Jachut

I try to look at it like this: I have (well, had) to improve, i didnt have to be perfect. I dont have to stick to a food plan absolutely 100%, all it took was to change the balance between calories in, calories out over a long period of time and the weight went. Now, I wanted to be healthier. You can lose weight eating nothing but KFC if you really want to. So I do eat well. I think what do I want for Breakfast and the Coco Pops might sound good, but I dont follow every urge like that! But I never put myself on a very strict diet (and we dont tend to approach it like that in australia). I think its really important to work with your strengths and weaknesses. I may not have any real eating disorders, but I SUCK at dieting! I can never stick to any food plan, I just want to eat what I want, when I want to. So I relied on my band for portion control and did my very best but didnt beat myself up. I dont journal, I dont do any of that. Where my strength is is exercise. I was already fairly athletic and had some fitness, and i really put in 150% on the exercise side of the equation. It made up for my less spectacular eating efforts. Its how I continue to manage my weight. Success isnt necessary 3 lb per week or 50lb in 4 months you know, it might only be 2lb per month but weight gone is weight gone and over time, you will become a new person.

Lol, you are and I are rather alike I think Wasa. I would have put her right on the spot and watched her squirm. I like the way you put it, Moonbeam, - people do seem to think that as a lower BMI patient, you dont have the priveledge of being truly fat, you cannot know the pain of it and therefore you have taken the easy way out in having the surgery. They seem to think you should suck it up and REALLY suffer. You'll find that attitude in several thread on the rants n raves board too, people seem to forget that EVERY single one of us here had a BMI of say 32 at one point in time. What would you rather, get on top of it before it gets to 45 or the waits till you're so far gone you need WLS AND seven different plastic surgeries and ten years on fourteen different medications?

See this is where (and I think many might disagree and say the band is just inherently bad) I think it goes off track. True, the band can have these problems. But doctors dont seem to want to work with the patients to solve them! The minute it starts to happen, they go into arse covering mode, and blame the patient, try to deal with them as naughty children, refuse to fill or unfill them and do all sorts of absolutely idiotic things. At this stage of the game if your band has slipped,I'd say there's an awfully good chance that it wasn done right in the first place, or that something has happened in the post op phase to prevent proper healing. That just plain needs to be dealt with. It may require further surgery. That's the problem with the band, but no amount of pissfarting around by the doctor will negate that fact, to put it off only degrades your health and motivation. I hope you get this sorted.

I agree, a sweet spot is simply a spot where there is steady weight loss. you cant define it by amount you can eat or foods you can eat. If you define it by those terms, I have NEVER reached a sweet spot yet I've lost all my weight and then some (went way past the top of my healthy weight range down to a BMI of 22) and maintained the loss for nearly 2 years. But I eat more than half a cup and I eat bread. At any level of restriction if you eat fast, dont chew, take big bites you are likely to throw up. Just as at any level of restriction you will be able to eat ice cream easily.

Lol, when jeans werent so low rise, I always used to buy men's jeans. I hate hate hate jeans that go up to your navel, or god forbid, above! How to look like someone's grandma in one easy step. They are SO uncomfortable and they look SO awful. Not that I want to display my bum crack either, lol. I'm not a fan of stretch jeans either. I dont like the feel of them, they tend to fall down and go baggy.

Nobody ever calculated mine like that, or calculated it at all. I was asked by the nutritionist that I had to see for one appointment what I'd like to be and I said 70kg. She kind of laughed and said that's a bit ambitious. As it happens 70kg is right smack in the middle of my healthy weight range (63-79). She was assuming everyone loses about 60 to 80%, which is realistic to assume. But the thing is with that statistic, its almost ENTIRELY in your control whether you go past it or not. I weighed between 77 and 79kg for a long long time, probably 10 years plus. For me, it was still fat. It may have been a "healthy" weight but not for my build, I'm one that should be in the lower half of my range, I'm tall and willowy and quite light boned and finely muscled. I was chunky, chubby and flabby at 77kg. So I pretty much set my own goal at 70 and have settled at about 68 to 69. Personally, I'd still like a smaller bum, but the fact is I'm verging on skeletal around the neck, shoulders, back and chest and still a bit more voluptuous below the navel. I think for any more improvement I would need some lipo, rather than weight loss because I will just end up looking truly awful above the waist.

Hmmm, I would have thought peanut sauce was low carb anyway, lol. Nothing added would mean organic Peanut Butter, something that's basically peanuts and oil. But that sort of thing doesnt *really* matter in a recipe, however, make sure you use a low salt one. The amount of salt in things like butter, or peanut butter, can really throw a recipe out if there's salt in it in other forms.

