Search the Community

Hey everyone! I haven't had internet access for a few days and it's been killing me! LOL! Everything here is going good. All is well with the pregnancy so far. I am starting to feel my band tighten up at times, so I'm sure another unfill is looming in the near future. I still haven't gained anything yet. I'm a little ashamed to admit I am absolutely terrified of gaining back everything I lost over the past year. I'm hoping to keep my pregnancy weight gain to under 20lbs, which should be fine since I still weight 235! I haven't really discussed it with my OB yet, so I'm curious to what she'll have to say. The good thing is, now that the tiredness is starting to wear off, I've actually been feeling like exercising. I got some Leslie Sansone tapes from my mom, and I'm going to try them out 3 days a week. I'm restricted to walking for exercise, so I figured the Leslie Sansone workouts would be sufficiently low-impact. It's too damn crappy to go walk outside, and it's too frigid to walk on my basement treadmill. I can't wait for spring! Tonya - yes I'm taking my vits! I even got my OB to give me chewable prenatals! BGB - good to see you back here! Lynn - can't wait to hear about surgery. Sending thoughts and prayers your way!

I am so there with you! Have had this "unexplained" weight gain happen to me several times. I can offer some thoughts as to what is happening, whether they apply or not, who knows? But, without doubt, I can tell you RELAX!! It's OK! It's more than likely not REAL weight, but rather the body retaining water from exercise. This is soooo common...the body "insulates, cushions" the strained (injured) muscles by packing on the fluid. I know, I know...it sucks...but seriously...you did not consume 7200 calories extra...your body is burning more than usual (BMR)...so it has to be this, IMHO. Now, don't misunderstand...I KNOW how mad that can make you!!! A few tricks...extra fluids, more protein. Try a protein bar, slice of deli meat, FF string cheese. Always strength training BEFORE cardio. Eat small amount of protein 1/2 to 1 hour after workout. Back off any bad carbs if you're eating them. Ok...time to go practice my own preaching. I'm rootin' for you!

Hi Angyl - Ohhhh, I am sorry to hear that the test didn't go well, but I have to tell you - GIRL YOU ROCK!!! I can't imagine even TAKING a test a day or two after surgery. Surely your professor will work with you on it . . . Keep us posted. Any weight gain that shows up on the scale at this point is Fluid, so don't let it worry you one bit. I did the same thing after my TT - I guess it is a lifetime of watching the scale that makes us torture ourselves like that, I don't know, but there is NO way you've gained any in the last few days. And about being able to eat 5 Ritz crackers . . . that (in my opinion) is not too much. Now - understand that there was a time I would have rushed like a crazy woman to my band doctor insisting I needed a fill if I'd been able to eat 5 crackers, but after 2 different episodes of being way tooooo tight, I now understand that it really is okay to be ABLE to eat, moderation really is the key and the band (when properly adjusted) will help you with that. I would say that for at least the first year I had the band I had no concept of how much I really should be eating. I thought if I was physically ABLE to eat, then my little silicone buddy must not be tight enough. In my case, nothing was further from the truth . . . So, without trying to sound like your mother :wub: - don't think just because you can eat 5 crackers that you don't have restriction. I would say give it some time because your band may be in a little bit of shock after your surgery. I chose not to get an un-fill before my TT and have had some very tight days since, but in the long-run, I think it is going to be okay. My thought is, as the swelling goes down, hopefully it will return to my pre-TT state, that was PERFECT for the first time in a year. Have a great Sunday - Happy Easter . . .

There is no doubt in my mind that I could not have done this without WLS. I have spent my entire life (well since I was about 12, the first time someone pointed out that I was fat) trying to lose weight. There were a few periods where I lost weight and kept it off for a few months, which is how I ended up at 301 lbs at the age of 46, lose some weight, gain it back plus a few more. I yo-yo'd through all types of weight loss programs, homegrown to medically supervised. What I learned AFTER surgery is that my body/brain was fighting me the whole way. If I missed a meal (which didn't happen often) or ate too lightly when I was presurgery, I used to get really nauseous, like dry heaves nauseous, it was one of my questions to my surgeon - Will this happen when I am eating only a few ounces at a time? She assured me it shouldn't be a problem. My warning signs were usually shaky hands and weak knees. (my blood work showed no signs of diabetes or other blood sugar issues), crankiness and then the gagging. Well I am 6 months out and I have yet to feel true hunger pangs or even a smidgen of that weak kneed, shakiness, bad temper symptoms that would lead to the dry heaves if I didn't get something to eat. This was the battle I was up against - because these symptoms would kick in an hours or so after your standard 200-300 calorie meal. Now, I am totally satisfied with the 3-4 ounces I can eat at a meal these days. I have lost 88 lbs as of this posting and gone from a size 26W/24W to a size 16W. I have another 60 lbs to lose to get my fighting weight of 150-ish, (I'd be thrilled with 165, over the moon with 155). My weight loss has been toughest - but the easiest I have ever done in my life. I still make the decisions to eat healthy foods and stay away from simple carbs and fast foods - but my body is now on my side. Sometimes it is the emotional want to indulge in a rich food that is the toughest part or maybe the temptation to eat something really carby like Pasta - but my sleeve backs me up and keeps me honest :-D I am very happy and look back with absolutely zero regrets! In fact if I have a regret it is that I didn't get my sleeve sooner!

