MacMadame

Mine was billed to the insurance company at $350. However, I went through my EAP and they only cover $85. The shrink just eats the rest, I guess, because I only have to pay $10.

There are MX doctors who don't have disturbing posts about them. Why not use one of them?

Congrats, IndioGirl.

I guess I'm more cynical than that. Outside the US, lap band is the most common WLS while in the US it's RNY. I don't think RnY is somehow more successful here than elsewhere. I think it's our wacky health system that is causing doctors to push RnY over the band. Don't get me wrong, RnY has it's place. We aren't all alike so the same WLS isn't going to be the right choice for everyone. But it has a lot more risks than the band and, for that reason alone, I think they should be doing a lot less of them.

Yeah, I finally gave in and got underwires and now my clothes fit so much better. Makes me sorry I was such a wuss about it before.

If you can only eat 3/4 of a cup during the day, then I'd just ignore him and have a planned snack between lunch and dinner, preferably right before working out. If you plan it, account for the calories in your daily allotment, and eat something healthy for it, then I see nothing wrong with it, no matter what the doctor says.

I have used their Calcium chews but then I read the ingredients... the first ingredient is Corn Syrup and the second is Sugar!! I guess that's why they taste good but I'm going to try to find something that's not candy instead.

Did you tell him you were hungry all the time and doing it on willpower? It seems like some surgeons don't really understand that obese people can diet up a storm; it's keeping it off that is the problem. They see the weight loss as a sign that the band is working when you may just be in diet mode, like so many times before.

I think a well fitting bra is a good investment. If your bra fits well, all your clothes look better.

My point is that this is something that WoW players tell themselves to makes behaving irresponsible seem like behaving responsibly.

I was with you until you said this. It's JUST A GAME. The world won't end if the raid fails. Not to mention, why is a father and husband scheduling raids during family time to begin with... The football analogy falls apart because teams don't schedule their practice from "as soon as work is over until you go to bed every weekday, plus some on weekends". WoW raiding requires a much more serious time commitment than playing intramural sports and raids involving adults are often scheduled during the evening after work in what should be family time so that they totally destroy family life. Someone who wasn't addicted to the game would see this and would not raid more than once a week at most and would try to pick a time that didn't conflict with family events. But that's not what happens with these raids. They are all-consuming in a way that other hobbies are not.

What I would ask myself is: have I lost weight before? (Yes) have I kept it off? (No) if not, what makes this time different? (Nothing) I have lost weight before. I have lost TONS of weight. But I always gain it back. My feeling is anyone can lose weight on any diet. But most diets don't have you eating the way you will eat for the rest of your life. Once people get off the diets, they gain the weight back. The only way diets can work IMO is if you eat healthy food in reasonable quantities -- the number of calories you would need to maintain whatever your goal weight is, not some really small amount that you won't be able to stick to forever. But when you do that, most people are too hungry to stick with the number of calories or they don't lose weight past a certain point.

Sounds like he wants you to set limits for him. Maybe he wants to stop and doesn't know how. But it's not really fair to put you in that position. OTOH, if you say it's fine, then he can say later "but you said it was fine." So you are kind of screwed either way. The raiding is the worst aspect of WoW IMO. They do act like it's some sort of moral obligation to attend and not leave in the middle. I could see it if they lasted an hour but they sometimes go one for five hours at a time and that's just not reasonable. However, while it is an addiction, it's not like drugs or alcohol. There isn't any physical aspect that will make it that much harder to quit. Lots of people get really into that game for a while but eventually realize it's sucking them away from life and just quit. It's a lot harder to just quit from drugs. So that's a good thing. :frown:

I've seen the 40/30/30 ratio before and I think that's way too much fat. If I eat that much fat, I get gassy because I have no gallbladder, but even if I didn't, I don't think I want to eat that much fat.

