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I was banded on May 7th and they didn't tell me not to bend. They just said not to lift over 10 lbs for two weeks. I feel good. I am a hairdresser and went back to work on the 6th day after surgery. I had some pain but it was tolerable. They did keep me over night in the hospital right after surgery because I had so much pain so they could give me IV pain meds. I'm 10 days out now and feel good other than that I can't sleep on either side. I am sick of sleeping on my back. haha

Hi..welcome to LBT..this is a great place for support..I have been banded 10 months..feel free to check out my blog on here and PM me with a ny questions...congrats on making this decision, Jennifer

hi , i to am new to this site-i have been waiting on my date for a couple of months and to my surprise i received a call on 11/22 to let me know my surgery will be on 12/6 wow 12 days from now-anxiously i have been waiting and now i am in shock-but i know to go into this with plenty of faith-i am also a diabetic and currently inject myself 10 times a day with insulin-so i will surely be in heaven when that daily routine will no longer be yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh can't wait.

Wow....I sometimes buy me a little oven roasted chicken salad at subway with double meat and get a couple of meals out of it. I was buying the chicken teriyaki salad but I found out that sauce they use ups the whole salad from 10 carbs to 40 for the double meat. Considering the only difference is the small amount of sauce on the chicken, I figured I could live without it.

My doc let me do 2 protein shakes and one small low carb meal a day. I lost 19 lbs in 2 weeks pre op. It want as hard as I thought it would be.

I went for my second post op visit on June 9. It was at that visit that I would receive my first fill. Well, one week prior to my surgery, which was April 21, I was 348. On June 9 i was 296, down 52 pounds since surgery. The doctor was very pleased with my progress and told me I wouldn't be getting a fill. I was down 19 pounds since my first pre op visit. He told me to keep doing what I'm doing although he wants me to eat Breakfast. I told him I'm not hungry in the mornings and never have been. Why should I eat when I'm not hungry. I am eating at lunch and dinner. I am also walking one hour daily and drinking plenty of Water. I told him everything he told me at every visit: total lifestyle change, can't eat like I did before, must exercise 45 minutes a day, take a half hour for each meal, don't drink with a meal, no eating in between meals and so forth. I don't regret not getting a fill but I guess it's up to the doctor during each visit.

Aww.. That sux I wish I could just sleep for a couple weeks and then wake up to the surgery being all done 19 days and counting!!

I guess I never really understood the lap band process. I had gastric bypass 10 years ago and gained half of my weight back. I had the Realize lapband in June and thought I would feel once again like I did 10 years ago....not so. I can eat LOTS. I thought this was an answer to obesity and would help. I initially lost 20 pounds because I ate shakes and soft foods after the surgery, but when I could eat regular food again I went back to old habits and have gained it all back. My band is almost full and I'm still eating and gaining. What is going on? I thought I would NOT be able to eat. Help! Klipspringer

Hello Band Buddies I’m sending out this posting early for the Lapband coffee Group in Brampton for February because we are holding it bright and early on a Saturday morning for a change. The reason for the date and time change is to accommodate a new bandster who is unable to make it to our regular Monday night group and they would really like to connect with other bandsters… so for the month of February we changed the date. So if your going to start your Saturday morning off with a coffee anyway why not start it off with us… I’ll be getting there at about 9:45 a.m… because I’ll be taking the GO Bus in from Toronto so feel free to stop by early if you want to. We had a GREAT turnout at the last Brampton group… if your free stop by and stay “hi”… and if your busy… CANCEL YOUR PLANS…. and take a half hour for yourself… you might enjoy it and you might even pick up a few tips !!!! Tom, Toronto Banded July 6 06 Wt. Loss: 160 lbs Lapband Coffee Group – Brampton Saturday, February 8th – 10:30 a.m. Second Cup (Located in the Longo’s Plaza) 7700 Hurontario Street, Building E, Unit 504 Brampton, ON The Lapband Coffee Groups are open to EVERYONE who has had Lapband Surgery or if you’re looking into the lapband process, recently banded, or a long time "Bandster". This is a great way to find out about the lapband from individuals who have had the surgery and to ask questions or just listen to individuals share their lapband journey experience. No need to sign up… just show up and if you can’t find the group ask for Tom at the cash register. If you have any questions before the coffee group please contact: Tom – tomander@bell.net Let’s all “band” together for a cup of coffee!

