green

You are right about wanting what you don't have. All my family are very curly and I am actually the least curly of the bunch. My mum wore her hair in something like an Afro for a number of years. What upset me was being a blondie. Both my parents and one of my brothers were brunettes and I happen to find brunettes most attractive. Unfortunately for me I am a total genetic recessive - a strawberry blondie with blue eyes. And I inherited the fatty gene. :angry It's a bluddy good thing that I inherited charm, intelligence, a good sense of humour, as well as money. :heh: :heh: :heh:

There is no popcorn like movie popcorn. It really is zee best. I used to like it best with the slimey butter product on it. I also had fabulous popcorn in Mexico once. I think that it may have been popped over an open wood fire. It tasted smokey. This was served to us in a lodge in the interior of Mexico. We were the only guests there and we were treated like gold. It was an altogether fine time apart from the fact that they served us fish for our supper. Green loathes fish. Fish is something I can do without! As it happened we had a number of people hovering discreetly around us. When they spied that I wasn't eating my fish they were mortified and scurried off to cook different.

I have got a friend who is a 38 double A. You can't even find a 38 A bra anywhere in my city. They don't make 'em. I made it my mission to look. She has been my friend since we were in our 20s. I used to be very envious of her. She was a tall, willowy blonde with long slender arms and legs, and she could tan - unlike me. She also weighed between 15-20 lbs less than me. Then she hit menopause and turned into her mother just as I turned into mine. Now she is a cobby 200+ and has thick calves. (She is boobfree, though.) I turned into my mother; all my fat went onto my torso and so I retained the delicate calves of a racehorse. My post-menopausal mother used to say about herself that she looked just like a spider with an egg sac and so did I before I was banded. Great arms and legs and a body like a loveseat. blehhhh! :tired

I have no problem with a young person being banded as long as they are aware of the stringent rules which must be followed once you have been banded. I would be inclined to say that 13 might be a little too young and I will explain my reasons for this. According the Canadian Diabetic Society teenage insulin-dependent diabetics tend to go through a period where they bitterly resent their food restrictions and the general care which they must take with their health. They naturally want to live like the rest of their friends and they will eat carelessly and ignore or postpone other aspects of their daily regimen. This behaviour will always lead to sudden collapse into coma-like states and visits to the local ER. Moreover, screwing around with type I diabetes can lead to blindness or amputation. But, nevertheless, teenagers will go through a period of irresponsibility because they are tired of being different and of always having to be careful. Folks who have been banded also have to be careful. We can't drink soda because carbonated drinks are bad for the pouch. So is overeating and so, too, is making a habit of PBing. Gobbling down our food is bad and living on fat and carbs is wrong, too. Banding a young person who is morbidly obese, mature, focussed, and disciplined certainly seems like a good thing to me. Why require that young people suffer through years of yo-yo dieting, feelings of frustration and personal humiliation, as well as finding themselves socially marginalized? I can easily imagine that there are many 16 year olds who are ripe for this operation. In the case of this particular child her psychological profile is very different. She is much younger and she has already been raised to expect that surgery will take care of everything for her. She has, afterall, already gone through the lipo route with the blessing of her parents. Nor is she morbidly obese but only merely a chubbette at this point in time. And she is just entering her teen years; of course she is going to want to drink sodas and eat hamburgers and fries along with the rest of her friends. There is absolutely no way that this young teen is going to adhere to the protein first, vegies and fibre second rule when her pals are inhaling junk food. This means that the band is not going to work for her and she will find herself with an enlarged pouch. She may possibly suffer other, uglier complications through her inevitable inability to comply with Da Rules: slippage, erosion, acid reflux, hiatus hernia.

I am very, very pleased to hear that you have chosen to do this. This sure is a positive step to getting yourself in a good place. I have been seeing a psychologist for some years now and have found my visits with her to be a most useful tool for helping me wade through my own nest of issues. Because I am a major depressive and do have anger issues rooted in my own painful childhood I have seen a number of mental dentists throughout my adult years. Some of them are much better than others. If you find that you are not clicking with this one, do not blame yourself; find a different one. This is my only advice to you, sez Green.

When I was a naive young militant feminist I thought that porn had absolutely no place in a relationship between a man and a woman, that it was an insult to the woman. After working in a man's world (I used to build aircraft) for many, many years as well as doing a lot of reading on the differences (many of these rooted in our evolutionary past) in male and female psychology I have come to change my opinion on porn. While I am still personally kind of uncomfortable around it - I find close-ups of genitals that I am not actively involved with to be kind of icky - many men do like to look. Looking for them is rather like reading sexy novels is for many of us. Many of the guys I worked with looked at porn, ogled the office chicks, and sometimes went to strip clubs...and then they went home to their wives and children who were the only people who really counted in these men's lives. After working there for awhile I became treated as an honorary man, a situation which I found both flattering and unflattering at the same time. :phanvan It certainly lead to some weird experiences - offers to go to the strip joints with the rest of the guys was one, offers to look at their porn collections was another. :tired It was at times like these when I would gently remind them that I am a woman and not really interested, but thanks for thinking of me. Porn is porn and men do enjoy looking at sexy material, even if this is just a cute young girl in a bikini. It seems that this is the way that they are built. It is when porn or any other specific aspect of an individual's sexuality becomes an obsession that a couple's life becomes out of whack and suffering is the result.