As you get older you get more confidence in yourself and worry less about what others think, but running in public is a daunting thought! When I was 18 or so, I used to run regularly, I was a bit bigger than I am now, at the top of my healthy weight range but I thought I was huge, lol. I used to run only early morning or late at night. I wouldnt run in the daylight for anything. Nowadays, I just plain dont care. I enjoy the feeling of knowing I look like a runner, I no longer stagger, jiggle or go beet red and puff hard. But at first, i ran at night. I was absolutely scarlet when I got home, I looked scarey, I breathed like a steam engine. I preferred to do it under the cover of darkness. It didnt take me long though to gain confidence - a couple of fun runs really helped in that regard, running in public surrounded by others in the daytime. I went through a stage where I was quite large still, well, still had big boobs anyway and they got LOADS of attention. I was so embarrassed by them flopping up and down, but nowadays, I dont have any left, lol. People tend to leave me alone and not yell out stuff anymore because they're not assulted by the sight of my tits flapping around and I also these days I guess I look like I'm a serious runner. You'll get there, it takes a bit of guts to put yourself out there, but you're worth it and you really do have to just do it.

I lost HEAPS of weight after my surgery, so much so that I didnt end up having my first fill until almost 12 weeks.

Yes, it is, lol. Well, not harder in that it becomes gruelling or anything. But I lost about 70lb the first year and 30lb the next. The second year where I lost 30lb, I continued having fills so I was more restricted, thus eating less and had built up to running 10kms at a time. So I'd gone from very little restriction, able to eat anything and NEVER pbing whilst running 3 or 4kms four or five times a week and losing PLENTY to being much more restricted, having my diet more limited and running 8 to 10kms four or five times a week for a loss of less than 1lb per week for that second year. What I eat now to maintain woudl have had me losing weight like CRAZY in the first few months. Especially if I'd done as much running! But I got there in the end, went WAY past goal weight and BMI of 25 right down to a BMI of 22. Its not harder, but its doenst happen as easily or quickly if that makes sense.

I run (outside) for about 40 minutes to an hour about five days a week(6 to 10kms). that's my basic routine. I switch it around a bit - sometimes I jsut go out and run and other times for a period of a few months I include more interval training type runs (REALLY hard). I was doing a bit more strength training too but to be honest, I've experimented and I feel running keeps PLENTY of muscle on my lower body and i ust throw in some core work and some pushups and dips 3 times a week or so *(15 minutes after a run). this gives me the sort of body I want - lean and toned. I've found strength training tends to bloat me out a bit and make me look "thicker" and definitely a few pounds heavier, so I've kind of gone back to just running. it was also starting make exercise time consuming and a bit of a chore, whereas I need no encouragement to go out and just run. its the old, whatever you will actually DO is the best exercise for you. I love running.

To be honest, this would worry me. But you'd need a medical opinion on that, me saying it would worry me doesnt make it a problem. I was the oppostive. I have a cast Iron gut. Everyone around me can be dying of food poisoning and I will come through completely unscathed. I never vomit, I rarely get stomach bugs and when I have, half the time whilst everyone else is barfing up a lung, I'll only have diaorhhea. I kind of instinctively knew banding would be good for me (mind you, I could have been completely wrong!). And it has. I dont have half the trouble others seem to, I'm not a sweller, not sensitive to fills etc. an experienced surgeon might be able to tell you how other patients have fared.

Its the "I dont understand why people are still getting bands" that prompted me to post too. People are still getting bands because they have a choice. We should be glad for that choice. I have no problem with people who've had bad experiences posting throughout this entire forum. Lets face it the band has not turned out quite to be what theyd' have hoped, it has a lot of problems and I'm glad to know more about the alternatives. But lets keep it realistic and un-emotional. The banded folk here are not all complete idiots who have made an inferior choice. I know this is the VSG forum and all, but it gets tired. Most posts are considered and informative but that was just derisive and I'd expect better from a moderator. It wasnt about the doctor it was a remark about idiots who choose banding.

Fanny, you're the only one that'll get this, but I'm rolling round laughing at a Fanny on a Brazillian waxing thread. Imagine sugar in your bits for days! Exfoliation anyone?

Ugh, its probably what we've got to look forward to here in six months. Even the cheese crust pizza adds make me want to barf. I never would have eaten food like that even if I was starving. The very idea of pizza hut's revolting sloppy pizza base, filled with fake cheese, ugh. Lean Cuisines, microwave meals, stuff in cans, I think its all yuck. I got fat eating real food, lol. I really do think all this processed muck has to go out of our diets for our health and I refuse to feed my kids crap like that - but even for a die hard carb eater like me, Pasta covered in bread is just a little hard to take! I defend my (wholegrain) carb eating but the truth is I eat WAY less than I did and my body is better for it. I just need a little for running fuel, but not meals like this!

