MacMadame

P.S. My parents created me. Who created your God?

Lots of girlie stuff looks too fussy on me. I look like a little kid dressed up their mom's clothing or I look like a wedding cake. I do spend more time on my appearance though. I actually put product in my hair and sometimes I even blow dry it. I still think of makeup as being a stage thing though. I wear it when I am in a skating competition (i.e., on stage) and a really fancy dress-up party which I tend to approach mentally as if they are a costume drama and not real life.

You can't be angry at something that doesn't exist.

This is why I'm not telling anyone at work. I was on Nutri/system back in the 80s. I was trying to lose weight for my wedding. I told everyone -- they could see me eating the N/s food and see the weight coming off and people were very supportive. But they also started to DRIVE ME CRAZY. They'd say "are you sure you should be eating that" and ask me how much weight I'd lost all the time and say things like "you're going to look so great in a bikini" which would bug because I knew it wasn't true and was an unrealistic goal. It's not that they were mean. They definitely thought they were being supportive. But their support drove me up the walls at times. At other times, the support was nice though. So it's a double-edged sword. I think the ones who ask how much you've lost can be made to shut up if you never tell them. Say something like, I don't weigh myself that much any more or I'm not concentrating on the pounds but on my health/what size clothes I wear/getting small enough to [insert NSV here]. Another good answer is "a lot!". If you don't give a specific answer, they get tired of answering. For the food police, it's going to be harder. Some people won't stop that crap even if you ask them. But some will if you ask them. Just tell them that you are an adult and that having a lap band doesn't mean being on a diet for the rest of your life, but making healthy choices overall. Also tell them that you are following your doctor's recommendations as to what you can and can't eat. If you have to, lie about it! "My doctor says I should eat cake once in a while so I don't binge." The other thing that will help is time. Someone else will do something to feed the gossip mill or you will get to goal and they'll get used to you at your new size and won't remember to police you.

This reminds me of another point I was going to make but decided it was tangental to my main point... When you get pg, you will get every Tom, Dick and Harry coming up to you and telling you some horror story about their own pregnancy or someone they know or just someone they heard about. They aren't trying to talk you out of being pregnant, obviously. It just seems to be human nature to want to tell these kinds of stories and for them to be as gruesome and as scary as possible. That's why you have to take them with a grain of salt. Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that heart bypass surgery is routine. I know I was pretty worried when my FIL went through his. It's a BIG surgery - major surgery. I don't think of lap band as major surgery. It's done laparoscopically and it's over in about an hour, with hardly any blood loss. This is why everyone has to do a risk-benefit analysis. Everyone's answer will be different because everyone has different values and is in a different place in their lives. Therefore, if someone says they don't think the risks of lap band surgery are worth it to them, that's okay with me. But I've done my homework and I'm smart enough to have made the right decision for me and I think the benefits outweigh the risks -- for me.

Not every surgeon requires a liquid pre-op diet. I am looking at 3 surgeon's offices in my area. Every one of them has a requirement to lose 10% of your body weight before surgery and none of them care how you do it. Of course, it takes longer than 2 weeks if you are going to do it through healthy eating. I think that's why some surgeons put their patients on the 10 day liquid diet instead. If they can stick to it, it's fast and reliable. But of course a lot of patients can't stick to it. I think this is why there is no one right answer and they all do it differently.

If you had the right thing and were pre-approved for it, then you just have to get the hospital to rebill your insurance company with the correct code. They have incentive to do this because they want their money. Before I decided to have lap band surgery, insurance was no biggie. Almost everything I did was covered except for a co-pay and once in a while I'd get a bill for $50 or $100 saying not everything was covered, but that was rare. But with lap band I have had to jump through so many hoops, it's not funny. I haven't even gotten my pre-approval yet either. I am sort of dreading the rest of the process at this point. Good luck!

Well I intentionally put some snark in with my logic because not understanding the real risks of things is a pet peeve of mine. I blame the schools for not teaching people to understand statistics and how to evaluate information. But that's another rant for another time. Bottom line: I have done my research and I know the chances of various bad things happening if I get a lap bad. In addition to knowing the theoretical risks, I've lurked around the complications forum on purpose to get a feel for the range of problems people have and how they impact them in real life. I recommend you do that and form your own opinion about whether you can handle the risks. As for hearing about people who had problems, we all need to watch out for people whom come and tell us about every single rumor they hear about bad things happening to people who got WLS. Some people do this because they don't approve of WLS and they are on the lookout for these stories, which tend to get exaggerated and distorted. Sometimes, when you probe, the WLS isn't even lap band or an important detail is left out -- like the person went to a known quack for a cheap banding or wasn't following the rules. This is not to say that no one dies or has slippage or erosion or other problems from lap band. We know they do because we see people here who have these problems. But you'll get much better info from LBT or a local support group about complications than you'll get from someone who hasn't even had the surgery and is getting many of their stories of bad things second-hand. I am comfortable with the chance of death from lap band because it's very, very small. I was planning to have my tubes tied and the chance of death from that is similar to lap band, but I've never heard anyone caution someone not to get their tubes tied because they might die, even though they might. It's an elective surgery, too.

Okay, so how would you know that some skirt you were trying on in the store was cut on the bias? They don't put that on the tag as far as I know.

The mortality rate for lap band is 1 in 2000 compared to 1 in 200 for bypass. The fact that someone knows someone who knows someone who has a friend who died doesn't change that statistic.

