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Finished all pre-op and blood work. Have met with Dr Hollis and his staff and feel quite confident about their qualifications and success. I am starting off at a low BMI and am a little nervous about the slow progression this process might take. I am 39 years old and 5'7" and a starting weight of 192. Started the pre op diet early and am down to 186 lbs. Goal weight of 135 lbs. I was so pleased that Dr Hollis' office has their self pay special, but was shocked at their financing options. I feel very lucky that my husband has offered to pay for the procedure. I am the usual mix of emotions: scared, excited, but sure of my choice. I have been in a downward spiral with a back injury that put an end to running daily which was the only way I was able to keep my weight in check. Thank you for any insight and suggestions of expectations.

It's been 1 week and I have not loss any weight... I was sleeved on sept 29 and I only lost 9 pounds.. am getting so frustrated. .. is this normal. Then I get the urge to eat a lot then I do and them my tummy hurts I need answers

Isint it heavenly to finally chew and taste food? Way to go n your weight loss..that is fabulous Betty!

I weigh 185 pounds and have been yo-yo dieting for years and I am now contemplating on the possibility of the lap-band surgery. I only need to lose 40-45 pounds but I just can't seem to be able to do it on my own. I have been able to lose a lot of weight in the past but only to gain them back much faster in the end. Am I crazy to be thinking about surgery. Please advise!!!

I was banded April 12, 2010. Just went in yesterday for my 3rd fill. Have a total of 6.8cc in a 10 cc band. I've lost 52 pounds post op....62 total. I follow the rules and guidelines given to me by my doctor like the bible. I have not put bread back into my diet, I do my Wii Fit every night for at least an hour, and I'm noticing fantastic results. The decision to have this surgery was life or death for me. I was a diabetic on insulin and pills, getting ready to be put on high blood pressure meds. I'm only 41. I was taking more meds than my parents who are in their late 60's and early 70's. Not the life for me. When you have this procedure, it's time to be serious. Do everything you are told to. Follow the guidelines and the weight WILL come off. I promise you that. I could never lose weight, but I came to the realization that I had to get my MIND right as well. We need food to live...but we don't need to LIVE for food.:thumbup:

I conjecture the problem is related to the food you ate. Mashed potatoes at one week out is a poor food choice due to the immensely high starch content. It breaks down into simple sugar and could cause dumping in susceptible people. During the weight loss phase, food choices should be high in protein. Mashed potatoes are not high in protein and may cause your weight loss to stall or plateau. Good luck to you.

Nope.... I don't think anyone does/has. You're pretty much on your own with this. Just think... if you eat $133.33 less in food a month, over 10 years, the band will have paid for itself!! LOL You'll also likely live longer, from losing *any* weight, even if not all that you want to. Smaller clothes are cheaper than plus-sizes (any one else agree?). But then again, once you can wear whatever you want, you could go nuts and buy more clothes than ever before! Mandi

I've had my band for 3 years. I'm not constantly sick. In fact, very seldom. It's only when I eat something that won't pass through easily, that balls up, like pasta or bread products, that I have problems. If it doesn't go through, I have to vomit it back up. My first fill doctor was a quack--I live in Eastern WA and had the surgery in Detroit, because that's where they accept Medicare and my military insurance for payment, so I came home and got a doctor who specializes in fills. He couldn't hit it, then did the fluroscope and insisted my port was turned or misplaced and that I had to go back to Detroit to have it surgically replaced. I did that at great expense (for my budget it was terrible) only to find out he simply missed the port and misread the fluroscope. It was perfectly positioned. They gave me a small fill in Detroit and and got a different doctor who actually does the surgery and he had no problem. He's so good that it only took 2 fills to get it right on. I feel like it's perfect, but there are simply some things that won't pass through the band and if I eat them, or don't chew food well enough, it comes back up. For example, in the last week it's happened once, when I tried to eat a hamburger. Hamburger buns are a no-no for me, but I did it anyway and then had to get rid of it. Otherwise, if I stick to what I know I can eat, it's fine. That very good doctor, who was on the ground floor of developing lap band procedures, is the one who explained that the vomiting is caused by food that gets stuck and triggers the gag mechanism. It feels awful when that happens. Pain, discomfort, and then I know what's going on. I think people have to accept that somethings are just not good to eat, but they don't want to deal with limitations. I could go back and have some saline solution removed so I could eat more, but that's the last thing i want to do. I can eat a lot if it's food that passes easily, but I want these restrictions on my former addictions. I can eat too much as it is. In 3 years I've only lost 60 lbs when the goal weight is twice that much, so I don't want to make it easier. I don't want to eat whatever I desire. Only what's healthy and filling. What gives me problems are exactly the foods I want to avoid but in the past lacked the will power to resist. Now, I don't have to rely on poor will power.