For all you single ladies out there, or ones in relationships that could be better... And even the married ones. This topic applies to all of us women who may have lost touch or never understood how to value ourselves. I've been doing a lot of thinking about self worth, what to look for in a potential partner, and how to make sure I respect myself and demand respect from others. When is was younger, I settled for men who were not good enough to be with. I did have standards for myself and I knew what I wanted in a man, but I never went for that. After a series of boyfriends who didn't respect me I settled for the first man to get serious about me. And that led to years of an unhappy and abusive relationship. Being overweight young, or simply struggling with insecurity, sets us up for bad relationship choices. As I gained weight my standards for myself and what I would put up with only got worse. There is a fear that one is not worthy of love from a high value person. Only the broken men made me feel comfortable because I was so insecure. I'm setting out to change this. I recently got into a relationship with a person far below my worth and dropped my standards for myself almost immediately for him. After surviving my 8 years of hell with my kids dad and losing all this weight, here I was again in the same situation!! This needs to end. I am creating a list of "standards" for myself based on how I want to be treated, what i will and won't do in a dating situation, the values I must have in another person and the reasons I deserve these things. I'm building a framework for my own worth and self confidence to keep myself reminded that in my search for a partner, there is a destination in mind. After losing so much weight I feel like a different person. I won't repeat the patterns of insecurity that ultimately led to my unhappiness and weight gain. I want to set the bar high and this time, no settling for less than Im worth in love and life. I know it's up to me to set the standards by which I'm treated!

