MacMadame

I hate exercise and I never do it. What I do is have at least once "active" hobby that gets me out and moving. It's not "exercise" but I get exercise doing it. I pick something I love to do, not whatever gets me the best workout. This way I can stick with it for much longer than I've ever gone to a gym. I did figure skating for 10 years for example. The most I've gone to a gym regularly is 10 month!

It's working for me now too.

Pringles give you the runs? That's so sad.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If I preview it first, it always shows up. But if I don't, it doesn't.

No, he's a poser. This is where I part company with you. I'm well aware of the science behind obesity and this may be how lots of people got there, but once you get there, you are now a prisoner of your body which is doing everything it can to keep that weight on. This is the whole reason to get WLS, IMO. WLS, unlike diet and exercise, will break the physiological cycle and give us fatties the same kind of body chemistry as the non-obese. That gives us a fighting chance. The rest is up to us. But one reason that WLS works for so many people, IMO, is that for many of us, it really is a matter of being hungry all the time and not a matter of unresolved feelings or low self-esteem leading to destructive behavior. But it doesn't work for everyone so obviously the biology isn't the whole story for everyone. There's a whole philosophy of therapy that concentrates on behavior. You change our behaviors and that changes your thinking instead of the traditional method of working on the feelings. It's sounds like you've figured that our yourself -- that you can change your feelings by changing your behaviors.

Well I didn't even get through 2 pages...

I think whether or not it is worth it, is going to depend on your outcome. You need to do everything you can to maximize your outcome or it won't be worth it. This means really researching your surgeon, following all the rules and making sure you do all the head work you need to do so you don't sabotage yourself. Otherwise, you'll end up like some of the people on here who paid big bucks to get banded, then big bucks to get unbanded. Or have only lost a small amount of weight after a year. For those people, I suspect it's totally NOT worth it. I just found out I will be self-pay. I worked my insurance but it turns out that none of the 3 carriers my company uses covers it because the company excludes it. This isn't what the insurance carriers told me when I called them, but it's turned out to be true, nonetheless. So I have to work the "is it worth is?" analysis too and I found being self-pay changed the equation for me. It made me less gung-ho for a band and more inclined to get a surgery that doesn't require as much follow up or have as many long-term complications that require re-surgery -- which I'd also have to pay for.

Okay, now I'm dying to read the particular thread that started all this off.

My library is hit or miss. I'm going to check them out though because the local bookstores have NO wls books and I can't tell from reading the info on Amazon which are the good ones and which aren't.

I've been cutting the cheese all day...

I've always lied. But I haven't had a new license in so long that I've hit the weight it says I am at least twice since I lied about it.

Froggi- I've decided that I'm getting rid of my WLS for Dummies book. If you want it, PM me. P.S. I don't think YOU were the rude one here. :redface:

That is the problem with a lot of food. Do you guys what How I met your Mother? On that show, Barney Stinson has a theory about women... the hotter they are, the crazier they are allowed to be. I feel the same way about food. The more calories it has, the better it has to taste in order to be "worth it". If has 1000 calories and it doesn't taste awesome, I don't put it in my body. Because cheese is a Protein and we need to eat a lot of protein.

I have to take back what I said about Mr. Mac. We talked today about it and he was even willing for us to take out a SMALL home equity loan and willing to pay up to 20K for it. Before he was saying we couldn't afford it and I should try dieting again and blah blah blah. I think he's realized that his big deal is with surgery in general and that I'm really going to go through with it so it's not worth whining. Plus normally he's a great husband and very supportive so not being supportive is something he has trouble maintaining for very long. :redface:

Flowers - you need to RUN RUN RUN. They didn't leave the name off the quote accidentally. They want to be able to use whatever doctor is available at the time you show up. It's called Bait and Switch and the less reputable agencies do this. If you can't get reliable info out of your booking agency, if they continually mess up, if you feel like they are giving you the run around and aren't on the up-and-up, then RUN. There are other booking agencies. Or you can deal with the doctors office directly (once you fire your booking agency that is; they won't talk to you until then because they don't want to have a bad relationship with the agency). Then start a new thread asking for the names of some good surgeons who have a reasonable self-pay price near El Paso. You will get a bunch of names and you can go from there trying to get info on them. Don't just look in MX as there are a lot of surgeons in TX. But don't cut MX completely out either. That is my advice to you.... for what it's worth.

