Llyra

Weird? I think you are a genius. Heck yeah, wear your heaviest clothes and all the gold jewelry you can stand up under for the weighing. This arbitrary discrimination of anyone under 40 BMI is for the birds. God bless my insurance for finally approving my surgery at 36 BMI (or was it 35 or 37? Under 40 anyway). My arthritis is much improved and me GERD is gone. Hang in there, Fissy, and advocate for yourself for all you are worth.

Typical American mongrel: Scots-Irish and Irish being the largest contributers of genes, with a strong line of Welsh, a few genuine Sassenachs, and a couple of lines further back of French, Dutch, African, a couple Amerindian tribes, and heaven only knows what else: that's as many as I can determine via genealogy since 1635. That being said, when my children started school, I told them that when officially asked their ethnicity is AMERICAN and their race is HUMAN, and if any bureaucrat wanted to press the matter, to send them to me.

My scale, which I've used for years and is exactly two pounds lighter than the doc's scale.

Gracious, Bob, don't hold back- tell us how you really feel. Growing Support for "Ground Zero Mosque" Among Family of 9/11 Victims - Technorati Politics I don't think that was the smartest choice of location for a mosque given the emotions left over from 9-11, but either we support freedom of religion or we don't. Cherry picking who gets to build what where means we don't.

Y'know, kiddo, you may not mean it the way it comes across, but that's a tacky request. You going to check her out and let her know whether or not her appearance is against her? Pppphhhtttt! Assertiveness is not a guarentee of success, but you've made a good start- congratulations! Keep in mind the world is full of men and the cute ones are not always the interesting ones. :biggrin:

Portion downsizing is also key for me. Somethings I've given up because they are unpleasant to eat since I got banded (french fries, for example, and soft bread) but I continue to eat essentially whatever I want as long as I keep the amounts under control. Melted fat free cheese is like eating soft tar off the street on a hot day. Yuck.

Mine was delighted to discover I was considering the surgery and my BMI was 35 or 36- don't recall which. She'd watched me lose and regain a significant amount of weight several times over the years and understood what I was up against. My surgeon tells me that people who have between 60 and 80 pounds to lose do especially well with the lap band, I'd find another family doctor, preferably one with some understanding of weight issues and co-morbidities. I don't put up with people yelling at me, especially if I am paying them.

I'd come back and see what people said, too. Part of saying good-bye is paying attention to the good-byes said in return. Bye, Patty. May good things come to you.

Sounds like a gem of a boss. Did s/he give you sick time for the hernia repair recovery period?

Oh, good grief, what an experience. Well, nil illegitimus non carborundum: don't let the bastards get you down. I'm glad you're still able to have the surgery. I had to meet with the nutritionist three times for counseling before I met with the doctor, but that was part of insurance requirements. WMC in Casper has an outstanding program and followup support system- sounds like it is non-existent where you are. It's good you have your twin for support!

Hang in there! Don't give up the ship! It's darkest before the dawn! Excelsior! (Have you ever thought about the number of sayings we have to encourage people?) I don't blame you for being totally bummed, but you have lost 35 pounds, which is nothing to sneeze at. Keep the faith- the best is yet to come.

I had a tummy tuck in 1999 in conjunction with some other surgeries and my muscles were involved. It hurt like holy hell and no, I did not feel like sitting at a desk for several hours three days later. I asked a friend who had a non-muscular-involvement tummy tuck done and she said it hurt like holy hell and no she wouldn't want to sit at a desk three days later. That being said, I have never had a moment's regret about having the tuck. It was worth every moment of discomfort and inconvenience. Good luck to you!

