FunnyDuddies

I love the one in the basket. That is a great shot. I think if you do the one of the hands holding the baby you ought to crop it a bit to have the baby fill the pic. Really bring focus to it. Fabulous stuff!!

Tricia you are killin me with to emoticons LOL

We love most types of music. I think it just depends on what is going on. Like now I am working, so I have classical playing in the background. We LOVE techno, hip hop, and rap for in the car, and dancing. Classic rock and oldies always make me smile when I need a pickme up. And I listen to really hard rock when I clean the house. LOL

You know we just got a weight bench and heavy bag at sports authority. While I was in there they had some pretty good sales going on. You might want to check them out! And I know they have stuff for bigger sizes. Do not go to sears... their stuff is not only way overpriced, but total crap! LOL

I hear ya. I had the week from hell last week with family illness and work craziness (100+ hours in one week of work ) and other stressors. And for the first time I emotionally ate. I couldn't believe it!! And I felt so sick, and so depressed after. It is just really hard to break out of that once you have done it too. I think the idea of working out is a good one. it releases endorphines to help make you feel better. Also, go for a walk in the sunshine. Be careful!! you and I have the same coloring...and I know you would burn in 2 seconds LOL But the Vitamin D from the sun really can lift your spirits. I hope this next week goes a bit better, and you mom is in my thoughts.

I drink between a gallon to a gallon and a half a day. It has cleared my skin, and my weight loss is steady. When I stop drinking water, my weight loss stalls.

Ok, I think maybe you need to not compare yourself to other people on the board for a while. Or if you are, then you need to do exactly what they are doing. Telly has had some amazing losses! Have you also seen that she has had some bad weeks? She also bikes like 13 miles a day!!! Are you doing that? Don't compare. You will make yourself crazy. If I were you I would do some studying on physiology and how the human body reacts to caloric intake and physical output. Find your Base Metabolic Rate. Compare that to your caloric intake. I agree with Wheets that 40% carbs seems a little high. I also agree with you that sugar should stay out of your diet. Good for you!! Up your liquids, and try for a gallon a day instead of a half gallon. Workout consistently. If not everyday, set a time and date and stick to it. Don't look at calories burned. Esp if you are reading it off of the machine. Those are never accurate. Focus on time. 15 minutes is good. 30 minutes burns 3x the calories that 15 minutes does though. And an hour burns even more. Its because of how the body works to burn fat for fuel. Also, try to not eat before a workout. Tht way the energy that your body needs for the workout will come from your fat...not from your lunch. Eat a half hour to an hour after. And drink drink drink. I also have found that my weight plateaus when I don't get a lot of sleep. Go figure. Try to get in you 8 hours of sleep each night. The band is not a fix all. You still have to work it. But it sounds like you are on the right track, and just having some early struggles. Congratz on your weight loss so far!! You can do this, just give it some time.

This is a nice thread. For me, my embarassment is over the weakness that made me fat. Without going into details, I just need to get rid of the fat to get rid of that part of my past. I hold on to the fat and don't get rid of it because I have been weak on facing the issue. It is a tough struggle. I am having the surgery to assist me in losing that part of my past and moving on. Without the surgery I will more likely stumble along the way, making myself feel like I have yet again failed over conquring this incident. There comes a point where for most people it is just too long a row to hoe, too hard a hill to climb. I wish there was not this stigma of WLS being the "easy way out". Not only is it not an easy way out, but it is a valuable tool for people to gain back the self confidence we all had when we were younger. Remember the times when you were a kid. No cares in the world except for maybe what you wanted for christmas, what you were going to play that day. Except for maybe school LOL Ah, I wish I were back in those times again. And every little struggle that I succeed in dealing with brings me closer to that bliss again. I see WLS as one way of conquring this struggle.