I just dont get why they act like that. The WHOLE point of the band is fills. What right has anyone to judge for you whether you need it or not. And a lot of the time, when you make poor lifestyle choices its because you need a fill. I would only agree that if someone were doing no exercise, then perhaps they ought to do that first before they try going tighter, but even THEN its a personal decision and if someone wants to be really tight and barely eat, well they've paid for their surgery, the band is in THEIR body,they're paying for the fill so no doctor or nurse really has a right to deny it to them.

Oh come on! That's a bit like me saying that I know a cousin's friend's aunt who had a sleeve done by a visiting Tanzanian witch doctor and died, so the sleeve is rubbish and nobody should have it done. Sounds like the doctor's a dickhead and probably didnt even put the thing in properly in the first place. Either that or told the patient he'd be right to go straight back to KFC.

I've been banded almost 4 years now. Like you, I've never really assumed this will be a lifetime thing, I really hope to get 10 years out of it, if nothing better's out there and my band wears out, I wouldnt hesitate to get another. I'm intrigued by the sleeve and I do believe for a lot of people its a better surgery but I dont think I'd swap over, I think I'd get another band. If I were so lucky as to get 20 years out of it, I dont know what I'd do then, whether I'd have any other WLS at all. I really think the longer this goes on, my habits are becoming more and more consolidated. I dont want to be so arrogant as to say that I could have done this without the band, but I am now maintaining my weight on about 1800 to 2000 calories a day which is quite a reasonable amount of food (I have to work REALLY hard to get it all in, but I need it) and I will never give up running, I love it. So I lost 120% of my excess weight and whilst I'm sure I'd have rebound weight gain if I lost my band in even 10 years, I dont think I'd really shoot up to my previous high, which was heavily influenced by being a stay at home mother of young children, something which no longer applies to me. Not sure there. But I do think somewhere in the future they'll work out how to control our appetites, not restrict our stomachs! i dont need an emergency fund, in Australia, if my band slips, wears out, or I just want it out, its pretty much free. Our health insurance covers it, no arguments, no pissfarting around. Its paid for. I paid a once only $3000 fee and I will never pay for any service from my surgeon out of my own pocket again. He bulk bulls everything, so its billed straight to our public health system and my private health will always pay for ANY hospital stay costs.

Everyone is different - 1200 is often enough to nourish most women and allow them to exercise. However, i just cant run well if I dont eat carbs. Protein doesnt do it for me. I dont need 10 slices of bread a day or anything but I *REALLY* need oatmeal or something for Breakfast, just a moderate serve of good carbs a day seems to be enough. But I do also struggle with this with a band and I find that without hunger to guide me, I undereat chronically. My idea of what makes a meal these days has changed a lot and I'll eat a yogurt and call it breakfast. I dont get hungry because of the band but the CRAVINGS!! Oh boy. i really find I have to concentrate very hard to eat the right balance of protein and carbs and add healthy Snacks even though I'm not hungry or I get to early afternoon and I'm obviously running on empty and I start to just pig out on carb foods. Obviously that's how my body tells me it needs food now, rather than actual physical hunger. Are you noticing anythng like this? but like you're trying to do, I'd suggest working to eat MORE. I never needed to drop below 1500 to lose all my weight and I didnt need a tight band to do that, so I was able to eat that much. And I need about 1800 to 2000 a day now to maintain it. Hard to do with a lapband but when I make the effort, my weight stays low and steady becuase obviously I can et MORE calories than that if I'm slipping in Cookies, chocolate etc.

Walking after surgery is important for blood clot prevention - like Mac says. And also, if you do have aches and niggles like minor back pain, staying active and limber will minimise it. Its good for your outlook and state of mind and if you suffer badly from gas it will help greatly. They probably will have made you walk a bit in the hospital, at home, just go out short distances several times a day. I found the day after surgery I was fine to amble 3kms or so. Just dont push hard for a week or two.

With my cast Iron gut I can eat my dinner and head straight out the door to run. The only things that give me trouble when I do this is if I've had a lot of Fluid - or Soup. It sloshes and that's revolting.

Hmmmmm - maybe pressure on the port and tubing (which runs fairly superficially for an inch or two in some people - I can feel my tubing - till it disappears deeper) squeezes saline into the baloon round the band and makes it tighter THAT way? Because some of the saline does remain in the tubing rather than the band.

Lol, buy yourself the smallest bra possible and see the pounds fall away.

How? You have a rib cage between your bra and your stomach!

I eat about 2000 a day to maintain my 148lb - I'm 5ft 10 and run for 40 minutes to an hour most days. I eat carbs too! Bread, Pasta, rice.