Jachut

In Australia, the main recommendation for people who are "pre-diabetic" or have "syndrome-x", if medication is not considered necessary, is a low GI diet. That means not cutting out carbs completely but not basing your entire diet on them and when you do eat them eat great quality, complex carbs, not processed white rubbish. And stick to low GI fruits and always include Protein in your meal. I would guess to a very large degree you'd have to do that with a band anyway, since rice, white bread seem to be problem foods. High GI carbs just send blood sugar levels skyrocketing. And exercise exercise exercise.

With all those z's in your title, at a glance I thought you said "I have a surgery date, need pizza"!

Calm down, what's done is done. Its a good chance for you to really think about tackling those head issues. Have faith in yourself. Those stressful situations you describe are exactly when I eat too. But this is a great reminder for you that the band is just something to help you overcome these, it wont do all the work. You can and you must continue to think about eating inappropriately and too much. How proud will you be if you last those two months to the next fill and still continue to lose? You can do it, just take a deep breath and move on from a couple of little mistakes. They dont matter!

If its any consolation I once threw our expensive scales in the bin right before the rubbish men came around because it didnt say what I wanted it to, lol.

No way would I let someone take out a part of my body that is working - not even if they'd found stones that were causing me no problems. You need your gall bladder, you dont grow body parts just for the fun of it. There is a high risk of gallstones after ANY weight loss, whether it was generated by surgery or not. Post pregnancy too. Fair Fat Forty and Flatulent as the saying goes - meaning overweight caucasian women post pregnancy are especially prone. Any stones you have/develop may also be able to be treated with ultrasound to break them up so they can pass. But sheesh, insurance companies not paying for gall bladder ops? That is truly unheard of over here! If gallstone attacks are not medical necessity what is?

I weigh myself clothed after dinner at night, lol. Then I know it cant possibly get any worse!

That's the kind of stuff we do - family walks, family swim sessions. I know it will help to build healthy habits, but I really hope we're not also sending the message that the worst thing a person can be is fat!

I would think though that it would be incredibly important to keep up muscle building exercise as well, like weights or something. That would give you optimum results. It may put a few extra kgs on the scales over time but you will be less fat.

The trouble with extreme dieting on less than 1200 or so a day is that your body WILL start to burn its own muscle as well, regardless of what you are putting in your mouth. As you're muscle disappears, so does your metabolism. Your body will deplete its glycogen stores very quickly and at 800 cal a day you're not replacing them. The whole point of dieting of course is to burn the fat from your body for energy and you're body does do this, but it also inevitably burns muscle. The more extreme your diet the more Protein you'll lose from your body. Atkins' claims (and other similar high protein low carb diets) have never been proven and have very little scientific basis to them. Slow and steady has always been the way to go with dieting precisely because you preserve your muscle tissue to a greater degree and are therefore less likely to have that huge rebound weight gain which happens because all of a sudden you start putting calories into a body that may be lighter but is less optimally proportioned than it was before. Fatter bodies burn fewer calories than leaner more muscular ones. Now this may not be a problem if you have a band in place for life since hopefully you will keep the new eating habits - apart from the fact that its possible to be very light but incredibly flabby at the same time due to little muscle. But if you ever took the band off you'd be almost sure to have an enormous weight gain. You're body would not be able to handle the level of calories a normal person would eat in a day.

Oh you're body adjusts all right. It just slows down. Pretty soon you'd be struggling to lose on 600 calories. You also cant possibly get adequate nutrition from that little food. Listen to your own body. If you're making good food choices, not overeating or cheating food past your band and you're losing at a reasonable rate, I wouldnt listen to her.

Try as I might, everytime I picture myself at 80kg I see someone fat and ugly because that's how I felt, I was a teenager at the time. I feel far more beautiful now in my late 30's and 30kg heavier! I've found motivation hard at times because back then in the 80's people over a size 14 couldnt wear jeans or anything vaguely normal like that, so my youth was spent in misery. Nowadays I have a wardrobe full of great clothes! I have long hair now, whereas I was always the ugly girl with short hair - now I'd love to get weight off so I can cut my hair short again, lol. And I pull old photos out and I do look terribly fat at 80kg! But I think that was more puppy fat you know, around the face. I had huge cheeks and a wide face and looked beefy. Now I look nothing like that, I dont carry the weight on my face anymore. So its extremly difficult to sort out a picture in my head of how I will look at my goal weight.