I would have to say to this, then, that those people are the exception to the rule. Just because you know a select few with this view on the pro-life side does not mean we all feel this way. I myself volunteer time at a clinic where counselors, doctors and nurse, along with post abortion parents, give time and money to teen mothers, and unfortunate mothers who cannot afford to take care of a child. There are MANY clinics like this throughout the united states. And many many families willing to take in a child who might otherwaise be killed. And yes, this is a logical statement. Yours is also a logical statement. But they are both logical statements based wholey on our particular viewpoints. Lets not get into each other's debating styles. Because you happen to be debating with a two year champ :heh: Now lets look closely at some of the things you have heard from your family. I, for one, do not condone and absolutely think it is horrible that abortion clinics have been bombed, that providers have been shot or shot at, and that any attacks have been carried out on these people. But I understand it. In the minds of these people who carry out such actions you must understand that these people see what these doctors are doing is mass murder. If a government official decided that your family was not good enough to be on this earth any longer, and there were thousands of people backing up his view points on this, wouldn't you do everything in your power to stop the murder of your family members? Even if your last resort came down to taking the lives of the people carrying out this act? I know that if someone tried to kill an innocent I would gladly put my life, and theirs, on the line to see that it stops. This is the thinking of these people. Just as pro-abortionists claim that it is ok to kill the child to save the mother's life. Take one life to save another. You must look at it from their viewpoint. Again, I do not condone nor agree with this tactic. I believe that it is something that should be solved on a govt. level rather than on a person to person level. I am a very "small govt" type of person. And I know there are a lot of conservatives that actually agree with pro-choice movements because of the "my body, my choice" notion. Again, while I don't agree with it, I understand. I would love for there to be fewer laws that affect my body and my choices. But in this case we are not talking about my body. Did you know that a baby, while still in the mother, is in all clinical terms a parasite? the umbilical cord is not attached to the mother. It is attached to the placenta. The placenta is not part of the mother either. It is part of the baby. The placenta pulls blood from the mother's system and nurishes the baby, while also removing waste from the the system. Everything is encapsulated. Nothing is ever part of the mother. The baby is living off of the blood of the mother, just as a tick would. Or a virus. It is a parasite. Knowing this, you cannot say that the baby, while it does reside within the woman, is actually part of the mother. It simply feeds off of the mother until it can survive outside of the womb. The idea that if you cut it off of the mother it cannot survive is true, but that goes without saying for any human being regardless of age when cutoff from food and air. It will die. And Gadgetlady, I thank you. I do have resources that I use quite frequently. I feel that doing the work I do helps me to cope with the choice I made in the past, though I know I will never be truly over it. I have read the statistics of the climb in family child abuse with regards to post abortion parents. It is sad and I see it a lot in the clinic where I volunteer my time.

I find it very interesting that as a christian you would even HINT to professing to know the mind of God. And as a christian...here's a thought. Better safe than sorry!! None of us know!! None of us REALLY know. Doctors don't know, lobbyists don't know, the 14 year old that got knocked up by her boyfriend doesn't know, and no one on this board knows. ONLY GOD KNOWS! So is it murder to abort a baby? Wouldn't it just be smart to play it on the safe side, have the baby, and give it to a family that wants a child of their own? There really are plenty of those out there. Why is it that whenever the abortion debate is brought up it is nothing but people bitching about the "carriers" potential death, or the rape of a woman. These make up for less than 1% of all abortion situations. The majority of what makes up all abortion cases are 14-17 year olds who got pregnant screwing around when they shouldn't have been. And we have removed all consequences of that. Shoot, solve the AIDS crisis and I realy shouldn't have a problem with dressing my daughter up like a slut and sending her out on her first date at the age of 12. I mean come on. Lets look at the real picture here. Abortion is used by stupid little girls who make stupid mistakes because they are not taught to take responsibility for their actions. I know. I was one of them. And Gagetlady is correct. I am broken from it. I pray about it every day of my life. You know when it hit me the hardest. When I was pregnant with my daughter. During my first pregnancy I heard all the bullshit about it not being a human, not being alive, not having a soul. I bought into it. Then I was pregnant with my daughter. And at 5 months I could feel her inside of me. Responding to my emotions, what I ate, what music was playing in the car, what I read to her before I went to sleep. And it killed me to know that I destoyed a child of mine. I killed my own child. Now lets get back to the whole murder idea and this "keep your laws off my body" notion. This human being, this person maybe attached to you, but the heart beats on a different scale, it eats and digests seperately. Clinically and scientifically that means it is a seperate entity. That means that it is not really "your body" but instead a second body living within your body. Now that this is established, and we do not know the mind of God or when a life truly begins, why do we as a society feel it is perfectly alright to support the possible murder of young children? We all cringe at the notion of someone killing a child after it is born. It is horrific. It is nightly news and people are in shock. But it is not wrong for us to take a life just as innocent because of where it resides? And 99% of the time it is for inconvinience sake. So that we can still go out on a firday night. So we can not take time off from school before adopting the kid out and then continuing our education. So we can keep from having that embarassing conversation with the parents about how you just couldn't keep it in your pants cause Jimmy is the most popular guy in school. Here's mine. So you wouldn't be forcing your boyfriend to propose to you because when he did it, by golly you wanted it to be from the heart. Not out of obligation. Boy was I stupid. I actually killed my own kid so that I could be sure my husband proposed to me for all the right reasons.

