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Bravo, Cloe!!!!! And it is good to hear that you are back on track, Mandi!

This is how we Canucks spell. We learn to spell the British way. Our kids have to be trained on US spellings when they compete in spelling bees south of the border. And of course we also pick up on US spelling up here. This can sometimes land us in trouble at school. I have heard of the occasional university student who was slammed by their prof for misspelling a word when in fact they were using the correct US spelling. In my edition, the 1972 edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, judg(e)ment is listed with both spellings but no comment as to whether one is favoured by the States.:phanvan

Although your question wasn't addressed to me, I'll tell you what I eat these days. I eat much smaller portions and I pay much more attention to what I eat as well. I have cut back on cheese and carbs which are things I adore! I try to make a point of using fresh vegetables every day. I started doing this after I started checking prepared food for calorie info and discovered that these foods had very few nutrients. Often I will combine the fresh stuff with the frozen or canned. I have gotten into the habit of eating avocados and eggs - not together of course - because both of these items are very, very rich in nutrients. I make stir-fries and because my appetite is much smaller they last two nights. If I am jonesing for carbs I eat products that are high in fibre like whole wheat pasta and bread. Those little cans of flavoured tuna fish are a really good and quick source of protein. And I eat lo-cal yogurt. I am lucky that I don't like soft drinks or sugar in my tea and coffee and that I do like water. My problem is that I love wine and scotch.:phanvan Oh, and I also take a bunch of vitamins: 2,000 UI of vita D, 1,000 mg of Calcium, vita B6, B12, and folic acid, and a multi-vitamin. Living in the north I really need the Ds during our winter and because I am post-menopausal I also need the calcium. I figure that the others won't hurt and might help.

That sounds like a splendid compliment to BJean and me. Thanks, Devana.

It's kind of ironic, I find, that the bride makes so much fuss because every wedding I have been to is very much like every other wedding and I find them all rather boring, pretentious events. They all blur into each other and are really only special to the bride and the groom and perhaps the parents. The only wedding I did enjoy was my brother's first wedding. This took place outdoors on his in-laws' farm and was very laid back. A city grrl could eat, drink and look at other animals, too. The cheesiest stunt was when my husband's greedy brother came back from being married in Europe, threw a pool party at his house, and asked everyone to bring their own chair, something to drink and a cheque in lieu of a present.:Banane43: The invitations to this were printed off his computer on regular weight paper. I didn't bother showing up although I should have, now that I think of it, leaving my cheque book at home.:heh: If this aunt persists in her mean-spirited ways, Carlene, you and your excluded grandchild could boycott the wedding altogether and treat yourselves to a splendid week long trip, perhaps to Disney World or Mexico.

Grrl, I always suspected that we had a lot in common. As for the tall thing, I am 5'6''. I wish I was taller because then I would look thinner but I'm not.:phanvan

Auntie sounds an insensitive shallow individual. Maybe you can explain this to the child.

While I was off work due to depression I had to be evaluated by a work appointed shrink. He asked me a lot of brain dead questions and then asked me to write something down for him. I wrote: I'm depressed is all, I don't have senile dementia.:help:

I agree with Marjon. It sounds as though there is more going on with you that needs to be sorted out before you have a fill/restriction. It sounds as though that you are eating compulsively for reasons which are either psychological or neurological. This means that you need some additional help. You need to find yourself in the hands of a good and caring psychiatrist - and these are not always that easy to find - for you need meds and talk therapy in order to sort your compulsion out. And a psychiatrist can flag a possible neurological problem if that is the case with you. At a later point, when you are fixed up, you can start working with a dietitian and getting your band slowly filled. This will be a fun and productive time for you. But in the meantime you need to treat yourself to some pre-band work. And don't forget to keep us in the loop.

Your struggles to get the band have been truly epic, grrl. I am floored!

I've never liked weighing myself and gave up on doing it when I was 25. Since then life has been figured out by clothing size issues and it was I could not longer shop in the normo stores that I figured that I needed the band. I finally weighed myself at the age of 57 on the morning of my surgery. I weighed 200 lbs and was wearing size 18W pants. This was last September. Now I wear size 14 pants. I only get weighed when I go for a fill and at my last fill which was last week they told me I weigh 170. If I were you I would throw away the scales, concentrate on eating carefully and healthily, getting in some excercise, and enjoying those wonderful Non Scale Victories which do keep cropping up. You know what I am talking about: clothes getting looser, going down a size or two, getting compliments, moving around without huffing and puffing, etc.... Afterall, we are all in this for the non-scale stuff, aren't we?

LOL! Tell her you are going to pretend to be Barack Obama instead!

I lost 30 lbs at the 6 month mark, going from 200 to 170. Like BJean, I was banded in September. I am very, very happy with my weight loss although it has not been as dramatic as that of many of the others who post on this site. I figure that this was partly due to my age and partly due to the fact that I wasn't starting from as high a number as some of the other women here. My other problem is that I have been unable to excercise except for going for long, long walks since I was banded. I tore my left rotator cuff last summer and now that that has almost healed - after months and months of physiotherapy! - my right rotator cuff is blown. My gym routine was blown, too, since this consisted entirely of ab work (I am one of those women who carries all her fat around her middle) and I needed my arms for this stuff. This was my tough luck but I am so happy to be 30 lbs lighter. I have gone from wearing size 18W pants to wearing a normo size 14. Even though my weight loss has been relatively slow compared to many I am very happy with it. I believe that a slow and steady weight loss may be healthier in the long run. And I was told that the time line for a lapbander to get to target is two years. My surgeon told me that my target was 150 lbs.