Hello, I find that I am so hungry. I don't understand why, Its more than head hunger because my stomach is growling. I understand that I went through this surgery for a reason but one main one is I thought I WOULD NOT BE HUNGRY!!!! Why am I hungry??? My start weight in this process was 248. I did not take this surgery lightly or for granted. I am just being honest, I am on full liquids but did have some things yesterday against my diet. I think I better just suck it up & deal with it and hope things get easier. to Loseit2014 thank you so much for your honestly!!

Girls, How did you all do? I can compare this to my hysterectomy 3 1/2 years ago (full cut). I am tired and sore, but this is nothing like the hysterectomy. Thank Goodness!!! Since I live in a rural area, we have had trouble getting liquid pain meds. So lucky me, we get to crush up a pill and take it with unsweetened applesause. YUCK. I think I will mix it with my protien drink today. Also, I hope you know not to weigh your self this week. All the IV fluids they have pumped into you puts on Fluid weight. My husband is a nurse and he said each one of the big bags weighs approximately 2 pounds. Happy Healing!!!

Congrats on your approval I got my approval the same date, and my surgery is scheduled for August 7, I go for my lab work on August 2, and I'm so excited my health has been so affected by this excess weight, I'm so ready to get healthy again, i've been told as long as we do everything our surgeon tells us we should have minimal complications, so I am going to be sure and follow all instructions to a t, keep me posted on your progress and best of luck......Michelle <holmmi>

Hey guys, I came up with a great idea that I wanted to share with you. Any distance sport would work well too. Below is the message I sent out to my family and friends, use it or chuck it, whatever works for you! I hope it helps someone out! "As many of you know, though some may not, I made a major life decision regarding m weight. On September 16th, two weeks ago, I underwent surgery to receive a lap-band. Now with the lap-bad in my body, the amount of food I can eat is restricted and therefore causing me to lose weight (15.5 pounds so far)! If I continue on this path I will continue to lose weight over a long period of time. Now, while losing weight like this is fantastic there is one way I can get more bang for my buck. All I need to do is come up with a way to exercise in a suitable and entertaining way. This is where you all come in. The reason you have received this message is because I trust you, and feel I can count on you to help me in this endeavor. I am only asking 3 things of each of you. Before I tell you the three things please let me explain my idea and goal. Exercise can be tedious and no fun for people, so I am trying to take what I have available to me and make it fun. I have in my home a recumbent stationary bike. Now I do enjoy it to some extent but I need to enjoy it more so I came up with a plan. Here is where you start to come in. What I am initially asking from you are 2 things. The first is merely your address. I need this because I will be virtually 'riding' from one home to the next. I plan to take your address and see how many miles it is from the next closest person, via google, and 'ride' that many miles to the next home. My ultimate plan is to make a circuit that may go something like this: 1. Home to JLP on the other side of town. 2. From JLP to my parent's house three states away. 3. From my parents to Maine (Auntie Di). 4. Maine to Montana....etc... The second thing is to select from the following list the terrain type you think best describes the area around your home. This will allow me to pick a bike setting and change up my settings throughout the circuit. Is your terrain (near you city/area/state): 1. flatland 2. a valley 3. a flat top mountain or hill 4. a steep (pointy) mountain or hill 5. a few consecutive hills or mountains 6. continuous hills or mountains If no terrain choice is to your liking choose the closest one or let me know and I will pick one no one else has picked because the point is to change up the routine. Now the third and last thing I ask of you is this. When I virtually get to your 'home', I would like to be treated as a guest and served a healthy meal. This means, from you, I would like just one healthy recipe. One that recipe is received (via Facebook is fine), I will then begin my trek to the next person's home. So as of right now, I need willing participants to be in my cross country bike circuit. If you agree, you will give me only three things; your address, your terrain type, and a recipe when I 'arrive' at your home. If you are game to help me out, please post your address and terrain type so I can begin figuring out my route. Thanks for the help everyone!"