Up one and a half pounds this week. I suspect half is due to the amount of ice cream I ate during this hot week and the other half is the water I am retaining, also due to the heat. My next goal is 200 by Labor Day with 4.5 pounds to go. I think I can do it and if I don't make it by Labor Day, surely the week after. I am not going to obsess. I am not going to obsess. I am not going to... There is something about approaching a goal that panics me into making decisions that look calculated for failure. I can't think of the number of times I have been within a few pounds of a long-desired goal only to have my weight creep steadily upward. Obviously there is no one around to sabotage me but myself and I wonder why on earth I do it. Time to speak firmly but lovingly to myself: Look, Llyra, honey, I think you are getting into a panic because obtaining something you want very much implies that you can also lose that thing once you have it. Is it really less painful to give up within site of a goal and watch it slip away than it is to obtain that goal and fear eventually losing it? I know, I know, this is a lifelong pattern with you in everything from business success to weight loss success: you get within inches of the top of the heap and voluntarily slide back down. Well, there is no reason why you can't change a pattern that you've outgrown and that serves no purpose except to frustrate you. It's not like dipping below 200 pounds is something you've never done before- did it hurt the other times you did it? No, it felt pretty good. The very idea also induces a panicky fear of not being able to reach the goal and that is what you need to deal with now. Okay. Take a deep breath. Blow it out. Another. Blow. One more. And- ahhhhhhhhhh. You can do it the same way you've done other things: one step at a time. The step for tonight is to be done eating for the day. That's all. Just be done eating for today. Tomorrow you can have yogurt, fruit and oatmeal for breakfast, salad with cheese and nuts for lunch, and hmmm, maybe antelope stew for dinner with a couple of crackers and more fruit for a snack if you need it. Okay. Today is taken care of, tomorrow is planned. Take another deep breath, let it out, and go on with your evening entertainment. You don't even need to think of food or weight until tomorrow morning. More importantly, you don't need to think about what you weighed this morning again. The scale is closed until next Monday morning. The numbers will change in your favor if you follow through with good choices, just as you've been doing for several months now. You can do it- you have done it. This is just a small blip on the radar of your life that will soon be forgotten. It is not a blot on your soul.

Three weeks before my 55th birthday. Add me to the geriatric group.:confused:

I love oatmeal. I make plain with some sweet-and-lo artificial sweetner or add some no fat sugarfree chocolate mix to it. Raisins are a nice addition if you chew them well, as is any kind of fresh fruit or yoghurt. I make the whole oatmeal but don't cook it to mush.

With the input of responsible medical personnel, each person makes a choice based on her/his best interests. There is no magic number that makes the surgery acceptable or unacceptable. That a poll on the matter exists is distasteful.

Part of what I value about the lapband is the decrease in pleasure eating brings. Sometimes it bugs me, but those times are less frequent than they were at first. I've NEVER been able to eat the way normal people do, so this is just a new and more useful way of not being able to eat "normally." I can still eat an occasional piece of coconut cream pie- just not the entire 8" pie! :biggrin:

You are wrong, you know. They are just not yearning for a relationship with a god of vengeance, destruction, and unfathomable contridictions as described in your posts. There are many ways to the Great Spirit, but I understand that Christians only acknowledge their own. And once again, as long as nothing is legislated in favor of Christianity and against the rest of us, that is fine with me. If asked privately and repectfully about my beliefs, I might share them, but I believe the interaction between the Great Spirit and an individual is sacred and not something to spoken of lightly in a forum as a subject for debate. Dear Patty, thank you for your input and explanation of what you believe. I will bow out of the debate now with best wishes to you and everyone who has contributed to the discussion. Blessings on you all. Llyra

Was size 20-22 pants, now size 16-18. Was size 2-3x tops, now L-XL. 37 pounds down, approximately 40 to go.