It's 14 pages but they are filled with goodness. Makes a very interesting read and shows us the role of policy and politics in decision making. meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the American diet. Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the Pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless. Atkins allowed his readers to eat ''truly luxurious foods without limit,'' as he put it, ''lobster with butter sauce, steak with béarnaise sauce . . . bacon cheeseburgers,'' but allowed no starches or refined carbohydrates, which means no sugars or anything made from flour. Atkins banned even fruit juices, and permitted only a modicum of vegetables, although the latter were negotiable as the diet progressed. Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A. attacked Atkins's diet as a ''bizarre regimen'' that advocated ''an unlimited intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,'' and Atkins even had to defend his diet in Congressional hearings. Thirty years later, America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer. On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades' worth of best-selling diet books, including ''The Zone,'' ''Sugar Busters'' and ''Protein Power'' to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it's not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer. The perversity of this alternative hypothesis is that it identifies the cause of obesity as precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous food Guide Pyramid -- the pasta, rice and bread -- that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy. While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy. Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by association. Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals. Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message ''and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.'' These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma. (Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, also rose significantly through this period.) They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.'' The science behind the alternative hypothesis can be called Endocrinology 101, which is how it's referred to by David Ludwig, a researcher at Harvard Medical School who runs the pediatric obesity clinic at Children's Hospital Boston, and who prescribes his own version of a carbohydrate-restricted diet to his patients. Endocrinology 101 requires an understanding of how carbohydrates affect insulin and blood sugar and in turn fat metabolism and appetite. This is basic endocrinology, Ludwig says, which is the study of hormones, and it is still considered radical because the low-fat dietary wisdom emerged in the 1960's from researchers almost exclusively concerned with the effect of fat on cholesterol and heart disease. At the time, Endocrinology 101 was still underdeveloped, and so it was ignored. Now that this science is becoming clear, it has to fight a quarter century of anti-fat prejudice. The alternative hypothesis also comes with an implication that is worth considering for a moment, because it's a whopper, and it may indeed be an obstacle to its acceptance. If the alternative hypothesis is right -- still a big ''if'' -- then it strongly suggests that the ongoing epidemic of obesity in America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise. Rather it occurred, as Atkins has been saying (along with Barry Sears, author of ''The Zone''), because the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier. Put simply, if the alternative hypothesis is right, then a low-fat diet is not by definition a healthy diet. In practice, such a diet cannot help being high in carbohydrates, and that can lead to obesity, and perhaps even heart disease. ''For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive,'' says Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard's prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center. ''They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.'' Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner. But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality. This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. The result is a balkanized community -- ''splintered, very opinionated and in many instances, intransigent,'' says Kurt Isselbacher, a former chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science -- in which researchers seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and thoroughly uninterested in testing any other hypotheses but their own. What's more, the number of misconceptions propagated about the most basic research can be staggering. Researchers will be suitably scientific describing the limitations of their own experiments, and then will cite something as gospel truth because they read it in a magazine. The classic example is the statement heard repeatedly that 95 percent of all dieters never lose weight, and 95 percent of those who do will not keep it off. This will be correctly attributed to the University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Albert Stunkard, but it will go unmentioned that this statement is based on 100 patients who passed through Stunkard's obesity clinic during the Eisenhower administration. With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's. According to Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of obese Americans stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and 1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980's. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese. That steep rise, which is consistent through all segments of American society and which continued unabated through the 1990's, is the singular feature of the epidemic. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for that. Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And for the first time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2 diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes and now, for the obvious reason, is not. So how did this happen? The orthodox and ubiquitous explanation is that we live in what Kelly Brownell, a Yale psychologist, has called a ''toxic food environment'' of cheap fatty food, large portions, pervasive food advertising and sedentary lives. By this theory, we are at the Pavlovian mercy of the food industry, which spends nearly $10 billion a year advertising unwholesome junk food and fast food. And because these foods, especially fast food, are so filled with fat, they are both irresistible and uniquely fattening. On top of this, so the theory goes, our modern society has successfully eliminated physical activity from our daily lives. We no longer exercise or walk up stairs, nor do our children bike to school or play outside, because they would prefer to play video games and watch television. And because some of us are obviously predisposed to gain weight while others are not, this explanation also has a genetic component -- the thrifty gene. It suggests that storing extra calories as fat was an evolutionary advantage to our Paleolithic ancestors, who had to survive frequent famine. We then inherited these ''thrifty'' genes, despite their liability in today's toxic environment. This theory makes perfect sense and plays to our puritanical prejudice that fat, fast food and television are innately damaging to our humanity. But there are two catches. First, to buy this logic is to accept that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity -- both socially and physically -- is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal. And second, as Flegal points out, little data exist to support any of this. Certainly none of it explains what changed so significantly to start the epidemic. Fast-food consumption, for example, continued to grow steadily through the 70's and 80's, but it did not take a sudden leap, as obesity did. As far as exercise and physical activity go, there are no reliable data before the mid-80's, according to William Dietz, who runs the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control; the 1990's data show obesity rates continuing to climb, while exercise activity remained unchanged. This suggests the two have little in common. Dietz also acknowledged that a culture of physical exercise began in the United States in the 70's -- the ''leisure exercise mania,'' as Robert Levy, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, described it in 1981 -- and has continued through the present day. As for the thrifty gene, it provides the kind of evolutionary rationale for human behavior that scientists find comforting but that simply cannot be tested. In other words, if we were living through an anorexia epidemic, the experts would be discussing the equally untestable ''spendthrift gene'' theory, touting evolutionary advantages of losing weight effortlessly. An overweight homo erectus, they'd say, would have been easy prey for predators. It is also undeniable, note students of Endocrinology 101, that mankind never evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars. ''Grain products and concentrated sugars were essentially absent from human nutrition until the invention of agriculture,'' Ludwig says, ''which was only 10,000 years ago.'' This is discussed frequently in the anthropology texts but is mostly absent from the obesity literature, with the prominent exception of the low-carbohydrate-diet books. What's forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70's, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat. In ''The Physiology of Taste,'' for instance, an 1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ''stout party'' after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a ''particularly stout party'') potatoes. Brillat-Savarin described the roots of obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ''floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.'' He added that the effects of this fecula -- i.e., ''potatoes, grain or any kind of flour'' -- were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet. This is what my mother taught me 40 years ago, backed up by the vague observation that Italians tended toward corpulence because they ate so much pasta. This observation was actually documented by Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota physician who noted that fats ''have good staying power,'' by which he meant they are slow to be digested and so lead to satiation, and that Italians were among the heaviest populations he had studied. According to Keys, the Neapolitans, for instance, ate only a little lean meat once or twice a week, but ate bread and pasta every day for lunch and dinner. ''There was no evidence of nutritional deficiency,'' he wrote, ''but the working-class women were fat.'' By the 70's, you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825. It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous. The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country. It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become ''this greasy killer'' in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates. In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.'' Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored. Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern's committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but ''a betting matter.'' Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980. ''What right,'' Handler asked, ''has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?'' Nonetheless, once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over. The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like Cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, Snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message. Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating. Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it. What this means is that even saturated fats -- a k a, the bad fats -- are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it's a virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will gain little to no health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead. But it gets even weirder than that. Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it's true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease. The crucial example of how the low-fat recommendations were oversimplified is shown by the impact -- potentially lethal, in fact -- of low-fat diets on triglycerides, which are the component molecules of fat. By the late 60's, researchers had shown that high triglyceride levels were at least as common in heart-disease patients as high L.D.L. cholesterol, and that eating a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would, for many people, raise their triglyceride levels, lower their H.D.L. levels and accentuate what Gerry Reaven, an endocrinologist at Stanford University, called Syndrome X. This is a cluster of conditions that can lead to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. It took Reaven a decade to convince his peers that Syndrome X was a legitimate health concern, in part because to accept its reality is to accept that low-fat diets will increase the risk of heart disease in a third of the population. ''Sometimes we wish it would go away because nobody knows how to deal with it,'' said Robert Silverman, an N.I.H. researcher, at a 1987 N.I.H. conference. ''High protein levels can be bad for the kidneys. High fat is bad for your heart. Now Reaven is saying not to eat high carbohydrates. We have to eat something.'' Surely, everyone involved in drafting the various dietary guidelines wanted Americans simply to eat less junk food, however you define it, and eat more the way they do in Berkeley, Calif. But we didn't go along. Instead we ate more starches and refined carbohydrates, because calorie for calorie, these are the cheapest nutrients for the food industry to produce, and they can be sold at the highest profit. It's also what we like to eat. Rare is the person under the age of 50 who doesn't prefer a cookie or heavily sweetened yogurt to a head of broccoli. ''All reformers would do well to be conscious of the law of unintended consequences,'' says Alan Stone, who was staff director for McGovern's Senate committee. Stone told me he had an inkling about how the food industry would respond to the new dietary goals back when the hearings were first held. An economist pulled him aside, he said, and gave him a lesson on market disincentives to healthy eating: ''He said if you create a new market with a brand-new manufactured food, give it a brand-new fancy name, put a big advertising budget behind it, you can have a market all to yourself and force your competitors to catch up. You can't do that with fruits and vegetables. It's harder to differentiate an apple from an apple.'' Nutrition researchers also played a role by trying to feed science into the idea that carbohydrates are the ideal nutrient. It had been known, for almost a century, and considered mostly irrelevant to the etiology of obesity, that fat has nine calories per gram compared with four for carbohydrates and protein. Now it became the fail-safe position of the low-fat recommendations: reduce the densest source of calories in the diet and you will lose weight. Then in 1982, J.P. Flatt, a University of Massachusetts biochemist, published his research demonstrating that, in any normal diet, it is extremely rare for the human body to convert carbohydrates into body fat. This was then misinterpreted by the media and quite a few scientists to mean that eating carbohydrates, even to excess, could not make you fat -- which is not the case, Flatt says. But the misinterpretation developed a vigorous life of its own because it resonated with the notion that fat makes you fat and carbohydrates are harmless. As a result, the major trends in American diets since the late 70's, according to the U.S.D.A. agricultural economist Judith Putnam, have been a decrease in the percentage of fat calories and a ''greatly increased consumption of carbohydrates.'' To be precise, annual grain consumption has increased almost 60 pounds per person, and caloric sweeteners (primarily high-fructose corn syrup) by 30 pounds. At the same time, we suddenly began consuming more total calories: now up to 400 more each day since the government started recommending low-fat diets. If these trends are correct, then the obesity epidemic can certainly be explained by Americans' eating more calories than ever -- excess calories, after all, are what causes us to gain weight -- and, specifically, more carbohydrates. The question is why? The answer provided by Endocrinology 101 is that we are simply hungrier than we were in the 70's, and the reason is physiological more than psychological. In this case, the salient factor -- ignored in the pursuit of fat and its effect on cholesterol -- is how carbohydrates affect blood sugar and insulin. In fact, these were obvious culprits all along, which is why Atkins and the low-carb-diet doctors pounced on them early. The primary role of insulin is to regulate blood-sugar levels. After you eat carbohydrates, they will be broken down into their component sugar molecules and transported into the bloodstream. Your pancreas then secretes insulin, which shunts the blood sugar into muscles and the liver as fuel for the next few hours. This is why carbohydrates have a significant impact on insulin and fat does not. And because juvenile diabetes is caused by a lack of insulin, physicians believed since the 20's that the only evil with insulin is not having enough. But insulin also regulates fat metabolism. We cannot store body fat without it. Think of insulin as a switch. When it's on, in the few hours after eating, you burn carbohydrates for energy and store excess calories as fat. When it's off, after the insulin has been depleted, you burn fat as fuel. So when insulin levels are low, you will burn your own fat, but not when they're high. This is where it gets unavoidably complicated. The fatter you are, the more insulin your pancreas will pump out per meal, and the more likely you'll develop what's called ''insulin resistance,'' which is the underlying cause of Syndrome X. In effect, your cells become insensitive to the action of insulin, and so you need ever greater amounts to keep your blood sugar in check. So as you gain weight, insulin makes it easier to store fat and harder to lose it. But the insulin resistance in turn may make it harder to store fat -- your weight is being kept in check, as it should be. But now the insulin resistance might prompt your pancreas to produce even more insulin, potentially starting a vicious cycle. Which comes first -- the obesity, the elevated insulin, known as hyperinsulinemia, or the insulin resistance -- is a chicken-and-egg problem that hasn't been resolved. One endocrinologist described this to me as ''the