This weekend was great!! I refrained from eating cake, my stomach from this diet is SOOO small that I was eating bandster portions all weekend. It felt wonderful. And I couldn't wear my favorite corset to the club last night because IT WAS TOO BIG!!!! ahahahahahahaha! Depression gone! LOL

I think that morality and spirituality are totally fused. Keep in mind I did not say religion. Lets take away the boundaries for a moment. Who sets your morals without spirituality. You just want to be a good person? Who defines good? Where did you learn what "good" and "bad" is? Without a higher teaching from somewhere it could be completely ok to take from one because of your need. We have certainly seen that as God is removed from our govt and everyday lives more and more that it is becoming much more common place to take from the 'haves' to give to the 'have nots'. To not cheat means to not deceive or lie. To not bare false witness. To not cause harm to someone in a non physical way. To protect inocence is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Children, mental ill, the infirm, the aged. Keep them protected, and help guide them so that they do not bring harm onto themselves.

Our pastor had us take these tests before we started premarital counselling with him. It was quite interesting. While I do agree that opposites attract I think a base or core similarity is essential for raising a family. Just because you need to have a continuity in your rules and guidelines and how the household is setup. Dh and I are VERY opposite in personality. He is shy, quiet, reserved, strong willed, antisocial, etc. I am not LOL but our core fundamentals are very similar. we have the same religious faith, believe kids should be raised the same way, believe the roles in the household are set and firm, feel the same about dicipline, and have the same goals for our future. We also made sure that this was all agreed on and understood before getting married. It was so important to us because we see more and more couples around us getting married now days with absolutely no regard for how well they are going to get along when the going gets tough.

The constitution may be a living document, but that does not mean that the ideals laid down in them change due to modern interpretation of the english language. It just means that we as a country have the ability to change it. It can be rewritten. But the original meanings of its ideals still should stand true as they were originally intended. You cannot take a document and interpret it in such a way to fit your thoughts and feelings or to suit your argument. You can simply take a document the way it is written and "glean your own understanding of it". Which by the way can be present or past tense. :Banane10: The issue of seperation of church and state was actually originally brought up in a lawsuit of all things. Everson v. Board of Education in 1947 where some guy thought his taxes shouldn't go to bussing kids to his kids school and a christian private school. What the constitution actually guarantees us is that the govt will never put itself in a situation where it controls any part of our religion. It was written in a time when the founding fathers were running from the church of england. Of course...they would make one of the most important parts of the constitution the guarantee that such a governing body would never be formed again. Thats all. Just freedom of religion. It did not and does not state anywhere that religion would not have some sort of influence. Our base laws are formed on the basic teachings of most major religions. Don't kill, don't cheat, don't steal, don't harm, protect innocence, etc. Without religion you would not have most of these laws. Personally I like these laws :Banane09:

linds and emilee thank you. I did do something nice for myself. I went out and bought a new goal outfit. a little leather club dress. hehehe i will wear it one day. LOL

Honestly if DH didn't have the same views, I think I'd kill him in his sleep :heh: LOL We bicker over politics as it is, and we are damn near exactly the same in thinking. lol

i think just the soup recipe alone is a great recipe for whenever you are hungry. even if you don't follow the diet. it is a great low cal filling soup.

