truckoholic

I have not got the band yet, largely because the one person I would like most to know about my life changing decision is absolutely dead set against it. My mother. At one time she was talking to me like it was really possibly a good choice for me to make. But now she has heard so many of the negative bad stories of weight loss surgery difficulties, that she has become so against any kind of weight loss surgery that now I am being forced to do it in secret if I go through with it if I want our relationship to be spared. I have a friend who had some sort of mysterious surgery a couple years ago that she did not even tell her mom or her kids that she was having it. But now a couple years later she is magically 100 pounds lighter. So I'm almost positive that it was some sort of weight loss surgery but have not got up the guts to ask her which one, and don't want to imply that she couldn't have done it on her own by asking. So yeah, I would have told my family members, and anyone else that wanted to know, since I'm not a real secretive person when it comes to surgery like some people are, but given the fact that my mom and sister seem to be so set against it, I probably will not tell. Atleast not til after it's done and I'm doing okay.

So yeah, I was somewhat actively posting on here at the beggining of the year about really considering the lap band surgery. After making multiple failed attempts to lose it on my own, I was convinced after weeks or research that the lap-band was what I needed. So I scheduled myself in to go to a seminar. Drove all the way over to where it was, and then got too embarrassed to actually go in so I ended up just coming home. Talked to my doctor about the lap-band and all he had to say about it was "Well what's that gonna do for you?" And he discouraged me from going that route. I thought "Well great, if my doctor isn't even supportive of it then how the heck would I ever get insurance to cover it?" So I tried yet again to lose the weight on my own. I was actually doing pretty good. Lost about 12 pounds or so. Got back below 300 for a while. One of the only things that was really helping me was I was walking about 5 miles every day. But after a while my right foot started having severe pains to where I could barely make it back to my car. So I tried to keep walking hoping my feet just needed to get used to it, but no. They just kept hurting worse. So I had to stop walking and try other excersize methods, but I have a hard time doing anything else enough to do any good. I'm sure if I was not so dang heavy that my feet wouldn't hurt so bad when I walk. So now, that I have gained again and am back up to 315 yet again, I am seriously looking into the lap-band again. It is obvious that I do not have the will power and control to not eat as much and need something to help me in that specific area.

I thank you all for your replies! I can totally see how this time of not being so sure could end up being a good thing because by time I finally make the commitment to do it I will for sure know that I am committed to it. This last time that I made an effort to lose the weight on my own again, I really had a lot of motivation and was doing really good, and did see some decent progress, but then like always it leveled out and failed to go any lower and I got so discouraged again. My only problems with the gastric bypass and sleeve and stuff like that is that I don't want to so drasticly alter the actual anatomy of my insides. I realize that the band is not just real simply reversed, but it would be a lot more easily reversed than one of the other surgeries. Hoping of coarse that there would never be a reason to have it undone. I guess my Grandpa is possibly going to get a Lap Band here soon. I had no idea he was looking into it. I just think all the time of how much my life style would change if I did not have this fat weighing me down all the time and making me self conscious in every aspect of my life. I love to ride roller coasters. But after multiple times of waiting forever in line and then not fitting in the roller coaster seat and having to get off in front of everybody and being embarrased beyond words, I just don't try anymore and it really hurts to be missing out on so much. I really want to be able to just pay for the surgery myself but I just can't do it financially right now, and don't feel like going through all the insurance crap right now. My insurance company does indeed cover it, but.................. So yeah, I have been struggling in multiple ways. So thanks for your words of encouragement and help.

Hey all I am also LDS out here in Northern California. Been a member my whole life. Went on a mission to the Ohio Cincinnati mission and spent a lot of time in eastern Kentucky and southern Ohio. As happens with a lot of missionaries who go there and eat too much of that awesome deep fried Kentucky food, I gained about 20 pounds on my mission. I do not have the band yet, but have been seriously considering it. Just gathering as much information as possible on it to try making a decision. I have been overweight since I was about 11 years old. By 16 I was 280. Stayed at 280 til about the middle of my mission where I went up to 290 at about 20 years old. Had Gall bladder problems and had to come home to have that taken out, then went back out on the mission and finnished it in 2002 at just under 300 pounds where I've been hovering for the last 6 years. Was glad I found this thread. Have been curious to know what other LDS people thought about the band, and if it caused any problems with you all taking the sacrament and fasting. So I'm glad this thread answered some of those questions. Really hit me that I needed to so something the other day when I went to the temple and my white pants just BARELY fit! They were tight!!! I used to almost need a belt to keep them from falling down, but now they are way too tight. That is just not cool!:smile:

I know a few people who after losing weight with the bypass surgery have gained a lot of it back because they kept eating too much and stretched out their new smaller stomach. Which I am sure is possible to some extent with the lap band as well. But I just see quite a bit of failed bypass patients and lack of proper nutrients and a lot of hair loss. But I don't know. I just plain don't like the idea of the bypass surgery because it involves so much cutting of the guts. Where the lap band although it should be treated as permanent, can fairly easily be removed if complications arise and you stomach will be much closer to the way it was before the lap band was installed. Here is a video on Youtube that I found of a lady that had the bypass surgery and failed, and then had the lap band and did great! [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FWBgB9fs4k]YouTube - Lap Band with great results[/ame] That probably would not be the case with everyone. There are many things to consider with both procedures.