Exactly a year has passed since I first applied the idea of lap band surgery to myself. I don't recall what put it into my head, but when I went to see my doctor for my annual check-up, I asked her casually what she though of bariatric surgery. Dr. Renee favors conservative treatment in most cases, which suits me fine, and I expected her to be lukewarm at best about weight loss surgery. When she promptly answered, "You are a perfect candidate for the surgery and I will fill out any papers you need in order to arrange it," I nearly fell off the examining table. She went on to tell me the differences between gastric bypass and lapbanding, both available in Casper via three excellent surgeons. She left the final choice up to me, but explained she thought lap banding was the best option since it involved less extensive surgery and had fewer risks. I left her office with a list of surgeons, instructions to call the Wyoming Medical Center Weight Loss Program, and her firm support in whatever decision I made. RN Deb Miller was in charge of the WMC Weight Loss program at the time and was the advocate that everyone hopes for when entering a life-changing and frightening new endeavor. She explained the program, the paperwork, the procedure, and WMC's policy on borderline cases such as myself. My BMI was not the suggested 40 and I had less than 100 pounds to lose, but I had arthritis, joint pain, GERD, and a family history of DM that strikes people at about age 62 (I am 55). Also weighing in opn the side of approval: my husband works for WMC and the hospital is growing more interested in allowing the surgery in hopes of reducing insurance costs down the line for weight-related co-morbidities. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I filled out the first paperwork, crossed my fingers and plunged into the preliminaries. Insurance required me to meet with the hospital dietician once a month for three months to discuss pre-op and post-op diets. Deb warned me that missing a single meeting with the dietician had been used as grounds to disapprove surgery. I appeared at my appointments faithfully, attended the informational program for perspective clients, read all the literature, checked out the short course online, and met with the surgeon I chose. The first meeting with Dr. Todd Beckstedt was brief and essentially consisted of "You got any questions?" and "You sure you want to do this? Okay, then." My questions had been answered via my research and it seemed the main purpose of shelling out the money for this visit was in order for his business manager to spell out how much more money I would be shelling out and how payment was arranged. I was privately dismayed at how long the preliminaries stretched out before the paperwork could even be submitted to the insurance company. I underwent a number of lab tests, medical exams, and psychiatric testing, all of which the insurance agreed to pay for, even if the procedure was ultimately denied. I had hoped to be able to have the surgery in December, but it quickly became obvious that was not going to happened. I resigned myself to the slow turning of the bureacracy. The psychiatric exam tickled my fancy: was I sane enough to want to lose weight? Was I stable enough to follow through with the program? Did I have the brains God gave a sagebrush? I went for my oral psych exam and several times found myself answering a question with some version of, 'I know the answer you are looking for is A but I really think B because..." When I went back to discuss the results of this exam with the doctor, I asked her if I was psychotic, neurotic or had some other kind of deadly -tic. She answered, "No, but you are unconventional." My, I was happy to have professionally confirmed what my family, friends, business associates, and I have known for many years. Once the psych exam was done, I turned in my paperwork to Deb and the wait began. It dragged on through January and well into February, a much longer time than it generally takes for surgery to be approved. I decided I was going to be denied because I was twenty pounds too light and began to wonder if I needed to increase my weight to the prerequisite 260 pounds i order to be approved (more even than I had weighed nine and a half months into carrying a ten andf a half pound baby). When Deb called to tell me the procedure had been approved, I think she was more excited than I was because she is a dear person who cares about all her patients and she had also decided I was about to be denied. I thanked her for the call and faced the next set of hurdles I needed to jump. We set a surgery date of March 3, 2010, I arranged for a couple of days off work for unspecified gastric surgery, and began my two week liquid diet. I managed to stay on the liquid diet without a great deal of trouble, but I was so sick of sweet gunk like Ensure and Boost by the time I was done that it is hard to look a chocolate liquid in the bottletop to this day. As I've written before, I recall essentially nothing of the day I went in for surgery or the day or two after- only that ghastly tray of bland, inedible (okay, undrinkable) hospital fare that was presented as my first post-surgical meal. I stayed on liquids a few days, then was given permission to eat whatever I wished as long as I chewed the hell out of it and could keep it down. I had little or no trouble with this first solid food and never has a bite of baked potato tasted so good as that first post-liquid spud. I actually ended up on a mostly liquid diet for longer than expected since I went to Texas to visit a friend who was recovering from chemotherapy and radiation for throat cancer. He was limited to Ensure-like fare and though he had real food for me, I was certainly not going to eat pork chops while he sat across the table from me sipping one of those ghastly meal substitutes. We drank the nasty stuff companionably for the several days I was there, though I did bring in some grapes and strawberries to supplement my meals. I didn't lose much weight prior to the pre-op liquid diet and didn't lose much more on the liquid diet. Shoot, I thought for a while I was going to have to gain weight in order to be approved, so why bother? My first fill was posphoned by a couple of weeks due to my trip to Texas and didn't have a lot of effect on me. The second fill was better- hooray! Restriction achieved. This summer I've gradually adjusted to my new eating habits and requirments. Fortunately foe me, my doctor is less strict than many I've read about in terms of what I can injest and when. Three meals at designated times of the day simply do not work for me; I am a grazer. Food too early in the morning makes me sick; I start feeding myself around eleven o'clock and by late evening, I've got my food in for the day. I don't count calories, either. I started using the Weight Watchers point system that worked well for me in the past, but the endless task of writing down every ort of food just infuriated me- been there, done that, regained the weight. As much as anything, I want to learn to live like a normal person and not think of food every second of every day. I ask myself "Am I hungry or just bored/sad/irritated/procrastinating/fill in the blank?" If the answer is "hungry", I eat what I want and stop when I'm no longer hungry. I was thrilled the first time I couldn't finish a restaurant meal and took enough leftovers home in a box to last me another two meals. When I lost my desire for french fries, a life time passion, because they sat in my stomach like bricks, it was the triumph of a lifetime of poor eating. I still struggle with not drinking water with meals, but it doesn't seem to affect either how long I stay full or my weight loss. When it does, I will put more effort into conquering that weakness in my program. The one bad habit I have not given up is carbonated beverages. I did give them up for several months, then confessed to my doctor how difficult it was and how much I missed diet Pepsi and Perrier water. He asked if I drank "the fully leaded (sugared)" variety and I allowed as how I have drunk only diet soft drinks since Tab came out in the Sixties. "Then what's the problem?" He asked. Well, didn't it stretch the pouch or something? He smiled and said that was more of a problem with gastric bypass than with banding and to drink the carbonated beverages if I wished. So comforted by my favorite bad habit, I've come almost six months since banding. My weight is down to 203 from a high point of 240. My joints don't protest every move and while leading horses up a steep hill last week, I realized I wasn't the least bit breathless. Things are better, definitely, and I am sitting here in jeans I haven't been able to wear in three years or more. I don't have a firm final weight loss goal because I tend to slip back into obsessive compulsive anorexic/bulimic thinking when I get centered on a number. My next short term goal is to drop below 200- I'm getting there. The goal after that is to drop below 180. After that- well, we'll see how I feel about the matter. I'm happy with my progress and for now, that is enough.

