Jachut

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.

How many have overweight or obese kids too?

I never know which is the best way to tackle this problem. My kids arent fat but my oldest son most definitely has a lot of potential to be. He's pretty lazy and he loves to eat. I've found at time when I've been rock bottom and just not motivated in any way to look after myself properly then my kids' diets suffer too.

Over the past year I've made the utmost effort to feed my kids well, as a family we eat really well. I'm quite strict with what they're only allowed to eat on a very infrequent basis, takeaway, lollies etc. We never have biscuits or cakes in the house, but they do like their school lunch orders and the school offers only rubbish, they do eat chips for their morning tea, overall I think they have a good balance between getting everything they need and still having the stuff other kids get.

They play lots of sports too.

But on the other had at 10 and 8 both boys know the concept of dieting, they like to weigh themselves, they compare their weight to others. Last night when we all went swimming and Doug and I took a turn each to mind the kids for 40 mins while the other did some laps, both boys did laps in the big pool saying "I'm going to get skinny too" rather than play in the smaller pools with their sister.

Is it even possible to raise healthy well adjusted kids with NO weight issues and NO tendency to connect weight with self worth. Can they grow up without the concept of "good" and "bad" foods? Are we raising our children even from toddlerhood to have food and weight issues?

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.< /p>

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.

Flaxseed oil is SO good for you too. My son takes it and it keeps his eczema under control beautifully. Full of Omega 3's for heart health and skin and hair health.

30g is usually the recommended daily fibre intake for adults but there's no way you'd gett through that with a band. I have no idea how you'd do it, this is the main issue that has scared me away for now. I have no problem with the concept of changing my diet to cut kilojoules but at a relative modest 38kg or so overweight I'm going to try to do that but cutting out the bad stuff and not my intake of fruit and veg and wholegrains - of course its a way different trade off if you're facing much more weight loss than that.

You do better to take a fibre supplement than to actually use a stool softener or laxative. To use those regularly makes your bowel less efficient and only compounds the problem. Water Water and Water too.

Surely though 30g of fibre is recommended to move the amount of food an adult generally eats and that if you've been banded, obviously the volume of food moving through your system is less so the volume of what comes out the other end is less and therefore your fibre needs would be slightly less?

Now THAT would feel great. Numbers on the scale dont mean that much to me, I find I can be at the heavy end of my normal range and still have my clothes feel lose or vice versa.

I have a bad habit of buying clothes that dont fit me :-(

Ooh yucky, that sounds awful.

I've come to realise though that the point of the band is that you still have to do things like exercise and diet and that you wont lose much weight or keep it off if you dont do those things.

Cant imagine why it would be a problem, other than perhaps issues of restrictions to what you could possibly lose and false hopes?

Then again my sis has hypothyroidism and has always been a stick insect, 50kg on a fat day.

Well without even trying I lost 1kg over the weekend and AF has arrived and I have lost 2kg since this morning, lol. I was due to see the surgeon yesterday but I rang because I also got all my bloodwork results back and am fit as a fiddle, there is absolutely nothing wrong with my cholesterol levels, blood pressure, blood sugar etc. No reason to think at this point in time that my weight is affecting my health negatively.

It would be a purely cosmetic procedure and still justifiable given my dieting history but the surgeon said he wouldnt do it at this point in time.

I have decided not to go this route for now. I really want to give it one last ditch effort and am feeling really motivated to do so. I'm doing it under dietician supervision so that if I come back to this point in 12 months I can say I really did try.

Kare those are the exact reasons I've decided against a band for now. I just truly dont think it will solve those issues for me and I can imagine getting to 90kg or so and thinking this will be just fine. It certainly will feel fine compared to now, but if I recall on the way up and through 90kg I was desperate, absolutely desperate about my weight. If the band gave me a 100% guarantee I was going to get right down to 70kg (when I was gorgeous, even if I do say so myself, lol), I would do it. But it doesnt.

We all need to be accepting of ourselves and love ourselves no matter what our weight. But to be honest, I have that now (even though I said I'm not prepared to accept my current weight). I dont need to lose any weight for that. I'm so glad DeLarla that you're feeling that because its a healthy way to be.

I'm another one that loves the gym. I have absolutely no problems motivating myself to do it and I'm addicted to the treadmill. Unfortunately I've completey wrecked my achilles tendons due to a combination of them just being a weak spot for me and me expecting them to do too much. 100kg + people are asking a lot of their bodies by trying to jog.

Sooo I've done nothing for 9 months, and I'm still hobbling and limping and visiting the physio 3 x per week. Its why I've gotten this heavy as I've really stopped any incidental stuff too - no more walking to the milkbar to get milk or to walk the kids to school or any of that and I"ve piled on weight.

I am going to have to FORCE myself to swim a couple of times a week, its so inconvenient and time consuming but its my only option at the moment and hopefully if I can get some weight off that way I will be able to resume what I enjoy.

Yes, the screw this part of the diet is where I come unstuck too. I know I can lose 10kg, I've done it a million times. But honestly, I feel like I've had somewhat of an ephiphany these last few days - and I've suddenly reached the point where I feel ready to let go of what's been holding me back.

What I've realised from all my reserch too is that people still get to that point, they have a physical restriction that prevents them regaining so much weight, but they still struggle with these issues. Its my head I feel I need to fix, not my body.

I rang my health fund, they cover it when its medically necessary according to the surgeon. No messing around substantiating it. I've been to the GP for my blood results, my cholesterol is a healthy 4.5, my blood pressure a perfect 120/70 this morning, no sign of diabetes, thyroid problems or any of that stuff. I'm in better shape than I was a year ago and 10kg lighter, thanks to an overall improvement in diet, if not calorie intake. My only problem is my foot which the physio has just discovered now that they've got the swelling down enough to do an ultrasound exam, is adhesions caused by previous heel surgery 20 years ago. Not due to my weight at all, but certainly aggravated by it.

On top of that AF has arrived (no doubt why I was so desperate about this last week) and on top of the kilo or so I've lost this morning, I know that means I'll also be another 2kg lighter tomorrow morning. That puts me fair and square at a BMI of 34. So I rang the surgeon's office and explained the situation, his secretary let me actually speak to him, his verbal advice was that no matter what my dieting and weight history, his policy is BMI 40+ unless there's sigificant comorbidities, which I thankfully do not have.

So peoples Im going to have to go it alone. I feel very relieved and I feel like I've really considered this from angles I've never viewed before. I've had a glimpse of what old age might be like too and I think I've had that mentality of being invincible shaken out of me. I've also got solid evidence that a change for the better in diet does affect your health positively.

I've also sat my husband down and given him a stern talking to (which was really directed at myself, he's never been anything but supportive). I've told him what I need to do and that I'm going to do it regardless of anyone else. I need the time to dedicate to myself, I"ve spent the last 10 years in baby and child mode and I need some time out and he's going to have to pick up the slack. I really need to find permission within myself to do this for me, that's the hardest part.

Some honest soul searching has told me that I've never really had a problem with hunger, its disorganisation, lack of time, lack of care for myself, stress, boredom and lack of direction and paying absolutely no attention to what I'm eating that's led me to this position. A band wont solve any of those things for me. I dont want to be thin and still have those problems. I feel like I want to work on those things and the weight will follow, not the other way round, kwim?

Good luck everybody and thanks so much to listening to the ins and outs of my personal decision over the last week. I may be back in six months of course, but hopefully I wont be. Most likely I'll get a bit of weight off, feel better and slack off a bit, but I'm actually having trouble staying this fat at the moment, lol.