My son was really into WoW for a while. It was not pleasant. What I did was make rules... like he had to come to supper whether he was raiding or not. Then I let it run it's course. He doesn't play at all now. He realized on his on that it's not a game you can play for a short time and leave and therefore you had to commit to it, all or nothing. With your husband, you can't "lay down the law" like you can with a kid, but you can get him to agree to some rules. If he won't agree to them or he agrees when he's not playing but breaks them when he is, then you can point out to him that he's let the game control him to the point that he can't keep his commitments. Maybe that will sink in. But you really can't "make" him do anything. He's an adult and his choices are his responsibility. You can only accept his behavior or not accept it. Think of it like any other addiction. You can't make a drunk stop drinking but you can not accept their crap. If he won't shower, don't sleep with him. If he won't go anywhere because he has to raid, go without him. Otherwise, you get into a cycle of you constantly bitching about the game, but accepting anything he dishes out, and him telling himself that you just don't understand and are prejudiced against the game and he can dismiss what you are saying.

So you think maybe some day the Sun won't rise in the East? :frown: I wouldn't bet on that. I'm guessing you wouldn't either. so there is so much about science that is repeatable. In fact that's part of what makes it science... in order for an experiment to be accepted has having proved or disproved a hypothesis, the experiment has to be repeatable. Again, what makes it a theory is that it can't be proved via experimentation. But it has to fit the facts that are known. If it doesn't, then it's not a scientific theory. Personally, I WANT my kids to be exposed to things I don't agree with. I don't know everything and there are tons of ideas out there. How are they going to learn to examine ideas for merit, if they only ever hear the party line? This is not the same thing as saying an 8 year old can't see Saw, IMO. Deciding when something is age-appropriate as part of being a parent. But now that my son is 16, I let him go to see things I don't like or disagree with all the time. Heck, I let him go to church when he was younger and wanted to go with his friends and that's something I don't agree with. :tt2:

This is why I prefer the Realize band. I don't want a hard hunk of plastic around my organs. I think that would be more inclined to erode than something softer. This is a big reason why the Realize band out performed the prior Lap-band IMO. Competition is awesome. :frown: Lap-band made their band better in response to the Realize band being set to be used in the US -- so everyone won on that one. There are actual differences. The Realize band is softer and the reservoir wider and is designed to be the only think touching the stomach, not the plastic. This is supposed to help with both erosion and slippage. The port is a low-profile port and it has these claws that make it cling to the stomach muscle instead of having to be sutured in. (Though your surgeon can chose to suture it in if that's what they prefer.) This is supposed to help with port pain and with port flipping. The Lap-band AP system has a smaller buckle and it is pre-formed into a round shape. Because the plastic is harder, some surgeons will put some fill in during surgery, which may give you a jump start on restriction. It also now goes all the way around, which the older Lap-band didn't do and which is important to avoid erosion IMO. It also has comes "pre-creased", which Allergen says helps with slippage. The Realize study was against the Lap-band that was available at the time, not the AP system. I think it's clearly better than the older lap-band. There is a reason that Allergen changed their band to be more like the Realize Band and also more like the French Mid-band. Whether the changes that Allergen made with the AP system have caused that band to just as good or better than the Realize band remains to be seen. Study data tends to lag so we probably won't see head-to-head comparisons right away and it may be that, by the time we do, both companies will have modified their bands again and made it all moot. :biggrin2:

And if you can't, you can southern fry it.

Before you appeal, you need to find out why you were denied. Then you can gear your appeal towards that. Like if you denied you because of missing info in your paperwork, you can supply the missing info. If they denied you because you don't have enough co-morbidities, you can take some more tests to see if you have ones that weren't discovered the first time. Etc.

I use this link to figure that stuff out for me: Ask the Dietitian - by Joanne Larsen MS RD LD - Healthy Body Calculator

Personally, I think nice people are important in this surgery because there is so much after care. :frown: I was very happy with the support staff at my surgeon's office and annoyed that I may have to switch to another surgeon because of insurance. But if you do decide to stick with the program that already has your money, couldn't you just do your 2-week liquid Protein diet that you were planning to do right before surgery now and then it would make the shrink happy?