Curly hair is complicated.

I seem to be feeling less bad....

Butter, you currently weigh 350+ and you are 39 years old. I mention these two facts not in order to disrespect you but in order to point out to you that you do have a health crisis in your future if you do not take action. Most of us who are members of this site have tried the diet and exercise route and know that this approach works for very, very few people. Yep, you can diet and lose weight and then the moment that you forget to keep up your vigilance all the weight which you have lost plus some bonus pounds will come crowding onto your body. This yo-yo dieting is unhealthy for your body and it is ruinous for your sense of self-respect. If your weight issues are rooted in a problem with portion control, then the lapband is the perfect tool. People who suffer from a sweet tooth do have more problems with losing weight via the band but even so they will lose if they are prepared to go to war against all things sweet. Certainly lapband surgery is much less invasive than any of the other forms of weight loss surgery. Less invasive means faster recovery time and lower risk of death on the operating table. These are plusses in my view. You will have to relearn how to eat which is a good thing, and some people claim that the weight loss which one experiences through lapband surgery is not as fast. It is my opinion that learning how to eat safely and healthily is a very good thing and I figure that a slower rate of weight loss is easier on your body, on its organs. As you can see, I am all for the lapband. My own experience has been a very positive one. I would advise you to poke around this website, do read, and do keep on asking questions. Best of luck to ya, eh.

Erectile dysfunction spam is way worse in my opinion. A morning coffee, a handful of vitamins and anti-depressants, etc, and some idiot telling you that your life would be oh so much happier if your mate's apparatus was longer and harder.... Now if they were hustling a quickie cure for acid reflux, heart disease, lung cancer, I might, possibly might be interested. *cough* All you want to tell these bozos is fork erff! but if you mail them back you are likely to find yourself with an ugly little virus.

I am a fan of the Frenchies because these were what my parents served us on special occasions when we were young. Then I spent 3 years living in France, 2 of these with a mate, a French guy who had deep pockets and a real affection for wine. During this period I was exposed to some truly magnificient wine, stuff which was expensive and difficult to obtain by French standards. I left France back in the summer of 1984 and after suffering some initial degree of grief about returning to Toronto in order to resume my real life I finally did calm down and I rightfully realised that life in Toronto can be very bluddy wonderful. Nevertheless, I still do find myself pawing and scratching at the vitrines behind which Vintages houses the really good stuff. You see, there had been a day when I had had the privilege of being able to guzzle that stuff.

I agree with Kat. The notion that the mother seems to hold, that the kid can treat her band like an automatic purging device - if she eats too much she will vomit it up - is entirely against the band rules of course. This behaviour will lead to careless eating habits, a stretched pouch, band slippage and possible erosion. So what is going to be next for that young girl? A gastric bypass?!? Not only is this mother horribly ill-informed, it appears that she has no desire to be well-informed. (Her unwillingness to have the child go through a psych evaluation, etc indicates this.) As we all know, following the band rules is tough even for motivated and informed adults. Here we've got a mother and a kid who has just entered her teen years who both seem to believe that surgeries are the magic solution. This is a disaster in the making. Unlike Kelliebelly I do hope they do consult this site - I have learned so very much about the band thanks to LBT and I do believe that this site is a most valuable resource for all banded people - and I would personally be comfortable if they read our comments concerning their current approach to weight loss. I would hope that both the girl and her mum might successfully sort through any evidence of malice and irritation displayed twowards then on this thread in order to focus on the bigger issues associated with obesity and with weight loss.

My favourites are the Frenchies, particularly those from Bordeaux, but I am not too fussy really. I like them dry and I like them to come with French passports is all.

