MacMadame

Not to mention we know the long-term implications of lapband about as well as we know them for lots of much more accepted surgeries and serious medical treatments. WLS is not this mysterious, scary, dangerous treatment like it used to be in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And I love you bringing in the PS example. PS is much more serious than WLS when it comes to complications and risks ... and for most people it's 99.9% cosmetic. Yet people who spent months or years agonizing over WLS will go get PS at the end of their weight loss as just a matter of course, no agonizing at all. (And I'm one of those people - heh.) Btw, do you know how many people out there who go on the 6 months supervised diet required by their insurance company, lose some weight, decide they can do it on their own, then one year later are back at the surgeon's office scheduling their surgery? A lot. They've wasted a year because they bought the Big Myth of dieting and exercise. Frankly, I think this is the main reason why insurance companies have this requirement. There is no clinical evidence to support it (which is why the CA DMHC will make your HMO waive the requirement if you fight it).

Unless you have a protein or vitamin deficiency, the only thing that stops this is time. But it's pretty rare that people go bald or even have enough hair loss that outsiders notice it. It's from the anesthesia and surgery most of the time. I though it was pronounced Mini-so-duh. :wink_smile: I've been going through the following sequence - melt, firm up, melt- firm up. I think if you give yourself time, you'll be presently surprised. After all, you are younger than I am so your skin should be in better shape.

Welcome to LapBandTalk! That's cool that we're in a book. There is a special section for Realize band here but you shouldn't just stay there. All the other sections are for every kind of band.

Bald is sexy.

I want to smack the crap out of people. As a hostess gift. I don't think they are expecting you to serve it. It's just something for you to enjoy later. Cuissenart? I'm not sure. I told dh to hide it and give it to me for Christmas. So now it's not available to check. I think they are Torani syrups with a different brand name. :biggrin:

Welcome to LapBandTalk! Unfortunately I'm in CA. But we have both a Doctors & Hospitals and a NY subforum on LBT so I'm sure someone can help you there if no one who knows notices your post here.

Yes, the co-morbidities that don't respond to meds is what got me. I have HP but it does respond to meds. (Well, I had it. Since surgery I haven't.) I have Aetna. They, at least, make their criteria VERY CLEAR. It's right on their web site. Lots of insurance companies make you guess and you can't get a straight answer when you call. Plus Aetna only requires 2 years of BMI over 40, so if I couldn't provide that, I wouldn't have *that* long to wait. But my company had an exclusion ... another subject that causes me to rant and rave ... so it was all moot. In a way, that exclusion was the best thing that could have happened to me. Once I was off the insurance merry-go-round, I could do what made sense for me. I could pick the surgery I wanted (Aetna says the sleeve is experimental), I could pick the doc I wanted (my surgeon wasn't in-network), I could lose as much weight as I wanted waiting for surgery (I lost 30 lb.), and I didn't have to do a supervised 3 or 6 month diet (after spending 5 months doing an unsupervised one), all without fear of not getting my life-saving surgery. The downside is that I had to pay for it even though I and my company pay them premiums every month. :biggrin: I was 191 on the day of surgery, btw, with a BMI of 36. And if someone doesn't like it, they can go suck it. :biggrin: I did what made sense for me.

Then I guess I'm a double atheist. :biggrin: I hate shopping too. The recipe is from a friend. She's a foodie and comes up with these recipes all the time. It's really easy: 1.5 cups of a Chocolate Reduced Sugar cake mix (I used Pilsbury's RS Devil's Food) 1.5 cups of Chocolate Protein powder (I used Champion Nutrition's Pro Score 100, but she uses Chike and I think hers taste better) 1 15 oz. can of pure pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie mix) Combine the cake mix and the protein powder, then add in the pumpkin. Stir and stir and stir until you get a sticky mess. (For a while it will look like there isn't enough liquid, but there is.) Put in mini-muffin pan that was lightly sprayed with PAM and bake at 375 degrees for 9 minutes. (Pre-heat the oven, of course.) Makes about 18 muffins. The cool thing is that you can substitute in any flavor of cake mix any flavor of protein powder to make different flavor muffins. Like Yellow Cake mix and Banana protein powder. A box of cake mix will make two batches of muffins, but there will be some left over. I just threw it out, but I'm guessing you could save it for the next time. So... the Magic Bullet is a mini-blender. But the cool thing is that it comes with all these cups. You can blend right in the cup and so you don't have to wash both the cup and the blender cup. If you make your shakes with ice, water and powder and put them in a blender (of any sort), you get a slushy shake that is like a smoothie. They are much tastier. Alternately, once you mix them, you can put them in the ice cream maker. Then you get a protein shake that is the consistency of ice cream. I have also gotten into adding Torani syrups to my shakes. So I'll buy vanilla and chocolate protein powder and add syrups to get different flavors. I'm drinking one that combines vanilla with white chocolate flavor right now and earlier I had added caramel flavor to a vanilla shake.

I went to the OH event near my town and after Eggface and Melting Momma's presentation on bariatric cooking, I went out and: 1) Replaced my Magic Bullet 2) Bought a new blender 3) Bought an ice cream maker (for protein ice cream) Then Mini-Mac talked me into making Chocolate Pumpkin Protein Muffins. Which used none of this new stuff but I did make myself a protein shake in the bullet. Which works much better than my old bullet.