Nobel-prize winning question.'' Insulin also profoundly affects hunger, although to what end is another point of controversy. On the one hand, insulin can indirectly cause hunger by lowering your blood sugar, but how low does blood sugar have to drop before hunger kicks in? That's unresolved. Meanwhile, insulin works in the brain to suppress hunger. The theory, as explained to me by Michael Schwartz, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington, is that insulin's ability to inhibit appetite would normally counteract its propensity to generate body fat. In other words, as you gained weight, your body would generate more insulin after every meal, and that in turn would suppress your appetite; you'd eat less and lose the weight. Schwartz, however, can imagine a simple mechanism that would throw this ''homeostatic'' system off balance: if your brain were to lose its sensitivity to insulin, just as your fat and muscles do when they are flooded with it. Now the higher insulin production that comes with getting fatter would no longer compensate by suppressing your appetite, because your brain would no longer register the rise in insulin. The end result would be a physiologic state in which obesity is almost preordained, and one in which the carbohydrate-insulin connection could play a major role. Schwartz says he believes this could indeed be happening, but research hasn't progressed far enough to prove it. ''It is just a hypothesis,'' he says. ''It still needs to be sorted out.'' David Ludwig, the Harvard endocrinologist, says that it's the direct effect of insulin on blood sugar that does the trick. He notes that when diabetics get too much insulin, their blood sugar drops and they get ravenously hungry. They gain weight because they eat more, and the insulin promotes fat deposition. The same happens with lab animals. This, he says, is effectively what happens when we eat carbohydrates -- in particular sugar and starches like potatoes and rice, or anything made from flour, like a slice of white bread. These are known in the jargon as high-glycemic-index carbohydrates, which means they are absorbed quickly into the blood. As a result, they cause a spike of blood sugar and a surge of insulin within minutes. The resulting rush of insulin stores the blood sugar away and a few hours later, your blood sugar is lower than it was before you ate. As Ludwig explains, your body effectively thinks it has run out of fuel, but the insulin is still high enough to prevent you from burning your own fat. The result is hunger and a craving for more carbohydrates. It's another vicious circle, and another situation ripe for obesity. The glycemic-index concept and the idea that starches can be absorbed into the blood even faster than sugar emerged in the late 70's, but again had no influence on public health recommendations, because of the attendant controversies. To wit: if you bought the glycemic-index concept, then you had to accept that the starches we were supposed to be eating 6 to 11 times a day were, once swallowed, physiologically indistinguishable from sugars. This made them seem considerably less than wholesome. Rather than accept this possibility, the policy makers simply allowed sugar and corn syrup to elude the vilification that befell dietary fat. After all, they are fat-free. Sugar and corn syrup from soft drinks, juices and the copious teas and sports drinks now supply more than 10 percent of our total calories; the 80's saw the introduction of Big Gulps and 32-ounce cups of Coca-Cola, blasted through with sugar, but 100 percent fat free. When it comes to insulin and blood sugar, these soft drinks and fruit juices -- what the scientists call ''wet carbohydrates'' -- might indeed be worst of all. (Diet soda accounts for less than a quarter of the soda market.) The gist of the glycemic-index idea is that the longer it takes the carbohydrates to be digested, the lesser the impact on blood sugar and insulin and the healthier the food. Those foods with the highest rating on the glycemic index are some simple sugars, starches and anything made from flour. Green vegetables, Beans and whole grains cause a much slower rise in blood sugar because they have Fiber, a nondigestible carbohydrate, which slows down digestion and lowers the glycemic index. Protein and fat serve the same purpose, which implies that eating fat can be beneficial, a notion that is still unacceptable. And the glycemic-index concept implies that a primary cause of Syndrome X, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity is the long-term damage caused by the repeated surges of insulin that come from eating starches and refined carbohydrates. This suggests a kind of unified field theory for these chronic diseases, but not one that coexists easily with the low-fat doctrine. At Ludwig's pediatric obesity clinic, he has been prescribing low-glycemic-index diets to children and adolescents for five years now. He does not recommend the Atkins diet because he says he believes such a very low carbohydrate approach is unnecessarily restrictive; instead, he tells his patients to effectively replace refined carbohydrates and starches with vegetables, legumes and fruit. This makes a low-glycemic-index diet consistent with dietary common sense, albeit in a higher-fat kind of way. His clinic now has a nine-month waiting list. Only recently has Ludwig managed to convince the N.I.H. that such diets are worthy of study. His first three grant proposals were summarily rejected, which may explain why much of the relevant research has been done in Canada and in Australia. In April, however, Ludwig received $1.2 million from the N.I.H. to test his low-glycemic-index diet against a traditional low-fat-low-calorie regime. That might help resolve some of the controversy over the role of insulin in obesity, although the redoubtable Robert Atkins might get there first. The 71-year-old Atkins, a graduate of Cornell medical school, says he first tried a very low carbohydrate diet in 1963 after reading about one in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He lost weight effortlessly, had his epiphany and turned a fledgling Manhattan cardiology practice into a thriving obesity clinic. He then alienated the entire medical community by telling his readers to eat as much fat and protein as they wanted, as long as they ate little to no carbohydrates. They would lose weight, he said, because they would keep their insulin down; they wouldn't be hungry; and they would have less resistance to burning their own fat. Atkins also noted that starches and sugar were harmful in any event because they raised triglyceride levels and that this was a greater risk factor for heart disease than cholesterol. Atkins's diet is both the ultimate manifestation of the alternative hypothesis as well as the battleground on which the fat-versus-carbohydrates controversy is likely to be fought scientifically over the next few years. After insisting Atkins was a quack for three decades, obesity experts are now finding it difficult to ignore the copious anecdotal evidence that his diet does just what he has claimed. Take Albert Stunkard, for instance. Stunkard has been trying to treat obesity for half a century, but he told me he had his epiphany about Atkins and maybe about obesity as well just recently when he discovered that the chief of radiology in his hospital had lost 60 pounds on Atkins's diet. ''Well, apparently all the young guys in the hospital are doing it,'' he said. ''So we decided to do a study.'' When I asked Stunkard if he or any of his colleagues considered testing Atkins's diet 30 years ago, he said they hadn't because they thought Atkins was ''a jerk'' who was just out to make money: this ''turned people off, and so nobody took him seriously enough to do what we're finally doing.'' In fact, when the American Medical Association released its scathing critique of Atkins's diet in March 1973, it acknowledged that the diet probably worked, but expressed little interest in why. Through the 60's, this had been a subject of considerable research, with the conclusion that Atkins-like diets were low-calorie diets in disguise; that when you cut out pasta, bread and potatoes, you'll have a hard time eating enough meat, vegetables and cheese to replace the calories. That, however, raised the question of why such a low-calorie regimen would also suppress hunger, which Atkins insisted was the signature characteristic of the diet. One possibility was Endocrinology 101: that fat and protein make you sated and, lacking carbohydrates and the ensuing swings of blood sugar and insulin, you stay sated. The other possibility arose from the fact that Atkins's diet is ''ketogenic.'' This means that insulin falls so low that you enter a state called ketosis, which is what happens during fasting and starvation. Your muscles and tissues burn body fat for energy, as does your brain in the form of fat molecules produced by the liver called ketones. Atkins saw ketosis as the obvious way to kick-start weight loss. He also liked to say that ketosis was so energizing that it was better than sex, which set him up for some ridicule. An inevitable criticism of Atkins's diet has been that ketosis is dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. When I interviewed ketosis experts, however, they universally sided with Atkins, and suggested that maybe the medical community and the media confuse ketosis with ketoacidosis, a variant of ketosis that occurs in untreated