I would love to be able to eat at the same 3 times a day and not be hungry inbetween. Hopefully after a couple of fills the not hungry inbetween will happen. However with my job it is impossible to schedule eating times and no I'm not just making excuses. I'm a trainer and depending on the course and the client the times can vary widely. Its good if I am doing a full day course as then I can normally have a break and lunch somewhere between 12 - 12.30. There are some courses that run from 10 - 2. these play havoc with lunch as by the time I'm finished I'm normally starving. Then probably the worst are the ones that run from approx 3.30 - 6.30 or 7. Especially as often I have an 60 - 90 min drive home. By the time I get home I am tired and starving! I don't mind taking food with me for lunch as there are lots of things that are easy to pack and eat but its difficult at dinner time as I want to be able to eat a "proper" meal. Also a lot of these late courses are at schools and they just want to get out and lock up as soon as the course is finished. Eating cold food in my car in the dark really doesn't appeal. Still trying to work out the best thing to do on days like these!

hi! I'm moving to Las Vegas in the next few months and I'm looking now for a bariactric surgeon. I had my surgery done here in Rochester on 7/7/10 by Dr DiBenedetto and he's amazing! My appointments are ALWAYS with him. He's always very busy but unless you need to come in for an un-fill on a day that he's in the OR (like yesterday) you always see him. So this Dr Atkinson, you pretty much never see him after surgery? That concerns me....

Well this is my first big meal but I prepared. I only bought a turkey breast and made 1/2 the dressing, since I have an autisc daughter I made a good portion of potatoes but still less then usually and we had yams cause I knew the kids would not leave anything left.little did I know the first bit of turkey would get suck and it didn't move for about 10 mintued. fianally I had a bit or two of the yam and pots and then it as time to clean up. I pack up whatever was left and sent it home with my guest and froze the other half of the turkey till Christmas. I was disappointed that I couldn't eat some but by the end of the day thanked my band for doing its job so well.

I couldn't agree with you more, Randy. It's easy to get impatient... my weight loss for this week 6/10 of a pound... but, we didn't gain it overnight and we won't lose it overnight. I chose the band over bypass because I thought it was a healthier option and with that comes slower weight loss, but healthier, in my opinion. I'm 5 days away from my 6 month "bandiversary" and 6/10 of a pound away from a total of 60 pounds gone so far. I still have a long way to go, but baby steps are okay as long as it's a steady downward trend. We can't get discouraged. We're in this for the long haul! You're right... first priority... healing. Then, we do have to watch our calories, we do have to watch the quality of food we are eating... we all know this... protein first, then veggies, keep carbs to a minimum, watch liquid calories (I'm enjoying a small glass of wine at the moment... SMALL), and... a biggie.... EXERCISE!! That's important. Those of us with extra weight often have joint problems and mobility issues, arthritis, etc. My exercise is water aerobics and I LOVE it!! But, find an exercise you can do and be consistent with it and it will help the weight to come off. Hang in there gang!! We're going to do this!! :smile::cool::eek::Banane30::Banane28:

I am being banded on June 4th. I started my pre-op diet on Friday, May 23rd. My starting weight is 200# and my BMI is 35. Can someone who started at about the same place tell me about what they lost each month for the first few months? I'm hoping to be down 25 or 30 pounds in 3 months but I don't know if that is realistic since my total to loose is 75#. I really want to set some goals. I want goals that are achieveable and will require exercise and effort for me to achieve. I just don't want to set my goals so high that I can't reach them and feel like a failure. In the same thought, I want my goal to motivate me to stay on track. Does this sound okay...... May 23 start date... 200# June 4th band date ~ 3 pound on pre op diet???? July 4th 1 month with band ~ 10 pounds???? August 4th 2 months with band/ 1 month with fill ~ 20 pounds????? September 4th 3 months with band ~ 25 pounds????? Please share what you lost!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks, TxJuneBug08

I was banded on 9/10 and just started sleeping in bed on 10/12. I can even sleep on my stomach. I'm so excited to be out of the recliner and get to cuddle again. YEAH! You'll make it to that point it just takes some time. If I were a back sleeper I could have been in bed a while ago, but I'm mostly a stomach/side sleeper so I needed to wait longer. In terms of intamacy there are a lot of different levels. About a week post-op we returned to some of those levels. A month out we returned to most activities, nothing crazy. -Leena