K down another 2 lbs which brings my total to 27 lbs on day 14 tomorrow I start the mechanical soft diets hopefully it will work

Hello I go for my first fill Oct 3rd and was banded Aug th I would have gone this week but my doctor is on vaca I lost 17 lbs right away and gain like 3 back. I am eating normal and now I just feel like I always feel and I can't wait to get filled. This past weekend I ate more then normal didn't follow my diet....I am hoping I didn't do anything to damage my band I will be so mad at myself. Have you ever ate more then you should? I just can't wait to go get this filled....I am afraid I will screw up. I want to get started on losing weight I am back on the right eating habits but really worried myself

Honestly, I have not really lost any weight yet.....I feel very little restriction right now. Fingers crossed that my fill tomorrow will help. I have to drive 2 hrs to get it and since I am a full time working single mom it is tough to get there. I am hopeing they will lean on the generous v conservative side on the fill. TBD! PS - My surgery was 8/24 and I quickly lost 10 lbs then gained back 6 so....nothing much happening yet. This site encourages me to be patient which is helpful.

I don't want to discourage you but I think you should be prepared. I too am a Kaiser member. I received a referral from my practitioner to go to the weight loss center around the corner from my home. The referral was for Lapband. When I got to the orientation, they informed about 50 of us that Kaiser was not performing this surgery at this time, they were only performing bypass. They do not have a surgeon to perform Lapband at this time. I was 75 Lbs overweight and they require that you be over 100 Lbs for bypass. I live in Riverside,CA. I decided to go to Tijuana,MX for my surgery. My surgeon was Dr Kuri and I paid 7,500. I hope that they have more resouces in Northern CA than they do here and that you can have your surgery. Good luck!

We go to cancun every year and also stay at an all inclusive resort. We will be going this upcoming June. it will be the 1st time back since I have been banded. In the past I too have gained at least 5 pounds on our 10 day trips there. This year I know I wont over eat, I wont over drink. I have my tool and we are working together to keep me healthy. I can't wait to go this ye4ar and be able to do things I couldn't do last time, such as Cliff diving, parasailing, wearing my bathing suit without being all covered up like a mummy....