But you see, I wouldn't. If that happened to me, I'd be all over the internet saying DON'T GO TO DR. [insert the name of doctor]. I wouldn't say DON'T GO TO [insert country/state I was butchered in]. That's not how I roll. [quoe]I've never heard of anybody who came close to death and then debanded and the threw out in the street here in the USA You need to talk to HeadHunter on this site then. Though I'm not sure he's had his debanding surgery yet as his case is complicated and they don't want to kill him taking his band out. All of that happened in Southern CA, btw. Not Mexico. Your case is IN THIS THREAD. And several other threads here and on WLSFacts.com. You post it everywhere. I have come to realize that there are many people out there who don't know how to do research. Then, there are the people who trust something a real live person tells them over anything they read. So knowing two people who had a good experience with a doctor is much better to them than reading on the internet that their doctor is a butcher. They will ignore reading about how their doctor messed up many surgeries if they have two friends who love that doctor, in fact. They do this even though a doctor with 10x the complication rate of a good surgeon is still going to have hundreds of happy patients. I have explained a little bit how I researched doctors in this thread. I can do it some more but I think it might make a better standalone thread or magazine article. It's true that WASa has sources that people not in the medical profession don't have. But you don't have to be in the medical profession to find out that there are a handful of doctors in Mexico who are really bad news and a handful that are not such great news. It may not be perfect research, but if you stick to doctors that have done lots of patients, but hadn't had reports of bad problems (caused by the surgeons), you will be much happier than if you go to someone based on price or your next-door neighbor loved them, or you can't find any info about about them so they must be good.

I thought my husband was supportive until I started talking about details of how we are going to pay for it. It turns out he thinks it's a eye-roll worthy idea. So screw him. (And not in the way he likes either.)

How helpful of you. :redface:

Ooh, Jachut, you are SO going to get it :redface: I do disagree with one thing though. I don't think "if I could do that, I wouldn't need a lap band" is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. It depends on what 'that' is. The reality is that we can't lose weight and keep it off and that's what WLS is for. So if that's what they are saying, then I agree ... if they could do THAT, they wouldn't need a lap band. OTOH, if "that" is "stay on the pre-op diet for 10 days", then, yeah, it's just an excuse.

No, you're one of those people who when something bad happens, has to blame it on someone and over-generalizes. You knew what the culture was like before you decided to go there. You were perfectly fine with it beforehand. But then something bad happened. Now you are blaming the culture for what happened to you. Yet what happened to you happens to about 1% of people who get bands (give or take a few fractions of a percent) and could have happened here. Plus, you went to a doctor who has a lot of unhappy customers posting on the internet about their experiences. So, in fact, no bribery to "buy" a reputation was involved in your case since your doc hasn't got a great reputation. No infection that can only happen in Mexico was responsible for your problems either. You didn't have a complication in a surgery center and not get to the hospital on time (something else to watch out for in Mexico), either. You didn't even have a problem that you could successfully sue a doctor in the US for. Conclusion: Mexico had nothing to do with. Instead of trying to warn people of the "dangers of Mexico" why not warn them of the real dangers your case illustrates: Such as the dangers of self-pay: When you self-pay, if you have complications, you are really stuck. You've paid for your surgery and now you have to pay for your complication to be fixed. In the end, you pay a LOT of money and you get butkiss for it.

Yet knowing this, you choose to go to Mexico for your surgery.

I have a couple of friends but the way I approach the site, it makes no difference so I guess I might as not have bothered. I'm not big on this feature. I have a Facebook account I never use. I guess I have other ways to check up on my friends.

Here's the page: Patient Information and Support Groups - Stanford Hospital & Clinics - Stanford University Medical Center It says that the intro meeting is next Wed. but the support meetings are the 2nd Wed., not the last. Bummer. Most hospitals do them one after the other so newbies can stay for the support group after. I didn't catch the "2nd" part because of expecting that.

According to their web site, Stanford has support meetings. Didn't they tell you about them. :confused_smile: I'm going to the intro seminar next Wed. and there is a support meeting after that. Maybe we could all meet up.