Thank you for the explanation. It's an interesting point of view. I don't understand how it follows that people who don't believe a loving god would take the form of Revelations' YHWH are necessarily living a self-centered godless life and yearn for a lake of eternal fire. That's a pretty nasty assumption. Just as Christians rubbing their hands while they watch sinners fall into a pit of fire is an extreme and not all together true picture, neither is it a true picture to imagine self-centered hedonistic pagans, Buddhists, Jews and Native American spirituals bent only on their own pleasures in flagrant disobedience to the Creator. I believe in God, the Creator, the Great Spirit, but I don't worship a diety who threatens his children with eternal damnation and the return of the Evil One in order to force obedience. This is not a compassionate, loving god.

I truly don't mean any disrespect for your beliefs, Patty, but this version of Truth makes the Creator sound vengeful, capricious, and just plain nasty. This interpretation of Revelations along with the visual of all the good Christians rubbing their hands together in glee because they're gonna get saved and all those unbelievers are finally gonna get theirs makes me wonder how on earth someone can embrace such a terror-based mythology and speak of it as a religion of compassion and love. Why would a loving God, having put Satan in the slammer for 1000 years of peace, suddenly release the SOB to wreck havoc on a world ruled by the Prince of Peace?

My insurance paid despite my not being heavy enough (imagine:blink:) to meet the BMI criteria. This was due in part to arthritis and a family history of diabetes. Insurance took so long to decide that I was ready to go to step two and gain fifteen pounds to meet the damned criteria. Thank goodness I didn't have to do that. Good luck to you.

Way to go, Kathy!:smile2::thumbup:

Brilliant, Emjay. Thanks!