diabetics and can be fatal. ''Doctors are scared of ketosis,'' says Richard Veech, an N.I.H. researcher who studied medicine at Harvard and then got his doctorate at Oxford University with the Nobel Laureate Hans Krebs. ''They're always worried about diabetic ketoacidosis. But ketosis is a normal physiologic state. I would argue it is the normal state of man. It's not normal to have McDonald's and a delicatessen around every corner. It's normal to starve.'' Simply put, ketosis is evolution's answer to the thrifty gene. We may have evolved to efficiently store fat for times of famine, says Veech, but we also evolved ketosis to efficiently live off that fat when necessary. Rather than being poison, which is how the press often refers to ketones, they make the body run more efficiently and provide a backup fuel source for the brain. Veech calls ketones ''magic'' and has shown that both the heart and brain run 25 percent more efficiently on ketones than on blood sugar. The bottom line is that for the better part of 30 years Atkins insisted his diet worked and was safe, Americans apparently tried it by the tens of millions, while nutritionists, physicians, public- health authorities and anyone concerned with heart disease insisted it could kill them, and expressed little or no desire to find out who was right. During that period, only two groups of U.S. researchers tested the diet, or at least published their results. In the early 70's, J.P. Flatt and Harvard's George Blackburn pioneered the ''protein-sparing modified fast'' to treat postsurgical patients, and they tested it on obese volunteers. Blackburn, who later became president of the American Society of Clinical Nutrition, describes his regime as ''an Atkins diet without excess fat'' and says he had to give it a fancy name or nobody would take him seriously. The diet was ''lean meat, fish and fowl'' supplemented by Vitamins and minerals. ''People loved it,'' Blackburn recalls. ''Great weight loss. We couldn't run them off with a baseball bat.'' Blackburn successfully treated hundreds of obese patients over the next decade and published a series of papers that were ignored. When obese New Englanders turned to appetite-control drugs in the mid-80's, he says, he let it drop. He then applied to the N.I.H. for a grant to do a clinical trial of popular diets but was rejected. The second trial, published in September 1980, was done at the George Washington University Medical Center. Two dozen obese volunteers agreed to follow Atkins's diet for eight weeks and lost an average of 17 pounds each, with no apparent ill effects, although their L.D.L. cholesterol did go up. The researchers, led by John LaRosa, now president of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, concluded that the 17-pound weight loss in eight weeks would likely have happened with any diet under ''the novelty of trying something under experimental conditions'' and never pursued it further. Now researchers have finally decided that Atkins's diet and other low-carb diets have to be tested, and are doing so against traditional low-calorie-low-fat diets as recommended by the American Heart Association. To explain their motivation, they inevitably tell one of two stories: some, like Stunkard, told me that someone they knew -- a patient, a friend, a fellow physician -- lost considerable weight on Atkins's diet and, despite all their preconceptions to the contrary, kept it off. Others say they were frustrated with their inability to help their obese patients, looked into the low-carb diets and decided that Endocrinology 101 was compelling. ''As a trained physician, I was trained to mock anything like the Atkins diet,'' says Linda Stern, an internist at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Hospital, ''but I put myself on the diet. I did great. And I thought maybe this is something I can offer my patients.'' None of these studies have been financed by the N.I.H., and none have yet been published. But the results have been reported at conferences -- by researchers at Schneider Children's Hospital on Long Island, Duke University and the University of Cincinnati, and by Stern's group at the Philadelphia V.A. Hospital. And then there's the study Stunkard had mentioned, led by Gary Foster at the University of Pennsylvania, Sam Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University in St. Louis, and Jim Hill, who runs the University of Colorado Center for Human Nutrition in Denver. The results of all five of these studies are remarkably consistent. Subjects on some form of the Atkins diet -- whether overweight adolescents on the diet for 12 weeks as at Schneider, or obese adults averaging 295 pounds on the diet for six months, as at the Philadelphia V.A. -- lost twice the weight as the subjects on the low-fat, low-calorie diets. In all five studies, cholesterol levels improved similarly with both diets, but triglyceride levels were considerably lower with the Atkins diet. Though researchers are hesitant to agree with this, it does suggest that heart-disease risk could actually be reduced when fat is added back into the diet and starches and refined carbohydrates are removed. ''I think when this stuff gets to be recognized,'' Stunkard says, ''it's going to really shake up a lot of thinking about obesity and metabolism.'' All of this could be settled sooner rather than later, and with it, perhaps, we might have some long-awaited answers as to why we grow fat and whether it is indeed preordained by societal forces or by our choice of foods. For the first time, the N.I.H. is now actually financing comparative studies of popular diets. Foster, Klein and Hill, for instance, have now received more than $2.5 million from N.I.H. to do a five-year trial of the Atkins diet with 360 obese individuals. At Harvard, Willett, Blackburn and Penelope Greene have money, albeit from Atkins's nonprofit foundation, to do a comparative trial as well. Should these clinical trials also find for Atkins and his high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, then the public-health authorities may indeed have a problem on their hands. Once they took their leap of faith and settled on the low-fat dietary dogma 25 years ago, they left little room for contradictory evidence or a change of opinion, should such a change be necessary to keep up with the science. In this light Sam Klein's experience is noteworthy. Klein is president-elect of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, which suggests that he is a highly respected member of his community. And yet, he described his recent experience discussing the Atkins diet at medical conferences as a learning experience. ''I have been impressed,'' he said, ''with the anger of academicians in the audience. Their response is 'How dare you even present data on the Atkins diet!' '' This hostility stems primarily from their anxiety that Americans, given a glimmer of hope about their weight, will rush off en masse to try a diet that simply seems intuitively dangerous and on which there is still no long-term data on whether it works and whether it is safe. It's a justifiable fear. In the course of my research, I have spent my mornings at my local diner, staring down at a plate of scrambled eggs and sausage, convinced that somehow, some way, they must be working to clog my arteries and do me in. After 20 years steeped in a low-fat paradigm, I find it hard to see the nutritional world any other way. I have learned that low-fat diets fail in clinical trials and in real life, and they certainly have failed in my life. I have read the papers suggesting that 20 years of low-fat recommendations have not managed to lower the incidence of heart disease in this country, and may have led instead to the steep increase in obesity and Type 2 diabetes. I have interviewed researchers whose computer models have calculated that cutting back on the saturated fats in my diet to the levels recommended by the American Heart Association would not add more than a few months to my life, if that. I have even lost considerable weight with relative ease by giving up carbohydrates on my test diet, and yet I can look down at my eggs and sausage and still imagine the imminent onset of heart disease and obesity, the latter assuredly to be caused by some bizarre rebound phenomena the likes of which science has not yet begun to describe. The fact that Atkins himself has had heart trouble recently does not ease my anxiety, despite his assurance that it is not diet-related. This is the state of mind I imagine that mainstream nutritionists, researchers and physicians must inevitably take to the fat-versus-carbohydrate controversy. They may come around, but the evidence will have to be exceptionally compelling. Although this kind of conversion may be happening at the moment to John Farquhar, who is a professor of health research and policy at Stanford University and has worked in this field for more than 40 years. When I interviewed Farquhar in April, he explained why low-fat diets might lead to weight gain and low-carbohydrate diets might lead to weight loss, but he made me promise not to say he believed they did. He attributed the cause of the obesity epidemic to the ''force-feeding of a nation.'' Three weeks later, after reading an article on Endocrinology 101 by David Ludwig in the Journal of the American Medical Association, he sent me an e-mail message asking the not-entirely-rhetorical question, ''Can we get the low-fat proponents to apologize?''