After watching a Mythbusters where they put Mentos and Diet Coke into a pig's stomach, I have come to believe that a) the stomach has amazing stretching powers and :frown: it's quite possible that trapped gas could stretch a pouch. It does seem that gas from carbonated beverages does get trapped for a lot of people rather than getting burped out.

It evolves. That's not the same thing as saying "eat margarine because butter is evil, no wait, margarine is bad for you." The theory has refined and evolved. It hasn't flipped completely over and back or changed drastically. It's pretty easy to disprove that the world was created in 7 days and is less than a million years old too.

Whether I can make it depends a lot on exactly when it is and what else is going on in my life at that point. But I am interested, especially if I can combine it with a business trip.

Actually, that's not what a scientific theory is. In science, there are things we know through experimentation. Those are laws or facts. They can be directly observed. Then there are scientific theories which are things that can't be proven via experiment. However, they still have to employ the scientific method to be a scientific theory. They have a lot of weight of facts and empirical evidence behind them as well. Evolution is a scientific theory and will always be a theory because you can't set up an experiment to duplicate evolution. However, that doesn't mean it's "just a theory". There is a lot of observation and experimentation and scientific method that went into and continues to go into as we refine our understanding of it. Intelligent Design is some people's attempt to dress up the Christian Creation myth as a scientific theory. People used to try to get "Creationism" taught in school and when that was rightly rejected as religion, not science, some Christians decided to try to create a scientific theory out of it and hope they could get that slipped into science class. So people write papers on it and employ a psuedo-scientific method on it and do all sorts of things with it that *seem* scentific. But there are many aspects of the theory that directly contract the body of science that we've built-up over thousands of years. On top of that, much of the "scientific" papers that are written about it could not pass the rigious vetting that a scientific paper is supposed to go through to be considered science. It's what we call junk science. Of course people perform junk science in all sorts of arenas, not just religions ones. But scientists are not supposed to do it and when they do, they get in professional trouble. If they are Christian Scientists who are doing junk science in order to try to prove their religious beliefs scientifically, they cry persecution and try to pretend that they are this century's Galileo who are being tortured for telling the truth that no one wants to hear. But in reality they are just crappy scientists doing a bad job of science. Actually Creation Myths and/or Creationism covers every conceivable religion, past and present. Intelligent Design is one particular creation myth dressed up in psuedo-scientific language. But it's not science and so it shouldn't be presented in science class. I have no issue with a science teacher presenting the Theory of Evolution and the Big Bang Theory to an elementary class and saying "we don't know where the stuff that formed the universe came from" because we don't.they can even point out all the holes in these theories -- because they don't explain everything. Though most of the holes are probably beyond a typical elementary school class. But I do have a problem when you start saying "some people believe ...." because a) just because some people believe it, doesn't make it true and if you start saying what some people believe, you have to say what EVERYONE believes and that would take up several weeks of time that should be spent on science and not listing all the different things that people believe that have no science behind them. I'm not Wasa, but I believe it was always there and wasn't created. My work, my family, reading a good book, giving back to the community, working out, etc. Peace is everywhere. You don't have to belong to a religion to have peace. There are a lot of people who believe the earth is flat too. Numbers doesn't make something scientific or a fact. If you believe that dinosaurs roamed the earth during human times, you believe something that there is no scientific evidence to support and quite a bit of scientific evidence to refute. The Baha'i Faith believes that religion and science are two ways of knowing the world and that they should be in harmony. I can buy that. I know a lot of people who are Christians who think ID is a big joke. They do believe that God created the universe and, you know what? There is no scientific evidence to contradict that belief. So have at it! You can even believe that Adam and Eve where the first man and woman. Someone had to be and it's not like their names got written down so maybe they were called Adam and Eve -- I'd be very surprised, but it's not really science's job to worry about that sort of thing, so I don't really care. But don't tell me that dinosaurs roamed the earth with humans and then tell me this is a scientific theory. It's not.