OMG those were funny. I have a whole bunch. Lemme go find em.

sounds weird...but i turn on my techno music and i dance its a great workout. andit is why i win all the dancin contests LOL

It has been hard. In fact it is because my aunt died from this specific type of cancer that I told my friend to get in and get checked. When she told me what the symptoms were, I knew right away she needed to get in.

OMG this thread has me laughing so much. My kids call their privates their "potty". And oh boy....my son won't stop touching his potty. LOL he is 3. And still sits to pee. We haven't even gotten to the standing stage yet. but if he doesn't have 2 or 3 layers on over it, his hands are on it. It is so embarassing. LOL DH looks at me and says "is something wrong with him?" I tell him no...you did that too! He denies it. I finally called his mom and made his mom tell him that yep! You did it too son!

hehehe i am at a point in my life where i really don't care what people think of my views. I have found this is only one of the few things I have total control over. and the way i figure it...if you can't be my friend because of how i vote or how i pray, then you weren't the type of friend i want. Don't be a hater!! LOL I love all ya liberals! hehehehe

Ok...since we have broken away from the original intent of this thread, and are openly discussing this. Lets hear from the raving right wing religious fanatic. Tired Old Man, you mentioned that illiterate folk are more likely to become criminals. This probably comes down to a few very specific points. *Illiterates more than likely have no money because they cannot get a job. So they have to resort to crime to earn a living. Ok. I get that. Not a good thing, but I understand the cause and effect. *Illiterates more than likely are illiterate because they did not attend the classes that they should have when they were children. Instead they were out hanging out with all the other losers more than likely getting into trouble, and raising hell, and starting their life of crime early. Once in that life, it is hard to get out of it. Ok. I get that too. So it seems to me the second would actually be the cause for the first as well. Ok. So lets look at that closely. Kids not being in school when they are supposed to be. What causes this? Its not the teachers. The fact that schools don't have enough colored pencils. the fact that the band doesn't have enough drum sets and flutes. It has to do with no one enforcing that these kids have to be in school. And don't try and say "Well they just don't want to be there". No one wants to be in school when you are a kid. You don't really appreciate school until you get older. The accountability of the parents are not there. They are not forcing their kids to get into that school house every day. Truancy is not punished any longer. Security around campuses is so relaxed, it takes nothing to get out of class, or even the whole school day. We can even go deeper and look at the serious offenders here. Lots of people will say "Most of them have no father's or come from drug addicted households." OKAY! Why are these people allowed to breed? Why are we not taking crack babies away from crack mothers? Why do we feel that rehabilitation of the mother will cure the problems with the child? It seems to me there are a lot of things that could be done at the root of the problem. Like taking children from drug homes. Enforcing the truancy laws. Forcing these kids into school to make something of themselves. We can't sit back and let that continue to go on, and then try to put a bandaid on the pile of problems when they adults end up in prison for killing a family of 4 because they caught someone breaking into their house for a tv and a turkey sandwich. There is no rehabilitation at that point. You are a lost cause at that point. There is no Go. No 200 bucks. You kill someone...you die. You touch a kid, you spend the rest of your life in jail. You steal, you don't get a second chance. You spend a lot of time in prison. I hate taxes, but I will gladly spend 50% of my hard earned paycheck to fund jails and prisons to hold all of these people. And lets start over and begin with the youth we have today. The rest are lost causes. We need to start from scratch, look at the root of the problem and try to fix the future. Ok...let the flaming begin. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*runs for the GOP local headquarters to hide under the desk* jeez. I seem a bit outnumbered. LOL remind me never to get into a political discussion with y'all. LOL

Thanks dawg. Congratz on your WL!! You have done so well. You are inspirational. Truely. Tell pnut i miss her. Its her fault i am depressed. LOL