Search "Hospital Weight Gain" a few people have posted about it in the PCOS forum and seem to have gained 7-10 lbs of water from IV fluids etc in the hospital. I'm sure it will come off quick. Good luck!

Okay, I thought I was doing great! I was due for my 2nd fill at the end of December but because of the holidays all the appts. at my doctors were filled up. So, I go in next Monday, Feb. 2nd. I went on the scale this morning and thinking I might've lost an additional 6-10 pounds I gained 5. OMG! is this normal? My first fill was 2cc and obviously I might be on track if it wasn't for the holidays. Should I worry? go on a liquid diet for myself before the 2nd fill? or just make sure I do not wait too long for a fill. Please advise.

Holy Crap!.. i dont know what to say to that Joe, other then thanks for preparing me. I think i better stay off the scale. I don't want to see a weight gain. I think i would just sit in a corner and cry. well that said I know it isn't the end of the weight loss so keep up the good work plug along and you will see a loss soon.

I asked for a female therapist that deals w issues that contributed to my weight gain. I have been seeing her for these inner emotions for a few months now. plus as a therapist its advised that u have a therapist of your own.... But overall their Job is to delve into the why with u and help u process and create new ways of thinking, reacting to the issues that are bigger than the food.... It also helps if u ask for a list of contacts of licensed counselors & then call them and ask. U can speak to the majority of them directly.

i've heard of some people not being able to eat dairy due to weight gain, as pretty much one of their only symptoms of an intolerance.

Ok so something reaallllly weird is going on.. I was 249 before my last fill and in 3 days I was down to 246 (which is typical because of not eating much after getting a fill) and now about a week and a half after my fill I am 252!!! I have weighed myself several times over the last 3 days so its actually what I am.. so I gained 6 lbs!! thats impossible! and what is so strange is the amount of food I have been eating since my last fill is totally cut in half or a third of what I was eating.. 1/2 cup definately fills me up! and I am not eating crap either.. I am so stumped.. not to mention ticked! it just makes no sense! the only possible explaination I could fathom is that I am pg.. but its way to early for weight gain.. I still have to wait about 2 weeks if that was even a possibility.. so its most likely not man this stinks!

Hey guys.. for those of you who pray.. I really need some prayer.. I have been having this mild pain in my ovary area as I shared earlier.. well today it was getting a little more constant.. and have heard that sometimes people get this kind of pain when they are pregnant.. plus I had that wonkie 6lb weight gain in one week with no explaination.. well its like 5-6 days before I would start my cycle.. and I thought what the heck i will take a PG test.. well... it was positive!! the 2nd line was really faint.. but the test said it doesnt matter and because its like 6 days early that could be why it was faint. (baby number 2 possibly!! whoo hoo) well the reason I want prayer is.. because I am having this pain.. it could also be a sign of a tubial/ectopic pregnancy.. or something else being wrong.. it might not be.. but it could be.. so I am going to the doctor today at 415p to see what they can find out.. so if you think of it please pray for me. ( I am only telling you guys and my hubby at this point :bananalama:) thanks and I will let you know as soon as I find out anything.

No weight gain. Enjoyed good Turkey and couple bites of pumpkin pie with rediwhip - yum! Actually lost a pound. Was off work from last Wednesday thru Sunday and was able to walk 3-4 miles each day except Saturday. Now to get thru December!

I was in BH for over 3 months with no weight loss and no weight gain. It's disappointing when we go into this thinking we'll immediately start losing a lot of weight only to find we didn't read the fine print. Looking back, for me, it's been a blessing to take longer for the band to begin to work. I've learned much about myself, my eating habits and how to communicate with my band. tmf

I more or less reached my goal at 6 months, which also happened to be around Valentines Day and was exposed to a lot of candy. While I'm a full blown abstainer of carbs (bread, pasta and cakes), I ate some candy and noticed no weight gain, nor loss. I was angry that my sleeve worked great when It comes to protein and feeling full fast, but didn't phsase me in the least when I ate candy. So we really must mentally get a grip on our sweets addiction because it will continue to exist. I now know I must fully abstain from sweets as well. Also measure and weigh you portions. My phone broke so I wasn't able to track my food either, I know I likely never would have cheated that first time had I been tracking.

If you are consuming enough calories in sliders to gain weight then I don't think you are really at your sweet spot. That is a classic sign of being overfilled. My best friend has a band to and she fights this battle but it is a mental battle. She gets fills to "fix" her eating problem and can't eat anything but drinks cokes, ice cream, chips, etc. Then she starts getting food like Tacos and nachos down but continues to say "I just can't get anything down except the foos I can't have". One day I went to lunch with her and she ate the entire plate of Mexican food then later was upset about her weight gain. I finally called her out on how much I watched her eat and that she is over filled. My advice would be the same to you as to her... go back to basics. Start back with day 1 post op and if you aren't mentally ready then for goodness sake get the band deflated (quit hurting yourself just to gain weight and get it filled when you are mentally ready to start back. You would probably stop gining if you get deflated and just eat normal for a while. It really does seem to be a mental thing with some people..... I hope you find your Mojo again

I don't know why I haven't seen this thread before but anyway... I'm here now. I really need something to get me back on track. The weight is not coming off as fast as I'd like it to and I have been stuck in the same 35# range since Thanksgiving. Do I cheat? Yes, sometimes. But I wanted the band to keep me from cheating or at least give me a punch when I tried to cheat. That is not easy after years and years of bad habits. I wouldn't say it was any one bad habit in particular, it was just negligence. Years went by and I realized one day that I had gained 150# in a space of about 10 years. All that time I did nothing to stop it. I guess I just kept making excuses and ignored the weight gain. It wasn't until health problems started occuring that I decided to do something about it. Now, I'm stuck yet hopeful. Maybe this thread and support from other men will help. I never had a goal weight but I remember a friend years ago told me that if I would just lose 30# she would be all over me 24/7. At that time my weight was the lowest I can remember at 235#. So I think 30# less and I will have my goal weight!

