Jack

Personally I believe "238" is WAY better than "300".....and that can not be regarded as a failure IMHO. When it gets to the actual HARD work part, I'm not at goal either. Then again, I'm not on CPAP, or on insulin shots. Or blind. Or dead. So....whatever my own status is....I'm a HAPPY Bandster and intend to continue as best I can muddle on until the earth falls out of orbit, etc.

"Don't look for the band to stop you from eating. Look for it to stop the 'hunger'. *That* is the sweet spot" GREAT!!!

I had my first "you're invisible" moment in years the other day. Standing of all places in a restaurant a tiny wisp of a young waitress just ignored me standing there.....obviously NEXT in line....to ask the couple behind where they wanted to seat....in a nearly empty restaurant. The couple was surprised and made their own point by telling her they were AFTER the 'next' guy....me..... She suddenly had that -caught-in-the-headlights-look.... and took me to a table with some embarrassment and apology on her part. I didn't know what to make of it. I am decidedly NOT 'trim' but certainly no longer 'morbidly obese' and fit XL t-shirts, 44 pants. I was old enough to be her grandfather. Don't know what the dynamics of that one was, but in my MO days I was pretty much invisible to nearly every sales person/waitress/etc most of the time.

Hi Alexandra.....good to hear from you, would be nice to catch up. I check in here daily a few times. cheers

"Chocolate craving" is no different than any other craving, that taken to the extreme we TOTMOs tend to do, results in the turmoil and self inflicted suffering indulging in one illusion we consign ourselves to another round of self doubt and guilt. Today I indulged in something I've been lusting after for 6 months: a deli counter has "lemon bar" in huge and glorious excess....today I bought one...and shared it with three other people. I got 3 small tastes....and have no guilt or residual lust for it at all now. preOp I would have simply inhaled at least one, taken the other back to a table and eaten it at some leisure, while hauling still another toward home...not that it would have gotten there. So I'm all for "chocolate lust" by whatever name. Being able to enjoy a taste without being driven to devour the entire shelf load is a triumph for me!!! It simply doesn't take so much these days, to satisfy such imagined pleasures.

"I'm proud to say I found both way too sweet. " YES!!!! :woot: :woot: :woot:

re: "I am trying to work on the reasons I overeat now, so the band will just be a reinforcement to keep me in check later. I haven't begun changing my habits yet, but I am evaluating my spiritual and emotional problems."<br /><br />great points....however, I failed utterly at that approach, and had to revert to 'change my overeating behavior'. Along the way, I discovered at last the emotional content of eating that did so much to trigger my episodes over the years. Behavior modification is the only tool that worked for me....and the Band provided ample opportunity to learn new eating behaviors. <br /><br />In the end, whichever tool is appropriate for the job. We are diverse individuals with complex reasons for being Morbidly Obese.

good to hear the news.....I remain "35# from goal".....and life is GOOD!!!!

Nykee: good to hear you HAVE been successful at losing so much weight. I hadn't seen any posts from you for a long time, and wondered how you were faring. I have a few comments as your issue strikes close to home on some of my own concerns: re: "If I get an unfil. I will gain the weight back." Disagree...the fill is not what does the deed; you recognize the cause: "Any unfill at all, will allow me to eat more" Yes, that's what all of us face every day. Eat too much of the wrong stuff, and we're back to Morbid Obesity again. Many if not most, Bandsters have to go into combat daily with the confusing and conflicting things we think we understand about our Band, and our body. The physical causes of Morbid Obesity are reinforced with other factors that influence our eating habits. The momentary comfort of eating and satisfaction of 'feeling full' far too easily can replace our long-term concern about our health and our weight. Our body-image ideals are seduced by the pleasures of 'sport eating' that I believe is on a par with 'sport sex'. There is little that verbal discourse can do to change behavior or desire for either. You bring up a point that is difficult to comprehend, let alone discuss. Satisfaction of physical drives is a complex subject that many researchers have theorized about for decades. We all have to find answers some how. You've made a lot of headway from the last time I saw your posts. Congratulations. Courage in your journey.