No, it doesn't work remotely like that. All insurance companies care about is that you dot the "i"s and cross the "t"s even when their "i"s and "t"s make no sense and are just arbitrary rules they put in place to make it harder to get approval. If you jump through the hoops correctly and meet the criteria, you get approved. If someone who weighs 200 lb. jumps through the hoops correctly and meets the criteria, they get approved. It's a bureaucracy. If anything, works it the opposite of how you imagine it because of how the rules are set up. Take me. I've struggled with my weight since I was 8 or 9. I went on my first diet at age 13. Because I fought the weight gain, it took me until 25 to be obese. Because I am short and 200 lb. is a LOT of weight on me, I spent much of my adulthood hovering between obese and morbidly obese. But in the US the NIH and insurance companies have picked the arbitrary BMI of 40 as their cut off. That's okay, though, as my BMI was 41 when I decided to get surgery. But insurance companies have added all these other wrinkles and they favor the long-term MO and the SMO. For example: 1) Some ask for a 5 year history of MO. This is NOT the NIH criteria. The NIH says only a "history of obesity". So someone like me may not have been MO for 5 years in a row because I was constantly dieting and dropping below a BMI of 40 and then gaining the weight back and going over 40. Someone who is SMO has no problem providing a 5 year weight history. 2) Many ask for a 3 or 6 month doctor supervised diet. Again, this is not in the NIH criteria. They just say a history of failed diet attempts. Which I have. But if I had gone on a 3 month or 6 month diet and had really tried hard and done well, I would have dropped my BMI below 40 again. Some insurances would then use that against me to deny me. 3) Many surgeons then ask the patient to lose 10% of their body weight even though clinic evidence to support this practice is weak. Again, if I comply with this requirement, my BMI drops below 40 and I risk insurance not approving my surgery. Neither 2 nor 3 are a big issue for the SMO. It's impossible to lose enough in even 6 months to get a BMI of 50 to drop below 40 and 10% of 300 or 400 or more isn't enough to do it either. 4) Co-morbidities. I had some. But many insurance companies puts extra restrictions on them and mine refused to count any of the ones I had. They weren't "bad enough". This is not an issue for heavier people as they qualify just on weight alone. Plus, even if their insurance company requires co-morbidities, they are more likely to have them. The bottom line for me is that WLS works when you have 50 or more pounds to lose and dieting & exercise without surgery does not. Obesity is a disease that costs society. We have a treatment that works to combat this disease, yet we put restrictions on it and force people to get heavier and sicker than they need to before we give them the treatment. That is not how medicine is supposed to work. The funny thing is that there are other diseases that are much more of a lifestyle choice than obesity. My MIL died of lung cancer which she got from smoking. Smoking was totally her own choice. Yet when she was diagnosed, the medical profession treated her like any other sick person and not like someone who had chosen to have a disease and therefore had to constantly prove her worthiness before she got treatment.

The top 4 stickies in this forum: LBT Forum Suggestions, Questions & Updates - Lap Band Surgery and Lap Band Discussion Forum Should get you started.

They aren't getting a balanced diet if you think that guidelines like the Food Pyramid are good guidelines. I don't think they are.

Welcome to LapBankTalk! Your date is really close. Have you started freaking out yet (some people do, some don't).

It depends on the Kaiser you go to. Some have six months of classes and at some the classes are optional.

When you post on a public board, you don't get to dictate the kinds of replies you get. (P.S. I haven't got a thread on Wetter. You must have me mixed up with someone else.)

Beats me, but Welcome to LapBandTalk.

Different Protein Shakes come with different sweeteners and you can even make up your own versions by combining powder milk with milk and then adding other stuff to give it flavor. Also, I don't think bandsters rely on Protein shakes the way those of us with other surgeries do. They are more optional from what I've seen.

Sorry, I can't help you. Your doctor completely messed up the sleeve on a friend of mine so that she had severe complications and the only way he could think of to fix it was to give her a bypass. As a result, I have no respect for him and wouldn't let him operate on my dog (if I had one).

Welcome to LapBandTalk! I think for the salad, every doc has a different rule. Mine said once I was on regular food to eat anything I could tolerate. I had lettuce at 7 weeks. But he also said that for most people, salad would be eaten at the 2-3 mark.

Too bad I can't predict the future though. But today I got my team jacket at work and I had ordered a medium thinking that I wouldn't fit into it right away and IT FITS!!!

There are two threads on Dr. K. in the Doctor's Section. Here's a link to the most active one: http://www.lapbandtalk.com/f11/considering-dr-kirshenbaum-26213/

:tongue2: PJTP: My Magic Bullet ate itself in such a way that I now have a big chunk missing from one of my crowns.

Welcome to LapbandTalk!

Congrats on getting a date!

I have a lot of reasons. My big reason is that I knew my major food problem was ghrelin and the band doesn't reduce your ghrelin, while the sleeve does. I was also worried about the long-term complication rate, particularly since I'm a self-pay. My surgeon has done over a 1000 of these operations and has a group of over 750 that he's been following for years. They see very good weight loss and low levels of regain.