Yeah I could NOT handle it if I was awake! I'm the guy that will pass out and fall on the floor just from seeing SOMEONE ELSE get stuck with a little needle.

I have the same basicly unreasonable fears about the not being able to eat the stuff I like if I have it done. Every year for my birthday my mom makes a special kind of macaroni and cheese that I just love!!! It is my favorite food aside from pizza. And I think about how that tradition every year would change and how sad it would be that such a long standing tradition would be so drasticly changed if I couldn't eat it, or couldn't eat much of it. And I think about how much I love thick crust pizza and how on special occasions I wouldn't be able to Celebrate along with everyone else and eat half the pizza like I usually do because it tastes soooooo good, and together with lots of root beer!! But then I stop and realize how pathetic that is of me. I realize how much food has become an entertainment device in my life. How important food has become to me. So controlling of my life that my only fear about having lap band surgery is that I wouldn't be able to eat the food I love so much anymore, or not nearly as much. And I think about that, compared to how incredibly good it would feel to be 100 pounds lighter, and I sit here and day dream about all the stuff I could do if I got rid of all this excess weight and how all of those thoughts and times that I think about have nothing to do with food, and far outweigh the goodness of any of the food. I don't picture myself being able to eat more because I am skinny. I don't picture myself being able to fit better on the bench at Pizza Hut so that I can better enjoy the pizza. Instead I picture myself able to ride a bike again. I picture myself able to Water ski. I picture myself sitting on an airplane and not getting so embarassed and crowded when someone sits in the seat right next to me and my fat is blobbing over the arm rest onto their side. I picture myself running around and playing with my future kids. I picture myself better able to make love to my future wife. I picture myself just not being so parnoid that everyone is looking at me and thinking negative things about me because I am as big as I am. So you see. When you really think about all that stuff, and realize how much more meaningful it is in life than the ability to eat what food you like, you begin to kind of forget about the food issue. I wish you the best of luck and hope you can find the comfort and strength you need to succeed!

I am at a position where I am just over 40bmi and am afraid to try to lose any weight at all for fear of dropping below 40. Of course now that I think about it, that is when I have no clothes or shoes on. With my clothes on I am closer to 41-42. But yes, if it meant whether I got approved or not I would gain some back.

Yeah they are pretty cool. You just go to tickerfactory.com or one of the other ticker sites, and design the ticker the way you want and then it will give you some different codes to copy and paste. You want to copy the BBCode and then go to My Account here on lapbandtalk and click on signature and paste the code into the text field for your signature. When you design the ticker, it asks you to put in a password or pin so that in the future you can click on your ticker and then enter your password and edit your weight loss information. Hope that helps

Hey Gill, For right now I am just trying to get all the information I can from the site to see if it is really something I want to do. Am going to try going to a seminar on April 7th put on by a bariatric Doctor that I know is a provider approved by my insurance, and then try to make a decision. Something has got to change. I want so bad to lose this weight! Went to my regular Doctor today and talked to him about it, and he didn't have anything good to say about the lap-band. Just told me that I could have the same exact results if I would just stop eating as much. But with him being a very fit skinny guy I could not really get accross to him that it is NOT that easy for us people with this problem. He asked me what I thought the lap-band would do for me, and I hate when I am in situations like that, because I have all kinds of reasons that I believe the lap-band is just exactly the tool I have been needing all this time, but when put on the spot like that all I could say was "It would keep me from eating as much" which of coarse was not a good enough reason to him. Granted he is an all natural holistic doctor, so of course he is not going to approve of anything un-natural like having a foreign object placed inside you. So after that little visit I left feeling more like maybe I should give it a try myself again. But I know that is not going to happen. I'll lose about 15 pounds at the most, then fall right back into eating just as much and gain 20 back. That's just been the cycle throughout my life, and I am sick of it. My dad is 340-350, my mom is about 280, my sister is about 280 and I am 308. My mom and sister have been pretty strictly following a diet given them by the same doctor I visited today, and they have lost only a few pounds in the past couple years since they've been going to him. I think my whole freakin family needs this lap-band. We all eat too much right now and we all have a huge desire to make a change, but need a tool to help us do it!