Hey Bobbie, I did the same thing I failed my stress test. I have a rapid heart rate and didn't get to take my meds that morning and I thought that is what made me fail but to find out after my heart catherization I have a 10% blockage. They won't do anything unless its 70% blocked. I had my lap band surgery August 21 and am doing fine. My cardiologist told me with weightloss and exercise that will take care of my blockage...It is always better to be safe than sorry...I hope everything goes well and I'm sure it will...Marie

It's after lunch, so everybody is full. Then, in comes a luscious chocolate confection. The sight, the smell—even the sound of the word "cake!"—stimulate the reward-and-pleasure circuits of the brain, activating memory centers and salivary glands as well. Melinda Beck asks the age-old question: Do you eat to live, or live to eat? Scientists, it turns out, have learned much more about how appetite works in the brain - and the findings have major consequences. Those reactions quickly drown out the subtle signals from the stomach that are saying, in effect, "Still digesting down here. Don't send more!" Social cues add pressure and permission to indulge. Soon, everybody is having a slice—or two. Scholars have understood the different motives for eating as far back as Socrates, who counseled, "Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat." But nowadays, scientists are using sophisticated brain-imaging technology to understand how the lure of delicious food can overwhelm the body's built-in mechanism to regulate hunger and fullness, what's called "hedonic" versus "homeostatic" eating. One thing is clear: Obese people react much more hedonistically to sweet, fat-laden food in the pleasure and reward circuits of the brain than healthy-weight people do. Simply seeing pictures of tempting food can light up the pleasure-seeking areas of obese peoples' brains. Two Reactions to Cake Two conferences this week on obesity are each examining aspects of how appetite works in the brain and why some people ignore their built-in fullness signals. Scientists hope that breakthroughs will lead to ways to retrain people's thinking about food or weight-loss drugs that can target certain brain areas. In a study presented this week at the International Conference on Obesity in Stockholm, researchers from Columbia University in New York showed pictures of cake, pies, french fries and other high-calorie foods to 10 obese women and 10 non-obese women and monitored their brain reactions on fMRI scans. In the obese women, the images triggered a strong response in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a tiny spot in the midbrain where dopamine, the "desire chemical," is released. The images also activated the ventral pallidum, a part of the brain involved in planning to do something rewarding. "When obese people see high-calorie foods, a widespread network of brain areas involved in reward, attention, emotion, memory and motor planning is activated, and all the areas talk to each other, making it hard for them to resist," says Susan Carnell, a research psychologist at the New York Obesity Research Center at Saint-Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital and Columbia University and one of the investigators. Similar brain reactions occurred in the obese subjects even when researchers merely said the words "chocolate brownie"—but not when they saw or heard about lower calorie foods such as cabbage and zucchini. Reactions were far less pronounced in the non-obese subjects. More such studies are being presented in Pittsburgh this week at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior. In one, neuroscientists from Yale University's John B. Pierce Laboratory had 13 overweight and 13 normal-weight subjects smell and taste chocolate or strawberry milkshakes and observed their brains with fMRI scans. The overweight subjects had strong reactions to the food in the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain—whether they were hungry or not. The healthy-weight subjects showed an amygdala response only when they were hungry. "If you are of normal weight, your homeostatic mechanisms are functioning and controlling this region of the brain," says lead investigator Dana Small. "But in the overweight group, there is some sort of dysfunction in the homeostatic signal so that even though they weren't hungry, they were vulnerable to these external eating cues." Studies have found that a diet of sweet, high-fat foods can indeed blunt the body's built-in fullness signals. Most of them emanate from the digestive tract, which releases chemical messengers including cholecystokinin, glucagon-like peptide and peptide YY when the stomach and intestines are full. Those signals travel up to the brain stem and then the hypothalamus, telling the body to stop eating. Obesity also throws off the action of leptin, a hormone secreted by fat tissue that tells the hypothalamus how much energy the body has stored. Leptin should act as a brake against overeating, and it does in normal-weight people. But most obese people have an overabundance of leptin, and somehow their brains are ignoring the signal. All these findings beg the question, which came first? Does obesity disrupt the action of leptin, or does a malfunction in leptin signaling make people obese? Similarly, are some people obese because their brains overreact to tempting food, or do their brains react that way because something else is driving them to overeat? Researchers at Yale and elsewhere are turning to such questions next. "It's possible that these changes reflect how the brain has adapted to eating patterns in obese people, and that could create a vicious circle, putting them at risk for even more disordered eating," says Dr. Small. There are plenty of other metabolic mysteries, too: Why are some "foodies" who get intense pleasure from eating able to stop when they're full and others aren't? Is the tendency to eat way past fullness genetic or learned behavior, and how much can it be changed? The answers are still elusive, but neuroscientists and behavioral experts are finding some tantalizing clues. Some fMRI studies have found that while tempting food stimulates the release of dopamine in obese people, they actually have fewer dopamine receptors than normal weight subjects do, so they may derive less pleasure from actually eating, setting up a craving for more. Curiously, several studies have shown that some forms of gastric bypass surgery can actually create changes in the brains of formerly obese people —and not just because their stomachs are smaller and fill up more quickly. Levels of leptin and glucose tend to drop in bypass patients, ending diabetes for many of them. PET scans also show that bypass patients have more dopamine circulating in their brains, which may help control appetite as well. Bypass surgery seems to make food less tempting, too. In a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last month, Swiss researchers had 123 severely obese, 110 non-obese and 136 bypass patients take a test that measures vulnerability to hedonistic eating, known as the "Power of Food scale." The bypass patients and the non-obese had scores far lower than those who were currently obese. (Exactly why is still unclear, but some experts think it could relate to "dumping syndrome," in which high fat and sweet food creates nausea and dizziness in bypass patients. They may have learned to associate such foods with discomfort rather than pleasure.) Some of the most intriguing imaging studies have peered into the brains of people who have lost significant weight and kept it off through diet and exercise alone—although researchers say they're hard to find.

