MacMadame

You will lose weight if you keep your calorie intake lower than your calorie expenditure, but you can do that just by dieting and exercising. You don't need a band to go on a diet. The reason to get a band is to control your hunger and hunger control is why banded people are more successful at losing weight and keeping it off than those who use diet and exercise alone. But if you drink while eating, the band won't control your hunger because food won't stay in your pouch long enough. It also won't control your portion size, the other thing the band does, because if you flush out what is in your pouch, you can put more in.

I was told to eat all my Protein first, then my veggies, then carbs only if room. But I know I won't be able to do that for the rest of my life. For one thing, I find veggies to be kind of rare in my diet. If I don't eat all the ones that come my way, my Fiber intake is way too low. I like the 3-3-1 plan. It's similar to how I eat now and it's very realistic and doable. Right now I eat veggies first, then some protein to make sure I get some, then some carbs so I know I'll get at least one bite of my favorite. :thumbup: With 3-3-1, I'd just have to switch the protein with the veggies and I'm good. I think most US docs go nuts about protein and I do not approve. I really don't see anything about having a band that makes your protein needs higher than a normal person. If I'm supposed to be having around 50 g of protein now, why would I need 80 g once I got a band? That just doesn't make sense to me. Btw, in looking up what my protein requirements actually are, I found this: "In 1936, the Technical Committee of the League of Nations set up recommended levels of protein intake for adults and children. The proposed daily allowance of 1 g of protein per kg of body weight for adults did have an appealing simplicity, but no scientific evidence was found to support it." I believe the WHO now recommends .6 g of protein per 1 kg of body mass per day, but it's not clear if that's for everyone or just everyone in a certain age group. Lots of US-based nutritional sites recommend 50 g for adult women. 60g if pregnant or lactating.

What we need is the truth. The truth is that if you have complications after your band is placed -- and some people do -- that there is a risk that your insurance company will not pay for them. This has happened to self-payers before and it will happen again. To pretend that it does not simply for the sake of "being positive" is wrong IMO. As for your doctor working with you, some do and some don't. If you have your band put in and have direct complications from the band immediately afterwards, your insurance will not pay for it. There have been self-payers who had to have their band taken out within weeks or months of it being put in and they ended up paying for that too. So they paid twice what they had planned on and ended up with no band. If you have complications that can be indirectly attributed to the band, then some insurance companies will use the band as an excuse not to pay for them as well. Others will not and will treat you fairly. But the risk is always there and it's something you have to be prepared to deal with if you self-pay. Sometimes it depends on the doctors office. Some offices are really savvy about the insurance codes and will really work the insurance to get as much paid for as possible and others just do what they do and, if insurance doesn't cover it, too bad. I've been lucky so far... I've had all my pre-op tests paid for by insurance even though the band isn't covered. But I make sure the people I deal with know how to work the system and I work the system as well. For example, my psych consult was covered under our EAP plan and not our medical plan. The EAP plan is generous and doesn't care what your psych consult is for. For my nutritional appointment, the dietician coded it as being about my hypertension and not about getting a band. My original surgeon codes fills as office visits. Office visits are covered. :thumbup: I have seen people who could barely afford the band taking out loans to self-pay and then not been able to afford follow-up care or having disaster strike and have to take the band out and have to come up with the thousands to pay for that. That's a really horrible place to be in and it's why I'm waiting until I can change insurance to actually get the band. OTOH, if I can't get insurance to cover it, I will self-pay. But I'm prepared for the additional costs. I haven't got my head in the sand about them.

Studies show that the overall weight loss between gastric bypass and lap band is the same. Gastric bypass patients tend to lose faster in the beginning but don't lose more weight overall.

It depends on what article you read, Jachut. I check before I posted and found 18-22 on 3 articles and 22-25 on one article. So I went with the majority. :tongue: My goal right now is to get down to 50% so it's all moot to me. Once I get to 50%, I'll worry about whether it should be 25 or 22. :cool2: Actually, my current goal is to get under 200. Then to get to 50% body fat. I like to take it in small steps.