Nice beginning!!! Now, tape measure and photograph yourself for your own personal journal to keep track of your metrics, which all change regardless of what the scale says. And.....start planning on what to do with all those clothing items that will no longer fit. cheers on your journey

re: grazing......"I'm a grazer"....the difference is what I graze on and how much little it takes to control any of those promiscuous food thoughts.... re: "But it's there in the back of my mind ... the chocolate, the candy I can suck on." In the same sense, you are setting up a red herring argument. Of course you can. If you want to continue 'sport eating' you don't need the band at all. Re: "I wanted to feel full" I wanted to feel "not hungry" all the time. The Band provided that for me....and even current grazing is sporadic and minimal compared to preOp. Strangely, when I eat my hard Protein (usually steak) in 3-4 oz amounts at meals, I am not interested in grazing. re: "The head hunger is the real battle and the lap band doesn't fix that." For me the long 6 week liquids/mushies routine gave time to learn new triggering behaviors and understand my own delusions about fullness and overeating. I've come to enjoy the head-hunger dance, as it takes so little to turn it down these days. A big glass of Water will satisfy my own head hunger for an hour or more. And with the 3 meals-a-day-plus-2-authorized-snacks, there really isn't much time that head hunger and the Belly Beasts can gang up on me. I think most Bandsters have found a hundred different reasons to NOT get the Band! I literally almost got up out of the preOp bed and walked out. It took all I had to not do such. For me getting the Band has been a very good decision. Cheers on your own journey.

re: "I know I won't be able to eat my whole steak anymore, at least at one sitting, but I wanted to cry at the thought of not eating a filet mignon every again" you WILL be able to eat your "whole steak".....it's just going to be a "whole lot SMALLER".....and filet mignon is one of my favorites! The 'dry' issue arises especially when reheating in a microwave. That does something to make coarse & fibrous Proteins more so from what I see. I eat (carefully chosen) pieces of chicken. Kabob style usually is just fine. The 'mashed tuna' was my early postBand phase. I was especially tight, even for other Bandsters. First fill was 6 months postOp in fact. Just be aware there are many paths to your own goal, and while you likely will share some very similar moments, there is also likely to be some that are pretty much your own. Cheers!!!

Your journey may be a bit different than my own. I eat steak several times a week now. In fact last week went out to a nice restaurant and GOT a marvelous steak!!! OK, I brought most of it home and ate 2 more meals off of it....still, quite enjoyable. Buttermilk soaked for 3 days and then grilled medium rare. With a special Yukon Gold-garlic-butter mashed potato, and a wonderful Australian-styled salad, so they claimed. But regarding what the Band leads one to eating in the early post-mushy phase, I think is quite individualistic. I couldn't eat regular salad either for over 6 months.

You will most likely find your tastes will change considerably if you follow the Plan. In my own return to real food phase 6 weeks postOp, I too tried baby foods of various kinds. Didn't care for it and discovered other ways I could prepare my own stuff with a blender and willingness to experiment. Don't expect your preOp tastes to necessarily drive your postOp needs. The single best food I had after the mushie phase, was a poached egg. Not only was it a delightful banquet, I could barely eat it all in one setting.

re: "aren't you supposed to stay away from steak and bread because of the risk of getting stuck? " Yes. For a period as defined by your Doc's orders, and your ability to tolerate such. Even with careful chewing, I was unable to eat burger meat, let alone steak, for nearly a year postOp. I relied on a small blender to chop it up completely, with a little touch of something such as NF mayo or other. I ate far more tuna for a year postOp than steak. And dry chicken still doesn't work well for me. The bread issue, thankfully, has resolved. PreOp I'd get specialty bread, inhaling 1 loaf on the way home from the bakery. Not too smart in any case. I was a bread-o-holic. Now I don't care for it very often. Toasted and thin works better for me too. I don't do such as buns, English muffins, and a wide variety of biscuits that used to comprise a large portion of my daily eating. After about 2 years, I actually could eat part of a piece of pizza, thin crust. And that isn't all that good any more either. Pasta I can tolerate about once every few months, but no longer live for that huge plate of the stuff. A few bites is plenty. It's a delight to find how satisfying 'eating to live' can be, instead of my old 'live to eat' life style.

If that were happening to me, I'd be at the hospital getting checked out thoroughly regardless of where my own Dr. was. Those may be referred pain symptoms, or they may be symptoms of something unrelated to the Band. Please get medical attention SOON to find out the cause and let us know what you discover.

re: "I can only eat a very, very small portion and think I can't possibly be full." It was odd at first for me too with that sensation....however once I discovered that I wasn't *hungry* it became a lot more satisfying that thinking in the old habit of 'full'. Even now it is a pleasant surprise sometimes to find one or 2 bites actually are 'enough' to satisfy. I too have decades of 'clean your plate'...'here--finish just this little bit'.....'are you FULL'...when that's the wrong question.... and learning to eat in restaurants takes a while to get the basic changes down. I had to learn new behaviors of "put it in take-home box'; order the small size, or the appetizer, don't get the big bready things no matter how good you think they look. And I've learned to just put down my fork and say "Enough". Most of the time. cheers on OUR journeys!!!!