I have the exact same problem! When I get hungry I get feeling sick and usually get a headache probably mostly from worrying about being hungry. So if I am going somewhere with my family or friends and know that it could be a while before we stop to eat (and something inside convinces me that they are all anorexic and aren't going to stop anywhere ALL day), I panic and just like you, will eat a lot more for breakfast before I leave than I normally would to make sure I store up as much as I can for the famine that is about to strike as we are gone all day. However, since my whole family is way overweight and we are all addicted to food, we do end up stopping and getting some sort of fast food, and then again, I just know that it's gonna be forever til I get back home where I can finally eat again, so I eat as much as I can when we stop. It is a terrible terrible cycle! I am usually much better off when I go places by myself because I know I am the one driving, and I am on my own schedule and know that I can stop whenever I want to and get something to eat. So I don't get the really sick feeling and the headaches nearly as much. However, there are also plenty of times when I am by myself that if I know it's gonna be an hour or so driving time til I get to the next town, (and being a truck driver I deal with this all the time) I also start to panic and get sick and my head hurts and I stop and fill up. But the stupid thing is, that even if I eat a whole bunch to make sure I have a good reserve, I end up getting hungry again usually faster than if I had eaten less. And I know this from experiencing it time and time again, yet I still do it to myself. Night time is a real hard one for me too. I can not sleep when I am hungry. So if I know I have to get up early the next day and need good sleep, I will eat a bunch just before going to bed to make sure I don't wake up hungry in the middle of the night. That's a fear of mine when I am sleeping over at someone elses house too, or in a motel with no food in the room. I have woken up many times at night with hunger pains and unable to sleep until I eat something which is why I panic so much about it. But what happens, is I have discovered that if I eat a lot before I go to bed, I wake up in the morning feeling like I haven't eaten for days. So hungry! But when I don't eat a lot before bed, if I make it through the night without waking up hungry, then when I wake up in the morning I am not very hungry at all. I have experienced this too many many times. Yet what do I do? I again get in the same panic state before I go to bed worried that I am going to wake up hungry in the middle of the night, so I eat a bunch just before bed. I have been this way since I was about 12. I am 27 now. So no wonder I am 310 pounds now.

Hi all! I am a 27 year old male who is 6' 1" at 310 pounds. For the most part I feel pretty healthy and don't feel that big most of the time. However, I do have consistant high blood pressure, I am on the verge of being diabetic and have diabetes on both sides of my family history, my knees for the past couple years have been hurting, my hips have started hurting, I am pretty sure I have a little sleep apnea (never had a sleep study done) I have absolutely horrendous heart burn all the time due to a hiatal hernia, I have had my gall bladder out and besides all that, I am just sick of being fat. I also have gynecomastia (think I spelled that right) which for those who don't know, is when a guy has breasts the size of a womans. I guess the word actually means "Woman like breasts". I have suffered with that problem since I was about 12. I will not go anywhere without my shirt on because my breasts are so big. Have talked to a doctor about having them reduced and all he could say is "You need to lose weight" Although I'm sure that would help some, it is a proven fact that people with that condition even after losing weight still have the big breasts. But since most doctors seem to not want to do anything with that til you lose weight first, I guess I need to lose the weight for that reason too. I Have tried multiple diet methods, herbalife being one of the most succesful. Lost about 20 pounds when I was using that but after a while it just became obvious that that was not a feasable long term way of doing it and rapidly gained all my weight back. I own and drive a truck which doesn't help any. One thing that bothers me is that I really don't eat a whole lot. But apparently my body absorbs just about everything I do eat. I am also a licensed commercial helicopter pilot, but because of my weight I am so embarassed and unable to pursue that career. It was so embarassing when I was doing my flight training when me and my flight instructor would get in the helicopter together and go to take off, and could barely get the thing off the ground, and then it would be leaning heavily to my side. And you can imagine my embarassment when I had an opportunity to go on a ride along in the Portland Oregon Life flight helicopter and they were getting me all set up to do it, then came the dreaded question "How much do you weigh?" "300" "Oh wow, I am so sorry, but our weight limit for ride alongs is 250 pounds" I felt so rejected and hurt. And this past year. Went to the California State fair. My brother in law and I stood in line for this ride for about an hour and we finally get up to it, I get in the seat and sure enough, the harness thing would not latch shut because I was too FAT!! I am so sick of that crap! I had pretty much gotten to where I was content with my weight. Figured that since gastric bypass surgery was not an option that I wanted to take, and dieting was not the way for me, that I might as well make the most of it and learn to just deal with it. But you can only take so much of those situations where you are too fat before it really gets to you again. The other day I saw a commercial on tv about the lap band. That was the first I had ever heard of one. Did not realize there was a fairly easily reversible weight loss procedure out there like that. When I saw that, I instantly saw a ray of hope. Both my parents are big, my dad is 350 pounds and I only see myself catching up to him and his diabetes real soon and like I said, I am only 27 years old. I have got to do something for my health, and my general way of life. Oh how my life would change if I was about 100 pounds lighter! So since I saw that commercial on tv I have spent a considerable amount of time looking up information on the procedure and looking at hundreds of peoples before and after pictures, just amazed by the results! And have read many many forum discussions about the pros and cons and have pretty much made up my mind that it is the surgery for me. Given my BMI of 40.6 and my above mentioned related health problems I'm just wondering how easy I might be able to get my insurance (Blue Shield of California) to pay for the procedure. Sounds like there might be a good chance. How do you go about getting started? Thinking about going to one of Western Bariatric Institute's info seminars real soon. Guess I would find out there. Anway, glad this resource is here! Look forward to hopefully sharing my success sometime in the next year or so.