I have no idea why I am fat other than too many calories and not enough expenditure? That should be a DUH answer but it is not that easy is it? I don't have any history of family abuse, abnormal relationships...anything which could triger unhealthy relationship with food. I have always been just under 140 lbs at 5'4" and when I hit that 140 mark it would trigger a panicked and rushed attempt to lose 5 pounds. My comfort zone was anything below 140. THAT was more than a decade ago. I did have one breakup ten years ago that I know hurt me and made me sad for a few weeks(normal??). I did notice a weight gain. I crept up to 160 and just didn't care. This next part will sound unreal but it is the truth for me(and some others??)--- I realized a year later that I was over 200 pounds. In 98 I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, my levels were within control after about six months. I had no significant weight loss while playing with my dose of Synthroid. A year or two later I was diagnosed with PCOS. Tried Glucophage and after six months of terrible bathroom visits I stopped taking that. The two diagnoses at forst gave me relief....therewas a REASON I was fat....a reason why it had become so friggin hard to lose weight. I know I eat well and do belong and actually go to a gym about 3 times a week. (I have to shake up my routine though because I only walk the tread and do some weights). In the last 9 years I have lost and gained the same 50+ pounds. I will not let either of the diagnoses be my reaons for failure. Do they make it harder to lose and keep weight off, YES. Do they make it impossible, NO! I have journaled(and been told I must be lying) my daily food intake. I have been away with friends and they see what I eat....and no loss. I think I eat too uch of the right things..I eat too fast. I'm thinking about LB I still don't know... Thanks for reading Susan

I have a couple of reasons for being fat. As a child I was very scrawny. When puberty hit so did the weight. I didn't know at the time, but my eating as a response to hormonal changes was due to sexual abuse when I was very young. Then at 13 I also developed PCOS which didn't cause the weight gain, but did keep on what I was putting on and made it almost impossible to lose it again. Also at 13 I developed Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) which again didn't cause me to be fat but made it so hard to eat sensibly or exercise in winter. I had a lot of emotional pain and rage that I felt I had to stuff down my throat with food because my own home wasn't a safe place to express them. Later on, what added to the weight problem was all the crash dieting I did. My first diet attempt was starvation. I was borderline anorexic at 15 (before they had a name for it) but brought myself out of it before it became an issue. After that I tried just about every crazy diet going.

hi there sleeping beauty. this might be my second post in reply. lol.. who cares?? lol. I didnt have any fill either when i had the band put in. it was strange because it sure does feel like its got some. i did ask my dr about it and he said no. but, it feels like restriction. im wondering how much swelling would be still in my stomach after just over four weeks?? i had a nasty episode this morning which i posted about earlier so i cant take anything for granted at all. i certainly cant fool myself that i can eat anything anyways.. it just doesnt happen for me. Im pleased about that though. having said that... im wondering about my first fill. im assuming that i will have some fill put in on the 7th when i go back to the dr. Have you been very hungry these last couple of weeks?? what do you think your hunger has been for?? ive found out it was for red meat. last night i had my first plain hamburger... and it was just sooooo good. lol. im having another one tonight. just mixed in with some sloppy veges and some gravy. I never ate a lot of read meat... but obviously my body was missing it a lot. i have had some chicken now for the last week... it was the red meat that really did the trick. ... i havent lost anything in at least a week. not since my food has been more substantial anyway. how many others experienced a loss of weight gain when their diet was changed from liquid?

I don't know about this company or policy in particular, but many won't approve revisions for weight gain. Some, however, approve them if there are medical issues. Since you've had issues with GERD and high blood pressure, that *might* be enough for some companies -but again, not all companies approve revisions. I wonder if a doctor could have a peer-to-peer review with them. Although your current surgeon isn't in your network, so that might be an issue - is there a bariatric surgeon who's in your network that you could do a consultation with?

Hi - know just how you feel -the same thing happened when I switched to soft foods as well - I had my post op today and the Dr, did a fill - I'm 17 days out also - he said not feeling full until after a couple of fills is normal as is the slight weight gain - hang in there - let me know how you are doing! - M

Long...I know where you are coming from on the getting your head set to match where you body is. 15 yrs ago I was a size 8. I could walk into a shop and pick anything off the rack and not even try it on. That all changed in a hurry when I packed on pound after pound. I guess through the weight gain I kept remembering what it was like to be slim and feel great (healthwise). Over the years I just kept wanting that back. I never want to feel that overwhelmed and rueful again. Hopefully the band will always be there for me. I know it is work with the band but just certain food issues are gone with me. I never felt like the rug was pulled out from under me when I got the band. I don't miss any certain foods. I do a lot of cooking and baking. (We are farmers and I feed a number of guys every day). I never seem to crave anything, even when I am cooking and serving the guys. The band has done that for me. I understand where you are coming from on never looking back. The only reason I will ever look back is to remind myself that I never want to be there again. You are really dropping the weight in the last couple of weeks. Hope you are feeling well.

I keep coming back to these boards because of posts like this. I have almost stopped a couple of times because of super sensitive people or people who feel its there duty to tell me when they feel I am being "mean" to someone (I am direct when I detect people trying to "bargain" their way to poor behavior or having a pity party!) But this post alone has made it worthwhile for me. I have had 2 long stalls in the 29 weeks since I had my surgery. Both lasted for a month. The first one was the dreaded 3 week and was very frustrating. However, I could read here how this was normal and to quit worrying about it. I put the scale away and stopped weighing myself everyday, and instead just checked every week or so. After the stall ended, the weight fell off very rapidly. My waist went from a 48 to a 36 in a matter of 5 months. Stalled again around Haloween and just weighed again this morning to find I was losing pounds again. Am actually looking to lose about 5 more pounds and then start adding weight gain shakes into my diet to stop losing weight. My doctor doesn't want me to lose anymore. Weird place for me to be to say the least!