Just hang on for a few days Tamz. I also left you a pm with my number in it. Call me anytime! I feel wonderful now! By the end of week 1 I was coming around to thinking "ok, I think I'll live..." Week two was a LOT better but still hard to get all my liquids in but I was excited because I could move into the full liquids stage and the pain had drastically decreased and now, day 19 (this is the exciting part!) I've lost 28 pounds and I KNOW it was all worth it! Give yourself time to rest and heal and you'll look back on this as just a blip in time and a minor bump in the road and oh so worth it! *hugs!* Renee`

It doesn't really sound to me like you're fallen off the wagon, just maybe letting your focus go other places. Why don't you join our weight loss challenge... maybe that will help with the motivation and get your focus back to that last pesky 10 lbs! You can do it!! http://www.verticalsleevetalk.com/topic/16638-4th-of-july-what-will-you-weigh/page__p__140700__fromsearch__1#entry140700

4 months out went from a 10 to a 9!!!

I am just trying to stick to 5 oz of the Protein 4 times a day and plenty of fluids in between along with Jello and sugar free pudding in between those. I get hungry in between but when I drink a little the hunger subsides for a little bit. So in all I am getting the 64 oz of liquids plus the 60 grams of protein as well. I am 10 days post op and just about ready to add purees. But I am still waiting for the dietitian to get back to me. I just don't want to push anything that will interfere with the stomach healing.

I was also sleeved on 10/23 & was experiencing the same pain in chest after sipping until yesterday. Then something clicked & I can swallow pain free now. Mind you, they are still small sips...but I'll take it! As far as pain, I'm still dealing with gas pain & it was way worse than incision pain. I COULD NOT stay awake for anything the entire day of surgery. It's gradually gotten better. I'm sleepy but not exhausted. And I've had plenty of energy to run errands & stay active all week. Best of luck to you all!!

I love Kashi Go Lean Crisp. It has 9 gm protein and when I add my milk (My store has a brand of Lactose free milk that has 12 gm per cup) so I end up with 21 grams for cereal. I also found when my store was out of that milk that Smart Balance Omega 3 milk has I think 10 grams of protein.

northern cali here, vsg on 10/20

Hello Excitedforthesleeve! I just joined to ask if anyone else is going through the same thing. I was sleeved on 10/18/17 and released the next day. I’ve been keeping in contact with my doctor’s office and letting them know that I can maybe get in 8 ounces of liquid total a day because I’m worried about becoming dehydrated too. For me the feeling is like there’s just no room for anything I swallow to go. I think the sleeve can get so swollen in some people that it just takes a little longer for it to calm down. Today I switched to clear protein drinks instead of the powder and I’ve managed to get a little more down. I hope you start feeling better soon and that you will be able to drink and get out of the hospital as quickly and safely as possible!