Yes, one of mine has always been bigger than the other. Apparently this is pretty common but most people don't have a big enough difference that it hits you over the head with it. But I do!

I don't have a magic wand but the SPAMers keep sending me info on how to make it bigger anyway.

I wouldn't say anything. What's the point? :thumbup: She's entitled to her opinion and you are entitled to disagree. I might tell her that slagging on my friends in my presence was unacceptable, but I wouldn't waste energy trying to get her to change her mind.

Not really. I am not such a hypocrite that I would totally abandon my beliefs about free speech just because someone hurt me or my family. I would do everything in my power to make sure the abductor was put in prison for as long as possible, but I wouldn't sue NAMBLA as a group saying it was their fault my kid was abducted.

They were defending free speech that particular case, in fact.

EAP = Employee Assistance Program It's a program some companies have so that if you have a problem with something mental -- like stress or substance abuse or marriage problems or even problems at work -- you can use the program to get help without the company knowing about it. We have a contract with United Behavioral Health and you can get an appointment for just about anything no questions asked.

I made sure to use a dietician and counselor who were in network. At the time I had insurance that has an exclusion for WLS but for the dietician we said I was there because of my blood pressure and for the counselor, I used our EAP plan which doesn't really care why you need the referral. So I only had to pay co-pays.

You can get Water intoxication if you drink too much water too quickly and water intoxication can be fatal. Some lady in our area drank a lot of water trying to win a Wii and she died from it. Also in our area, there was a fraternity hazing incident that resulted in a death. However, it's not just about how much you drink but how fast. Your body can process an tremendous amount of water in a day -- something like 15 liters -- if you just spread it out.

Same here and ... I don't even have a band yet and have no idea which one I'll end up getting. But lies and misrepresentation chap my hide and I couldn't let them stand! The Realize band is a good band. It had better results than the old Lap Band system and that's why Allergan changed their bands to have some of the same features as the Realize band. It's ridiculous to say that a band that has been in use for over a decade with excellent results, brought in some innovations that all the lap band manufacturers now use as a matter of course, and jumped through all the FDA hoops to get approval is "crap" and if people say that, I'll post to challenge them and make them back that up. (Not that they've been able to.)

Not everyone who gets bypass has dumping syndrome. Something to think about. You should think of the lap band as being for life anyway. It's true if you have a big problem, you can have it taken out, but typically that doesn't happen. The idea of it being reversible is that you will not be stuck if it turns out you are one of those people who reacts badly to it, not that you take it out when you get to goal weight (an impression some people have).

Studies show that Lap band patients keep off about 50% of their excess weight on average. So if you end up being average, you'd lose 75 lb., not 50 lb. But you don't have to be average. Plenty of people on LBT have gotten to their goal weight and kept it off. They do it by making real lifestyle changes and following the rules. If you think you can do that, there is no reason why you can't be one of the people who makes it to goal too.

I got WLS for Dummies and I was less than impressed. 1) I did a lot of research too so there wasn't a lot in there I hadn't already learned. 2) They tend to lump all WLS together. Sometimes they remember to say "oh, lap band patients won't get dumping" but sometimes they don't. So it's hard to know how accurate the info is going to be for me when I have my surgery.

The last time I was at what my goal weight is now, I was a C cup. So, no, I wouldn't be getting implants. A breast lift, maybe. But probably not. I like to avoid surgery and just getting a lap band is a pretty big step for me. If I end up with one of those hanging aprons over my tummy, I would get a tummy tuck though. At least I think I would. I guess we'll have to see. First I have to get the band (damn insurance)!

That's a good point, snowbird. I talked to a surgeon's office that was very proud of the fact that they had a 0% erosion rate. But they'd only done 50 bands! Plus they hadn't been doing them that long and some erosions happen after a few years. That's just not a big enough sample size to know what his true rate is.

This is considered not to be a safe rate of weight loss though. 1 to 2 lb. is easier on the body and what diet programs are geared towards. It's one of the problems with surgeries like bypass -- the rapid weight loss actually causes problems in some people. Have you been checked for slippage? In the complications section there are a ton of people who had slippage after 2-3 years and their symptoms sound like yours. Actually the odds of winning the lottery are much, much lower. Slippage rates for the band are actually pretty high. They are around 3% world-wide according to the latest published stats. That's 3 people out of every 100 that get banded! I have to say that slippage is the one thing about the band that concerns me and has me continuing to search for alternatives. I prefer a solution that does not have such a high failure rate. I think complications should be under 1% for an elective procedure. Unfortunately, I have not found one yet that I think will work as well for me and I'm too old to wait another decade for more advances in combatting obesity. So right now getting a band in the Fall is still my plan. I don't know if I'd call those people haterz, but many of them are freaking annoying! The guy who was going to go on tv and write a book and wanted to warn us all of the evils of the band and how he's found the "real" solution (even though he still hasn't lost all his excess weight yet let alone kept it off for at least 5 years with his "real" solution) was annoying. So was the one who wanted to know if the band was a "hoax" because it "didn't work" for her. The other annoying thing are the people who come here post about how someone they know got the band and THEY DIED, few details are supplied and what details are supplied seem unlikely, and then they disappear. I'm not talking about things like Denyell's dh ... telling Denyell's friends what happened was very sweet of him. I'm talking about posts that appear to be about nothing but trying to stir up trouble and it's pretty clear the poster doesn't really know anyone who had a lap band and died. When I first opened this thread I thought that kind of poster and also the people in real life who go on about how WLS is cheating was what it was going to be about, in fact.