Congratulations!!! You are doing fabulously.

Yah grrl, keep us in the loop and good luck to you.

I was cool until I got on the operating table and then I almost wet myself from blind panic. It was a good thing that I hadn't had anything to drink since the night before. And now I am a thinner and happier grrl.

Hey Gaffer, it's always good to hear from another Canuck. I had heard quite some time back that there were a lot of shrines in your province along the trans-Canada highway and that these proliferate in the mountainous areas in the Rockies. If that is true, maybe these shrines are as much a warning to travellers as anything else.

Thanx, BJean, for those kind words. Actually we both got very lucky. He's the beauty (he is always getting hit on by baby bunnies) and I am the brains - except when it comes to most mechanical and computer stuff. He is also a warm, generous and maternal kinda guy. It turns out that I need this; my mum was not good with tiny children and she preferred my brothers. As for the painful childhoods, we both have that in common. I was huge for my age and I was a geek. Then my parents warehoused me in a boarding school but kept both my brothers at home.

Your latest post is an interesting one, Jodie. I am glad that you are going to see what the campus counselling centre has to say. You may have a Borderline Disorder, as was earlier suggested here, or you may be bi-polar, a simple depressive or none of the above - just young and frustrated! By the way, at various times in my life I have been diagnosed with all three. Although my life has been interesting it has been punctuated with more drama than it should have been and this has interfered with my productivity in the two areas that I prize the most, the intellectual and the artistic. If you can begin to sort your issues out now you will be in a better position than I was to enjoy your gifts and your life. Keep on keeping us in the loop.

You might have that right. My husband was picked on all the way through school. He is dyslexic and so didn't do too well in many of his classes. And his mother is German; this did not go down well with the neighbours when he was a kid. The memories of the Second World War were too fresh. He still has a lot of scar tissue from those humiliating times. And thus the desire for a hawg!

My husband dreams of buying a Harley but he is too blonde to be on a motorcycle!

These are really fantastic NSVs. Congratulations, folks! I think the NSVs are interesting because they show things that the scale alone does not show, like the difference in the clothes sizes and blood pressure. And getting compliments is always an excellent NSV, too.

Oh, thank you so much, Dame and Yoda - you little sweetie pants - and you, too, becca, and the rest of you lucky Canuckies! I really, really appreciate belonging to us, eh!:myscared:

Hi to everyone. I was banded last September and I am in my late 50s. I have had little restriction and I have been taking this whole business slowly. The band has helped me big time for my ability to guzzle has been cut. I have been taking care of business, too, for I have been paying attention to those foods which have been going into my body. This means not only looking at the overall carb count but also at the break-down of nutrients. I don't know how it works south of the border but in Canada all processed foods/packaged foods must provide a nutritional facts breakdown. This is how I learned that Gardenay soups will provide 80 calories or so per half box but that while they will be generous on the vitamin A and salt requirements, these soups will only provide a minor amount of fibre and as for the vitamin Cs, Bs, Ds or Es, well, you can forget about it. On the other hand, eggs are brilliant when it comes to comparatively low calorie nutrition providers. Those eggs are loaded with the B complex vitamins and they are packed with protein. I don't have a sweet tooth - I really don't like fruit - and so I have been eating a lot of avocados even though they are relatively high in calories. They are high in potassium and are a good substitute for bananas. I am lazy and so I went through a period of buying bottled salad sauces even though I had lived in France and had learned how to make my own healthier and less fattening dressing. But I am banded now and I am determined to take care of business and so I am back to making my own salad dressing again. You might be interested in this and so here the information which I learned while I lived in France: extra virgin olive oil, lots of dijon mustard, and vinegar to taste. I like to use apple vinegar and I like the taste of hot and sour. If you want to sweeten the taste of this dressing you should add a few drops of balsamic vinegar or some grains of sugar. Lemon juice can be used in conjunction with balsamic vinegar. The deal is that you must use a fine quality oil, good dijon mustard, and an excellent acid as a base. You will beat this together and it will announce itself suitable for your vegetables when you have got the proportions right. Now, this is a basic vinaigrette but if you really want to get funky you can mash up some fresh garlic and introduce this into the sublime slime. Another truly splendid thing which you can do is to introduce a very, very high quality blue cheese into your vinaigrette. This must be an oily, sumptuous and dissolute blue, one that is easily mashed into the mix of extra virgin olive oil, a respectable Dijon mustard, and the right amount of vinegar. Now, a proper vinaigrette is not low-cal but it is devoid of transfats.

Oh, you wild and whacky funster! Where did TOM maintain he was a dreaded Socialist/Communist on any of these threads? And did you not know that communism and socialism are two entirely different economic philosphies? And certainly you must be aware of the malicious manipulation implicit in the above quoted post, nicht war? You have conflated what you believe to be this man's beliefs, and his evident dislike of the current right wing political approach to international affairs by the baby Bush government, as being evidence of his being anti-American and being anti-Christian. In fact this cat has always been anxious to engage in open democratic discourse. Are you insane? Do you really think that TOM is a threat to the sweet civil liberties upon which the United States were founded? On the contrary, his engagement in these big questions emphasizes the moral and intellectual generosity of the Christian West. What do you expect to achieve by demonizing TOM, a fellow Christian, by the above quoted statements? Cusano, you must realise that your fondness for dramatics and for snits and for abuse will never win anyone over to your side. Why do you do the things that you do? wants to know the baffled Green.