We have to find the courage to face each Bandster issue using the rational part of ourselves. I endured being too tight on several occasions, thinking I would somehow overcome it. In my 4cc band, even .1cc makes a tremendous difference!!! I wasn't throwing up at night, but had got to where each day I could be sure there would be a PB or 2. Feeling embarrassed by going too long without seeking help is understandable. Not getting that adjustment when needed is recipe for unnecessary suffering.

Good point. It came eventually even to me as a 'slow learner' that none of these 'comfort foods' actually were! And becoming aware of my own emotional responses finally helped me train myself to not *have to* respond to stress by overeating. What a relief! The key though, that helped the most, was to finally be able to recognize the simple difference between 'hunger' and 'not hunger'. The simplest rule I could invent for myself was "if Not hunger active.....Don't eat"!!! After a while it gets to seem natural, because along with that comes the 'when hungry....EAT' Then STOP. It's a beautiful system I had never really used much preOp.

Concern about "how much I can eat" and "not feeling full" is what got me to the point of being Morbidly Obese in the first place. Since the Band, I have learned how to tell the difference between "sport eating" and "eating to live" rather than "living to eat". There is a whole new life just waiting for us to discover it. No Bandster has ever died of starvation. We have to learn a whole new relationship with food and eating. We have to learn the difference between 'eating' and OVER eating. Hunger is not the best guide to when or how much to eat....that's what got most of us into "TOTMO".....the Tribe of the Morbidly Obese. We have to recruit and train that part of our brain which controls the Belly Beasts. Rational eating must replace the bad habits of a lifetime of overeating. cheers on your journey

"What I realized is that I am not hungry. I just want to eat. A small meal is great but I am still accustomed to eating more" that is a truth many Bandster eventually realize. Hunger is different than 'habit', yet both conspire to make our lives more complex than we need. Cheers on your wonderful victory!!!!

"We ate just to eat and I think now knowing what if feels like to be hungry helps me to not overeat because I really only eat when I am truly hungry. " Agree!!! Well stated!!!

There seems to be considerable range of what we expect as well as what we observe. I was perhaps fortunate, in that my own 'first fill' was six full months postOp. It was during that time I learned the most about eating, overeating, being hungry, being full, and being at that blissful state of 'not hungry-not full-just right'. It was also the period of my greatest weight loss. Ever concept I had of 'feeling full' somehow the gold standard of whether I needed to eat was changed. At long last, after the initial 3-weeks fluids/3 weeks mushies, and then into the real solid food, I began eating more or less 'normally'. That was my first experience with the symptom of becoming hungry, then eating, finding that hunger sated, and then stopping when no longer hungry. Full had nothing to do with it. And the first time I got truly 'stuck'.....was with dry triscuits (about 3 of them) and the sensation I was going to die over a period of increasing discomfort for several hours. I put in emergency call to the surgeon's office, expecting to be directed to the local ER. Instead, one of the front office girls had the Band installed about 3 months prior to mine. She guided me through and I recovered, although I still 6 years later do not eat triscuits. We can learn a lot from our collective experiences, without expecting them to all be identical. And I believe not one story I've read here in the past 6 years exactly mirrors any one else. There are a lot of similarities though. We can let the experience of others be a GUIDE, nothing more.

re: "Could it be the shape/size/?? of the stomach? Why do some people require such high volume in cc's to get restriction, while others are on the lower spectrum? ETC. ETC. " good question..... I haven't seen anything that supports that idea regarding the physical footprint of the stomach. What I have read focuses on the actual pouch/resulting opening size....which is directly related to size of the Band. The Band comes in a variety of models with different volume capacities. My own Band is from 2004 and is the then-common 4cc total volume size. Newer models are 10-14 cc volume. That difference accounts for some of the difference we see people reporting. There are nuances resulting from that as well. In my Band, as little as .1cc fill makes a tremendous difference in how constricted my pouch is, while the larger Bands may require 2cc or more for similar results. With smaller variation possible, there is smaller 'window of control' and more crucial attention to signs of 'too full'/'not full enough'. An unexplained observation I've had, is the fact there IS periodic fluctuation of 'fickleness' in what the Band tolerates. I have been unable to tie it to anything including phase of the moon. Sometimes I am subjectively tighter and sometimes looser. I've learned to adapt to that accordingly.

Bloating and flatulence is often caused by high sugar/high processed carbohydrate intake. "Fermentation in the bowel" is how the old natural practitioners labeled it. And high pH level in the stomach slowed the digestion of Protein, which resulted in putrifaction and more gas. Depending on how packed our lower GI tract is, will affect how long it takes to eliminate. Some people respond well to a short course of colonic irrigation. There is an absolute ton of reading material available to help guide you. Naturopaths typically have a lot to offer in such complaints.