Yes, it's happened to other people. :cool2: For insurance purposes, your surgeon should report the weight that will get you covered. A lot of them require a weight loss prior to surgery and then they report the weight when you started and not when the weight loss is over, for example.

I have found you have to take a lot of those posts with a grain of salt. Don't look at "I'm not losing" but look at the details. Many of the people who post this have lost TONS of weight. But they are down near their goal and the weight loss has slowed down. They are rightly frustrated and looking for some ideas of how to lose the last bit now that weight isn't just falling off. It's good to know that happens, but if someone loses 100 lb. is the band a failure because they didn't lose 125? Not in my book. Others have unrealistic expectations. Like the poster above who "only" lost 30 lb. in 3 months ... that is about 2 lb. a week! And she only has one fill. I'd love to have a "failure" like that when I get my band. The rest of the people really haven't lost anything or much of anything. But most of the time if you look at their full story, they have had personal crises that have caused them not to work on themselves, they haven't had a fill in a while (maybe they don't have a fill doctor handy or money is an issue), they are eating around the band, they aren't exercising, etc. We can learn from their experiences. It's really important to me to know what can happen and how to prevent it. It's also good to know upfront if what the band requires is something I am not willing to give.

You need someone to drive you home. They don't have to be there for the entire surgery though. Heck, you could use a taxi service if you really wanted to. But having a friend or family member drive you home may be cheaper. :smile:

I think you look great too. But I don't think you look like someone who is too thin and on the verge of an eating disorder either. So people saying that you are taking it too far are off-base IMO.

The formula for BMI is based on your height and weight. That means if two people have the same height and weight, they have the same BMI. But they don't necessarily have the same body fat %. In fact, most likely, they don't -- one is bound to have more or less muscle than the other. You can't know your body fat % from a chart either. It has to be measured just for you. Some machines that measure it are more accurate than others. My scale measures it by shooting electrical current through my body via my feet. This is considered reasonably accurate though it's not the most accurate. (The most accurate method requires a a swimming pool -- not something I keep in my bathroom. :biggrin: ) The caliper method is the least accurate. What is considered a healthy body fat % varies. But for adult women, it's usually 18-22%. Mine is 74% :thumbup:

Some insurance companies will accept high blood pressure as a co-morbidity but others want you to have high blood pressure that requires serious medication and/or can't be controlled by medication. Some accept one co-morbidity, some want two. You really need to check with your insurance company to find out what their policy is in general and also what your particular policy covers under what conditions. It really varies quite a bit and even someone else with Empire BCBS might not have your exact policy.

They don't do that after you've been working for a while. Once you have job experience, that's much more important than what grades you made in college. I know this because not only have I been working for 30 years, I interview and hire people. :thumbup:

Thanks, I need that! :smile2:

My message is very important! (Not really. It's just big.)

At a minimum, I'd take out the hyphen so it was two words. That would make it more generic looking and less like LapBand®.

I wanted to start trying some Protein bars pre-surgery since a lot of people here eat them post-op to get in their protein requirements. I started grabbing ones at Target that looked good. Then I read the labels... these things have TONS of sugar in them. Their nutritional composition reads like a bowl of sugary kids Cereal. I put them all back. I am looking for a tasty bar that has under 10g of sugar and at least 7g of protein. It would be nice to have some Fiber too. Any suggestions?

I posted that just to post, actually.

I found the page about the EasyBand study!! EasyBand GOAL Trial - Full Text View - ClinicalTrials.gov It looks like they are looking for 300 patients but they aren't actively recruiting yet.

I think you can still get him to listen if you play it right. I worked at a small company, 80 people, and a similar situation happened with the owner/president. He hired someone not qualified to be a VP and many didn't like her because of how she acted and treated people but he thought she was the cat's meow. For a while people were talking about how maybe they were doing each other, etc. Finally another VP, who he was friends with, took him aside and told him flat out that his behavior was unbecoming and hurting the company and he shaped up really fast. Sometimes when a guy is thinking with his little brain instead of his big brain, you can't deal with it logically -- it's bad for moral, good people are quitting, etc. Instead you have to be brutal and tell them they are making a fool of themselves. That will cool the little brain down real fast. But it has to be the right person and they have to mean it. If you aren't the right person, then your best bet is to stay out of it so that when it all blows up in their faces, you don't get hit with shrapnel.

