor choices for food pretty much the entire time we were gone. When I came back, I went to the gym and had gained 4 pounds!!! I felt like a complete failure, and I was beating myself up ever since. I did get back on track, making better choices and back into the gym 1hr of cardio, etc.etc.etc. I couldn't bring myself to get back on the scale, and I have spent the last 2 weeks pissed off at myself for being weak and starting to fail again... just like every other diet I ever did...I even called the doctors office and told them ahead of time I will need an adjustment and wanted to know if they could arrange it at that time. (My DR makes me see him once a month for the first year-studies show better compliance with monthly follow-ups) I wanted them to know ahead of time I wasn't doing well this past month. I had my doctors appt today and when I weighed in I had lost 5 pounds since last month. I am very happy with that...don't get me wrong, but I was just so sure I screwed up again...I was really not in a good place mentally!!!! I wanted to share this with all of you so hopefully you won't torture yourselves over a bad week or two. I wonder if I don't trust the band as much as I should. Even though I had poor choices, I ate much less than I would've ever been able to limit myself to before the band. If this would have been 2 years ago on WW, I would be up even more weight by now and really spinning out of control with the food choices. This Lap Band Does Work!!!!!!!!