I'm not a Dec. Bandster, but I thought I could help! First of all...do some spring cleaning. Throw it all out. If you have kids or family that still wants them, tell them to put them somewhere you can't find them. If you have to go out and purposefully buy them, you are more likely to have a moment of sanity and put it back. I am going to copy and paste a post that I wrote for someone else. Maybe there is something in there that will help you. Are you ready for some tough love? If you are not ready at this time, that if fine. Put it away in your mind that someone has given you some and come back here when you are ready. By the time I get to post this you will probably have 100 other replies, but I want to take my time and post what I really want to say. Okay...here goes the tough love. And this will be a long post! Nope the Cookies were not a good choice, but you ate them and now you need to move on and NOT do it again. You can't change what you have done but you can make better choices in the future. So the question is HOW IN THE WORLD DO I DO THAT? Well I will tell you that the answer is NOT going to come to you when you have a "cookie" (will now stand for anything that is not healthy for us for the remainder of this conversation) staring at you in the face. You have to have the tools and the mindset BEFORE that temptation ever comes up. We have to be ready to turn around at any particular moment and have a piece of cookie shoved in our face and realize that we are stronger than the calories, fat, sugar and peice of inanimate object that we are looking at. It gets harder as we have lost the weight and become a little more comfortable with our bodies. At first we were hell bent on getting losing, losing, losing. Well the newness has worn off and now we are just stuck with the realization that we will always have to fight the "cookies". Alright I am all about being practical so here are some suggestions that I have. 1. Take a piece of paper (one that you can fold up into your wallet/purse/pocket ) and divide it into sections. You may have to write down everything and then rewrite it to get it to all fit. a. Write down all the reasons that you had MAJOR, LIFE THREATENING SURGERY. Not the reasons that you wanted to just lose weight, but what caused you to make this drastic change in your life. b. Write down where you think you would be health wise in 10 years. What disesases, illness would you have? What meds would you be on. Look at your family for "inspiration". For me my mom died at 53 weighing 350+ pounds and had heart disease, diabetes, sleep apnea and a whole host of other disorders. Within 10 years, I was going to be there. c. Write down why you are more powerful than a cookie (this one is tough!) d. Find some typical foods that you would love to eat (your cookies) and look up the calories and then find out how much time you would have to spend working them off in the gym. e. Write down what about you makes you important enough to overcome your demons. f. Now you are going to want to fit all of this on a piece of paper in bullet form so when you are faced with you cookies you can look at it and allow you to mentally fight the war that has just come up. If you can justify eating that cookie after looking at your paper, then eat it, but have no regrets, and do not dwell on it. Instead you have faced the problem UP FRONT and not looked back on it. 2. Another possible tactic. I know that you are having a tough time getting your calories down. One thing that I have found that helps me is by eating the same foods that I like but with some simple substitutions and by finding ways to remove some unneccessary ingredients. For example. I make this dessert that had 1/2 cup of frozen berries, 2 TBSP of Cream cheese and 1/2 cup of granola. The cream cheese had 60 calories and I thought..."I wonder how this would taste if I didn't put the cream cheese in it". I tried it and guess what, I couldn't even tell that it was missing. Same thing with meatloaf. Instead of eating it with ground beef now I substitute grond chicken. As long as I keep all of my veggies and other healthy fillers in, I can't tell the difference. I really learned this from Subway. I found that if I went in and ordered a foot long sandwich (obviously pre-band) and got all this deli meat and cheese and then pilled it with my favorite veggies that I all I could really taste were the veggies anyways. So first I got rid of the meat and then the cheese, and the taste of the sandwich hardly varied at all. This is what I do all the time now. I will always fix something first and then think what can I do to lower or eliminate the calories without harming the integretity of the dish. 3. This is the one that everyone is going to hate. WE JUST HAVE TO HAVE WILL POWER SOMETIMES. Yep the age ol' dieting nightmare. (And believe me, I REFUSED to diet in my entire journey, so I use that word loosely) Our will power will not always be perfect, but we have to be able to stand up to ourselves and tell ourselves no. Before this surgery I couldn't tell anyone NO, including myself. So when my stupid head told me that I needed to go to Carl's Jr and get 2 big hamburgers and eat them in the 4 minutes it took me to get home so that I could look famished for dinner that was going to be served in 30 minutes...I never said no. NOW, I am comfortable saying no. It has helped me professionally, personally, and mentally. I thought that everyone would hate me if I said no, but now they no longer just expect things out of me. And I don't just give in to all of my brain's wishes. That is making me a better person. 4. Talk about your surgery. I have to honestly say that one of the greatest factors to my success is the fact that I have been open and honest about the surgery. I don't care what other people think about me. Go to 1A of this email and that should show you why there is nothing to be ashamed of. The more you talk about the struggles and successes of your surgery the less likely people are to shove food at you. We have one lady in our science department that brings in treats every week. After the 2nd week of school I told her about my surgery and not ONCE has she come in and offered me the food. She told me, if you ever want it, you may have some, but I don't want to push something on you that you obviously don't want. Yesterday at the staff meeting, the administration gave little food baskets to everyone for all there hard work during scheduling. However instead of a food basket I got a nice card signed by all the administrators, because the know that a food basket is pointless to me. I don't feel singled out, I feel very blessed that these people care enough about me to know what I need. Some people can't make these connections on their own and they need you to school them. Iknow this is tough, but I had to do it with my dad, my BF, and my brother. I asked them if they would offer a beer to a recovering alcholoic. All of them said no, and then I said then why in the hell would you offer me a cookie! If there is any advice in here you don't like. Think about why you don't like it. Is it because it is hard...well guess what CHANGING is hard, but maybe just try part of it. If you don't like it because it goes against all of your moral beliefs, then ignore it. I will never know and it will not hurt my feelings. Even if you came back and said "Salsa you are full of crap and are an idiot" I would think " her loss!" and keep on lovin' ya. This is what friends are for. We have to be here during the good times and the bad. We have to be able to look (or type) at the other person and say "stop being an idiot" If we don't do that as friends, really we are no better than an enemy.