I've had this argument with my very petite half-marathon running sister who every so sweetly suggests that I decrease the fat in my diet. She used to be a pack a day smoker, I said to her that for the chronic overeater, losing weight would be very like giving up smoking. All the issues she struggled with and spoke about whilst quitting I could identify with completely! She simply could not see it. She said "no, but you have a physical addiction to nicotine, you dont with food". Excuse me? How is it any different? I think most people think of it like this - and especially medical professionals. They simply cannot understand the issues. If you're not a chronic overeater yourself you absolutely cannot fathom how hard it would be to just "go on a diet". If people would cut you the slack they do smokers it would be a different thing. I love being told by the tiny Asian doctor who must weigh 50kg on a fat day that I should just "lose some weight". Then he proceeded to tell me that because he sits at a desk all day he doesnt eat lunch, that's how he's not fat. I apparently need to lose the 3 meal a day mentality. (um, 3? What about the other 5, lol) I also got a lecture from the physio about my weight and how I really should just lose some for the sake of my foot. Then the next appointment I'm waiting in reception and the receptionists were talking about who ate all the chocolates in the kitchen and it was Rory (the physio!).l Geez that made me furious. Hypocrite! Just because you're blessed with a metabolism that means you can be a piggy and get away with it, how dare you stand in judgement of somebody who's not so lucky, for the very same behaviour!

Yes, I think activity is the key. Fighting kids tendencies to plonk in front of TV, computer or gameboy is very hard. I dont know quite what the culture is over there, but so many people these days in Australia will not let their children outside alone to play for fear of what may happen. We're very lucky that we living in a new area, our house is only 10 years old, the way they design housing estates these days is pretty safe and our area, as new ones tend to be, is FULL of kids. We're nowhere near busy suburbs near the city. So my kids are lucky to be out on their bikes or blades from dawn till dusk (although I have to physically remove Fraser from the computer chair). I find it hard sometimes and very tiring but we are out every single day after school at sporting activities, both boys play basketball and football and they have matches every week plus training. I know lots of kids these days whose parents work and simply cannot do this for them. Luckily at school, school lunches are not provided in Australia so we're generally in complete control of what they eat. But its the quantities they can get through that astound me - yes entire BAGS or BOXES of whatever it is! They just dont know when to stop!

Doug (my DH) had an op two years ago at the Avenue, for compartment syndrome in his legs. It was a great hospital.

I still have a referal to Gary Crosthwaite on the kitchen bench. I ended up with two referals because he no longer consults at The Avenue and the only option I got was Coburg (a nightmare from Berwick) or at Cotham Private in Kew. My appointment with him is next week, so even though I didnt see the other guy in Frankston yesterday, I still have a last chance next week if I decide to go. But I'd be relying on him to consider it "medically necessary" when if I'm honest its only "cosmetically necessary", lol.

Isnt it amazing when you take the time to actually taste your food, that most of that stuff is truly revolting. That ring of grease around your mouth feeling, bleuch. You can ignore that when you've wolfed down your fish and chips in 2 seconds flat, but not when you take the time to eat it properly - I find my appetite for it diminishes mighty quickly.

So as Jack says there must be other hormonal and chemical mechanisms that come into play - because I was thinking that simply triggering your "feelers" wouldnt trick your body into thinking your blood sugar levels werent bottoming out from lack of food.

I would be trying to remind myself that what I personally would be deathly afraid of is not surgery (its a relatively quick and safe procedure) but the change in lifestyle afterwards. Never again will I be able to really pig out on McDonalds, that type of thing. In realising that, it made me realise that I never can again anyway if I want to look and feel a certain way, so perhaps try to remind yourself that what the band is going to FORCE you to do, you really have to do anyway. I think its probably that journey many are afraid of, not the procedure itself, and there's no way not to make that scary. Try not to project that fear onto your actual surgery.

The thing that's made me put off thoughts of a band for a while is this. A week or two ago, my doc thought I had some of the comorbidities of obesity (it turned out not to be so in, fact my blood could be used as a prime example of perfect cholesterol, HDL and LDL levels!) and given that I was about 38 kg overweight (BMI 35 exactly) pushed me to consider it. It seemed like a last salvation to me and for a while, I really wanted on, so I found myself eating like a pig to make sure I was "fat enough" when I got to the surgeon. In the course of my research and particularly finding this board I've realised where the real struggle will be for me and its not with physical hunger - although I do realise what a tool the band can be and how you would need to use it - its with the head stuff. So I figured I may as well start fixing that right this minute, and funnily enough, in the last two weeks have lost significant weight and now fall below the BMI 35 as well. My insurance company will not pay for a perfectly healthy 34'er to have lap band surgery, so even though on lots of days I think "but it's only a matter of time, this latest attempt will fail too", fact is I dont have a choice so may as well try to go forward from here. Two and a bit weeks in I've lost 5kg and am feeling really positive and strong but I plan to hang round here a bit just in case, plus I still find that though I dont have and wont have a band for the time being, there's still lots of wonderful positive information and learning to be done from you all.