I think you have fallen into the Dieter Mentality. Certain food is Good and if you eat it, YOU are good. Certain food is bad and you eat it, YOU ARE BAD. It's the same thing with exercise. Exercise is something you do because you HAVE to. Again, if you do it, you are good, but when you don't, you are bad. I believe that if you change your mindset, I think it will be less of a struggle and you'll find yourself making better choices because the emotion and the judgement will be gone. Feeling ashamed, beating yourself up for being a Bad Girl is not productive. It leads to a cycle of extremes -- being a model citizen followed by falling off the wagon and feeling despair and hopelessness. First, there is no such thing as good or bad food. It's just food. There are good and bad choices, but they have to be evaluated in the context of your entire food intake. Did those oreos and pb cups put you over your calorie intake for the day? Then eat less today. If they didn't, then look at your overall nutrition. Did they make your diet have too much fat or sugar that day? Eat something with less fat and more Fiber today. You have nothing to beat yourself up for if you made one bad choice one day if your week was full of good choices and your overall intake is balanced and healthy. Also look at what you define as treats. I don't want the fact that my kids have no weight problems today lead me to teach them habits and ways of thinking that will lead to weight problems tomorrow. Therefore, I try not teach my kids that only junk is a treat. Why aren't strawberries treats? My kids go nuts when I buy strawberries. They are expensive and only in season for a short time, so they see them as a big treat. They feel the same about cantalope. We don't buy it that often so when we do, it's a big treat. Sure, we buy ice cream and chips and other things too. But we don't act like junk is a treat and good food is something you have to eat because it's good for you and I think that's an important distinction. Anything you love is a treat. Finally, we get to exercise. I never "exercise". Exercise is something you do because you have to. Instead, I have "active hobbies". These are things that I like to do because I like them, but they also involve moving my body. I never think of them as exercise and I never think of them as things I HAVE to do in order to be "good." Your active hobby can be anything, too. It doesn't have to be going to the gym or taking up marathon running. It can be gardening. It can be bowling. It can be ballroom dancing. Ice skating. Joining a 'just for fun' softball league. Whatever you LIKE to do. And don't worry about whether or not it's "good" exercise. People get so focused on doing things perfectly, that they won't do "good enough" stuff because it's not perfect. Sure training for a marathon burns way more calories than bowling. But bowling burns way more than sitting at home watching tv or typing on the computer or reading. You say you haven't got a sedentary lifestyle so you probably already have active hobbies. Instead of beating yourself up for not going to the gym (or whatever you think of as "exercise"), congratulate yourself for not being a couch potato.

In my case, my surgeon's office recommends them as an occasional Breakfast item. It's because a lot of people are tight in the morning and want to skip breakfast and also because most fast breakfasts are carb heavy. Since I'm trying to eat like a banded person, pre-band, I thought I'd give it a shot. They recommend that the bars have less than 25g of carbs, less than 15g of sugar, over 10g of Protein, less than 250 calories over all. So far, only the Atkin Advantage bars meet that criteria. Maybe there are similar bars in the "health" food stores, but I don't shop there. The main problem I have with *all* the bars, aside from the sugar in some of them, is that they have a lot of fat and a lot of sodium. Oh, and they taste like crap. I almost forgot that one.

I've been told that my sweet tooth may be a problem for me with the band. But chips (which I can't stand) are band friendly too. I think what really kills bandsters is not dealing with emotional eating. If you eat when your body tells you it's not hungry, the band isn't going to help you. Likewise, if you aren't ready to make lifestyle changes. If you are ready to deal with your head hunger and make lifestyle changes, there are plenty of sweet and savory options that will help you lose weight. If you aren't, then you'll find a way to eat around the band.

You're right, it will get out. But if you aren't talking about it, that will stop a LOT of people from bringing it up. Not everyone ... but at least it will stop the non-rude ones who understand boundaries. :smile2:

My dh takes FOREVER to finish a meal. I was hoping that when I get the band I'll finally take as long he does. :smile2:

I don't like fish either. Or people who post just to post. :smile2: