nina874

I think if you eat too much of anything you can get fat - except maybe celery, it would be pretty hard to get fat off celery - but it is a lot easier to get fat eating a smaller amount of bad food than it is to get fat eating huge amounts of good food. There are loads of things that I love that arent necessarily bad when taken individually but when you add a cream sauce they become calorific, steak au poivre with asparagus, sweet potatoes and sauted baby carrots springs to mind....... I have to say as well that my step sister is a vegetarian and her love of cheese definitly, as she will admit, is reflected in her butt size

I am at goal now, but my DH is about to get banded at a BMI of 33, I am proud of him that he has decided to tackle this now as he is just going up and then down and then up further, better to get it under control before you have a mountain to climb!

46.1% !!! I am very happy with that

I did ok, I did get up close and very personal with my stepmums sherry trifle ( mmmmmm it is sooooo good! I actually stole it from her house and took it home ) but other than that I didnt stray too much so I just upped my exercise and maybe put on 1lb?

You need to schedule a fill! Once you have some restriction you will find it much easier to lose the weight. The diet advice that the previous poster gave you was good advice, if you combined high Protein low cal with the band then you are onto a winner.

Hmmm, if I am feeling very virtuous I will eat a rye bread with mashed up salmon with some salad. I tend to eat what everyone else is eating just less of it. I try to drink a pint of veggie juice a day, thus getting around the 5 a day problem as I found that with the decreased portion size I can manage I would have been eating 4 a day and nothing else!, Veggies and fruit and not that easy to eat with the band they have a tendancy to get stuck ( well for me they do) so juice seemed the logical way to go. I dont do Breakfast, never have done, I think it is a by product of years of morning sickness, I tend to have a light lunch maybe some Soup and a ryebread, but at dinnertime I will have whatever I have cooked for the family from roasts to jamaican jerk chicken rice and gravy. I always make sure that each forkful has some bulky food on it and I eat really slow. I never ever deny myself anything, and if I get upclose and personal with a tub of Ben and Jerrys I just work harder in the gym the day after, it doesnt happen that often so I dont worry about it! When I was trying to lose I focused on a lot of Protein, chicken mainly with a spoonful of whatever sauce or gravy I had made, I still have to cut meat up really small and chew it well and it always fills me up. I reckon 1/2 a chicken breast is about my limit without sauce and nearly a whole one with sauce. The dryer the food the faster you get full, any meat based protein is good, just make sure that you cut it up well. Fish is also good but the meatier the better, think salmon or tuna rather than skate or bass. I have to say that veggie juices are my life saver, I know that I am getting my vits so then I can relax and not worry about it.

Absolutly, but then you can with all kinds of weightloss surgery! If you want to eat icecream, creamed potatoes and gravy and all of the slide down a treat foods then you can and you wont lose any weight, but if you stick to a few simple rules - like eat the bulky stuff first and then just have one cookie which is all you will want when your band is full, then you will do fine. Often it is the taste that you are after, but the full mechanism gets turned off if you dont have a band. In my experiance if you push your band like that it will give you big time payback in the form of a stuck episode or just an outright vomit. I call it my choke chain, it yanks me back when I need it! As one of the previous posters said, it is a much a battle of the mind as a battle with the stomach. I railed against my band rules for the first year, I still lost weight I just bitched about it all the time, then once I realised that as long as I ate the bulky stuff first and didnt have things swimming in sauces the weight would come off and I could still get all the flavours I was craving I just chilled out. The bypass was waaaaay to radical for me, and I am the kind of girl that if I can't have something it becomes my obsession to have it, there is no way that I could deal with dumping syndrome, or the nasty side effects of fats. Everything had to be available to me I needed to take back the control myself. I could go into all the reasons health wise why I chose the band but ultimatly your friend will decide to do what she wants to do, just warn her that none of the paths are easy!

I thought I would post this as a boost (hopefully) for people just starting their journey. Firstly let me say that I LOVE MY LAPBAND!!!!! lol I have been at my goal weight for over a year now and have kept on losing without really thinking about it, the lessons that I learned whilst trying to lose the weight have stayed with me and my life is so much simpler now! I started out at a US 14/16 and I am now a US 2/4. In the first three months I lost about 40lbs and then it has just been a slow steady decrease, I hit my goal about a year ago and I am now over 20lbs under it. You have to have faith in your band and work with it not against it. There will be times when it is easier to shovel down something sloppy rather than take the time to cut up the good food and chew it well, but dont fall into the trap! Even when you think that 3lb a month is a pathetically slow weight loss, add that up over a year and it is easy to see how with time you will pass your goal. I had a very complicated relationship with food prior to my band, it fell into the love/hate category, as in looooooved it most of the time, had to declare war on it if I ever wanted to diet! I still love food, I still enjoy all of my meals, I just dont obssess about it anymore. I no longer gorge just because it tastes nice, but I have learned that a little bit of what you like will not harm you, instead of the entire bowl of trifle I have a few spoonfulls and I am very satisfied with it. I never deny myself anything, I just only have a tiny portion, once I stopped that feeling of denial ( I am soooo a ' wants what I cant have' person) my life simplified. Now I know that I can have anything that I want, I'm not actually that bothered about having it! I have discovered a love of excercise, I work out 3/5 times a week and love kicking my a** in the gym, I look and feel 10 years younger and have so much more energy and confidence. I lift weights and I am now enjoying watching my body change shape, in fact food wise I have to make sure that I eat enough as my DH has announced that I am too skinny! I cannot remember the last time I felt GUILTY about eating something, and I cannot tell you how refreshing that is after years of beating myself up. I treated myself to a Tummy Tuck ( dont listen to people that tell you that exercise will get rid of it, loose skin is loose skin and after 6 kids I felt that I had earned it) and I am going to have a BA this year as unfortunatly the girls have suffered as a result of the fat loss and ironically the weighlifting! People may call it vainty, I call it a reward for all my hard work. In fact my DH has been so amazed by the change in me that he is going to have his gastric band fitted next friday! He reckons after watching me make all the mistakes that I made in the early days he will be going into it ahead of the game, I hope so, and I hope that he ends up as happy at the end of his journey as I am at the end of mine.

I have a power plate that I have used ever since I got banded. I have had a FTT but I am sure that the vibration of the plate combined with the exercises that you perform have helped with skin retraction elswhere on my body. HTH

I cant help you but I will be really interested in the replies as I have a consult in 2 days for the same reason. Nanni I work out 3/5 times a week for at least an hour, I lift weights do cardio and generally beat my body into submission, it actually just makes my breasts worse! You cannot replace lost fat and excess tissue with muscle in your breasts, have you ever seen a male body builder with D cups? I too am hoping to get away without a lift, I was at one stage an E/F cup and I am now a C but the skin has to some degree retracted and my nipples are where they should be there is just zero volume, sad sad shadows of their former glory I am afraid!

I have a low profile port and it is still really visible, apparently there is a new super low one that is the thickness of a 50 pence piece, make sure you ask for that one!

Dont worry about it, my friend was on hers when we both had our FTT and | followed her a day later, it was slightly more awkward sorting yourself out post op with the compresion garment to contend with, but the surgeon wasnt bothered in the slightest!

I had a FTT done 2 years ago when I weighed about 165lbs, I did it because it didnt matter how much weight I was losing I hated my stomach after 6 kids. I was willing to take the risk in order to get the boost I needed, and I was lucky because my skin kept up with the subsequent weight loss. I now weight about 112lb and my tummy is still tight - cant say the same for the rest of me, I am having a BA this year cos the girls are looking saaaad! If you need a boost to get rid of the rest of the weight then go for it is my advice.

I think that losing weight gives you the chance to distinguish between the problems that were caused by how you felt about the way you looked, and the problems that run deeper. Once you can split them off you can deal with them, and sometimes it is a wake up call that there are things that need outside help. Getting them separted is just the first step, but losing the weight, and knowing what a huge difference you were able to make in that area of your life can give you the belief in yourself to tackle the other areas. The main problem is that you can change how YOU feel but you cannot force that change on other people, they have to want to change, or at least accept your reality. That part is considerably more tricky....