Yep pretty similar. Hence the physio reading the me the riot act to shift some of my blubber.

I dont get this either, before I did any research into a band I assumed you would have to eat small amounts five or six times a day rather than three meals. I also cant figure how if you're consistently eating as few as 800 calories a day your metabolism simply doesnt pack up and walk out on you. No wonder the band is not meant to be taken out again, because after eating that little for a year or so you'd probably NEVER be able to eat normal quanities again and would gain weight on thin air. Surely someone 100lb + overweight would lose weight quite easily and quite fast on 1800-2000 calories a day. I'm 240 now and on 24 Weight Watchers points can easily lose 3lb a week for quite a while - I think that equates to around 1400 calories a day. I guess if you're eating your Protein first, that's quite calorie dense compared to fruit and vegetables, and I guess you'd also need to include good fats to keep yourself healthy, so you could probably do it, but that's my main worry, how then do you fit in the Vitamin and mineral rich fruit and veg that you need to stay healthy? But I also dont understand how your head works round this. If you're eating 800 calories a day long term, you're going to be undernourished in some respects, no questions about that. How does your brain not simply drive you to eat to make up the shortfall. It amazes me that simply bypassing the hunger mechanism of the stomach, tricking it into thinking it's full works when your blood chemistry, blood sugars and the like must be telling your brain that you've not had enough. Yet plenty of bandsters report that once its become a way of life they dont think about food constantly, dont suffer ongoing cravings and the like. Its simply amazing.

I'm struggling at the moment because I've got acute achilles tendonosis and am at the physio three times a week to get it under control, my foot is very painful. Therefore I cant even go out for a walk. I have a treadmill and under ordinary conditions need no motivation to use it, I love it, and I also like walking/jogging outside and going to the gym. But at the moment all I can do is swim and that's a pain in the bum. Its so time consuming but at the moment twice a week we're packing up all 3 kids and heading down to the local pool. I take 40 minutes to have a good lap swim and then swap with Doug and mind the kids while he does it. Two more times a week I'm going on my own while Eliza is at daycare and the boys are at school. I dont mind swimming but I dont like it being all I can do and it's really really time consuming and inconvenient. PLUS (aaaaaargh) I just got my hair done a few weeks ago and the chlorine has stripped out all the colour and my hair is like straw. Its a means to an end though, I cant wait till I can do something on dry land again.

I've often wondered this. I mean if you're ill with something gastric and vomiting, wont all the stomach contents be in the bottom part of your stomach? It would surely cause a lot of strain coming back up. Gosh, it would probably hurt a lot too!

This has been the biggest factor in me deciding for now to put plans for a band on hold and give it one last effort. Finding this board was a big lesson, I've realised that for lots of people the mind hunger doesnt go away and that if I was going to have to work on that and overcome it (and a band wasnt going to make it magically disappear) then I could do that on my own and would have to do it on my own anyway. If I dont have mind hunger, I can ignore physical hunger without a problem. I enjoy my tummy rumbling because it means I've been "good". I'm sure that's not healthy, lol. Best for me is to go and do something else, like clean out the wardrobe or clean one of the bathrooms. I find if I can ignore it for an hour it does go away. I find this works for me but the trouble is for some inexplicable reason, I'll be going great guns, will have lots a bit of weight, thinking I'm on top of this and then I simply stop trying.

OMG! I've never done anything like that. I've just done Weight Watchers a gazillion times. I actually have lost a lot of weight once, about 15kg which was my surplus at the time. It took about a year to lose it, I just decided I wasnt going to diet anymore and that I was just going to eat sensibly. It worked, although it was slow. I was pretty active back in those days walking to work and the like. I kept that weight off and maintained about 145lb at 5ft 10 for a good 6 years till I started having babies. I even maintained it aftr my first baby but my second pregnancy I gained a heap of weight and never lost it and I found the lifetstyle change with 2 babies in 2 years was enough to gradually start the gaining.