I saw my doc at 12:15 and croaked to her that everything was as bad as ever. She had seemed surprised that the asthma meds that she had put me on weren't curbing the coughing. I grumpily said that that was because it's due to acid reflux. She then listened to my lungs and had me go for an X-ray. It turns out I have bronchitis and now I am on antibiotics. She also decided to switch my reflux meds to Nexium. I then spent the next hour and a half killing time by walking around downtown before going to my appt for a defill. Man, was it hot! Fortunately I didn't see anything I wanted to buy. And fortunately I really love walking. It is my favourite form of exercise. Nevertheless, I did arrive 15 minutes early for my appt and found the waiting room fairly full of overweight women sipping on water. I asked them when they had their surgery and we all ended having a pleasant discussion about the band. There were, however, a couple of thin women sitting in another part of the room who were keeping to themselves. As it happened, I was mentioning that I was in for a defill just as the fill nurse walked in the door and she said "defill? Come with me." Well, it seems that the skinny people were also in for a defill and they were really pissed off to see me about to be taken out of turn. I told the nurse that it was true that they were first in line and that I had arrived early for my appointment. They were extremely nasty to her and had bitched that they had been kept waiting 3 minutes past their appt time so by the time she was ready to see me she was a little shaken up by the mauling they had given her. She kept telling me what a nice person I was! She was surprised to hear that I wanted to be emptied out and she managed to get 5 cc out of the 6.5 that was in there. Now I have got to wait and see and trust that my life will return to normal. Here's hoping....... Oh, and my drug plan won't cover the cost of Nexium without an explanation from my doctor. So I am still on omeprazole for the moment.

I was banded last September and until recently I have had no problems. Though my weight loss was slower than some - I started at a lower BMI (which also has its difficulties as we are slower to lose) and I am an older bandster - I reached my goal weight and BMI in less than a calendar year. My current BMI is 23.8 and I weigh 147.5. I know this because I requested a completed defill this afternoon. It was about 2.5 months ago that I started to suffer from acid reflux. Because I have never, ever had any problems with my digestive tract it took me and my doctor quite awhile to figure this out. It took even longer for her to place me on a regime of prescription meds and for these to fail to make a dent in my symptoms before I figured that maybe I should shoot for a temporary defill. As of today I am defilled, on antibiotics, and still staying the course with the prescribed antacid stuff. I hope this works.

Japan's domestic economy is run on mom and pop stores. Unemployment is extremely low and all goods, including such local brand names as Sony, Hitachi, Yamaha etc, are very expensive in Japan. This is why Japan has made it impossible for U.S. big box mass retail stores to gain a domestic foothold. Many American and Canadian business types complain bitterly about what they see as an unfairly protectionist attitude on the part of Japan. Of cource this is because they see the glowing successes which such companies as Sony, Fuji, Honda have achieved in the west and they figure that they are owed a crack at Japan. This theory might be described as the "tit for tat" school of economics and the argument does have a lot of merit. The thing is that Japan has chosen to drive its internal economy on the mom & pop approach. This means that just about everyone will have the honour of having a role, a role which permits the family to honourably support themselves, in society. It also means that everyone pays through the snout for all their goods and services. Life is expensive in Japan. There are fewer rich people and there is less waste for this is not a lavish society. Your average middle class Japanese works harder, works longer hours, and lives in a much, much smaller crib than we who live in the States or Canada do. At the same time there is far less disparity percentage-wise between the paycheck of a worker, his manager, and the CEO of a Japanese company. I find myself writing about this in response to some of the above comments concerning Walmart and this company's ability to smother local economies.

If you find that you feel hungry then you likely need more fill.

The mother seems like a flake with shallow values. This is not going to help that kid.

From all that I have read on this site PCOS can really complicate weight loss. By using the search option on the bar at the top of this page and typing in PCOS you will be able to call up all the past threads which discuss the problems which individuals with PCOS can run into.

I use to gross out my ex-husband by calling them pus cakes. :heh:

I went to Expo '67 with some of the senior grrls from my boarding school. We were chaparoned by nuns and slept in the rec hall in a church in downtown Montreal. A few of us picked up some boys and arranged to sneak out at midnight to meet up with them. The necking sessions we had were great but ended up with all of us being suspended for a week. Later on that fall I got expelled for smoking dope. My father responded by insisting that I get my "hippie" hair cut off.

Oh, I have been really, really sick with this for the past couple of months (it took me awhile to figure out that it was acid reflux, eh) in spite of taking a bunch of meds. I have also developed a hiatus hernia! I am suffering but am unhappy about the defill because I am now at goal. I hope I don't gain weight and that I can get a refill soon.

Many, many years ago I read about a study which described the same difference in behaviour between thin people and fat people as your husband describes. The researchers claimed that they found that fat people are far more economical in their movements.

I was banded last September and I am at goal but I recently developed acid reflux and this is still out of control and so today I am going in for a complete defill. Another LBTer mentioned that this was what his lapband surgeon advised in his case. Cruising on empty is going to be very weird. I am hoping that my new eating habits will help me out during this empty period. Still, I am very, very nervous.

My defill appt is for 3 PM. I am really hoping that this will work. I am really suffering from acid reflux, my throat hurts all the time, I cough, and now I sound like a wiseguy when I talk. :omg: I will fill you in on the results. :ranger: I guess it will take a few days....