Hi everyone. I just went to a information conference last night. May I ask how you all decided what surgery was right for you. I went to the meeting thinking Lab Band because it doesn't cut anything and it's easily reversed if you have medical problems, but the doctor said he won't do that procedure if you have too much weight to lose. So confused now!

I got my lapband for the same reason , years of trying diets and loosing and putting it back on , I also realise it is just a tool but even so some of us will still have times when we struggle , I am doing the same , my dietition told me following surgery I would never need to go on a diet again , that may be true , at mo my weight has stuck and that is frustrating , my personal hell bandster style .

I am almost 4 mos. out from surgery. I have lost 31 lbs This picture was taken today. This morning I was thinking about being obese and how it felt. Do any of you feel like you are just a shadow figure to the world? People do not look at me, they do not see me and they do not want to see me. All they see is a large shadow to be avoided. Only my family sees the person under the fat. But when they look at other obese people what do they see? When I lose all the weight, what will I see? And how about all of us, the obese people? Don't we want to just blend in to a point that no one sees us? I think I do. I don't want to be noticed.

My surgeon said that the liver is the first place that your body puts on weight, so I would presume that just about anyone who is overweight has a fatty liver. He said that makes the liver hard, and therefore more difficult to work behind for the surgeon. But he said it is also the first place your body burns the fat from, so the 2-week pre-surgery diet was to burn off that fat and give me the "liver of a skinny person" and make his work easier.

Just to update, I did call the Dr and was able to get in today instead of on Jan 7 for my follow-up after my Dec 3 fill. I was able to eat over the holidays and did eat more than I should have. I was so afraid to step on his scale this morning. I thought for sure I would have gained 3-5 pounds but, to my surprise, I was down 1 pound. It doesn't make sense to me that I lost because I know I ate more than I had been eating right after surgery but I'll take it and run with it. My Dr is very conservative with fills he tells me so he added .75 to my already 3.5 filled band. So, I'm at 4.25 right now. He wanted to see me in 6 weeks so, I guess I'll see how this one works out. Happy New Year! I'm excited for this new start.

I was banded in April and have had three fills since then. On my last fill the doctor didn't think something was right so I went back two weeks later and he had a look at things under xray. He wasn't surprised to find that my band was completely empty. He seems to think that he has put a hole in the tubing near the port when he did the last fill in his office. I was SO despressed when they said I had to go back in for more surgery. I went in on Wednesay 3rd August and they replaced the port. Even though I was really down and a little p!ssed off that I had to go back in because he had stuffed up, I figure that's part of having Lap Band and you have to expect setbacks. I'm happy now that he found the problem and that he could fix it so quickly and that it wasn't so bad that he had to replace the whole lot. I have been feeling down and a little disappointed in myself that I haven't lost as much weight as what I would have liked since I had it done but now I am looking at things in a more positive light. Have hope, don't ever lost sight of your goal and why you have had this done. I have lost 22 pounds and I can't wait to lost another 22 and then another 22. This is such a positive step towards a better life that I can't wait to live!!!! Three weeks till my wedding and I am so grateful for the weight I have lost so that I can look even better on the day. It's not easy but it can be done.

I just started my first month weigh in yesterday. Good luck! Do you have united healthcare too? Did they tell you whether you were allowed to lose any weight during the waiting period? If so how much?