AlysonRR

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Too Much Information, lol I find kind of a fun challenge to make meals with the seasonal foods, and it's amazing how long it lasts - I've had mesclun greens last almost four weeks! I'm not too enthusiastic about canning, but we freeze quite a bit of the excess, particularly berries, which my kids eat almost every day. And we still buy organic bananas year round - definitely not in our 100 mile eating zone! Cool - our costco has organic ground beef! I was shocked, too. Sounds like fun! I can't wait til I am thin enough to ride a bike again...

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LOL, now you got me going again! I tried to explain to my husband why I was laughing - he didn't get it.

Great topic! We recycle everything our county takes, compost our produce trimmings, and instead of driving himself 80 miles to work, my husband bikes 15 min to the bus station, takes the bus to the ferry, then walks from the ferry to his job. I drive the kids around in our 45mpg civic hybrid. For cleaning, instead of paper towels or sponges (I'm a microbiologist and I hate sponges!!!) we use cleaning cloths that we can wash. Same for mops - cloth covers on a flat surface mop. I got both from The Clean Team. - Efficient Housecleaning and Environmentally Friendly Cleaners, but some types of fabric rags would work well, I imagine. After using cloth diapers on my children, at the risk of TMI, I switched to cloth menstrual pads. They're much more comfortable than the paper ones. We're building a house and using as many energy saving techniques and technologies as we can afford. We wanted to use a geothermal heat pump, but they're too expensive at this point, so we're using an air source heat pump instead. The house has many passive solar features. All the lighting will be CFL or LED. The flooring will be sustainably harvested bamboo and cork. The fridge, washer, and dishwasher will be energy star certified, and we'll have an energy-saving induction cooktop. There's a root cellar for passive cooling so we can store more of the veggies we hope to grow in a year or two. Another thing we've done that has been really worthwhile for our family is joining a CSA - community supported agriculture - a share farm. We pay for a share of produce from a small local farm, giving the farmer the surety of a paid crop and giving us lots of organic produce and eggs for half the year. We buy natural meat and some fish from local people plus we're lucky that my parents have a small non-commercial oyster farm and also catch dungeoness crab and are willing to share. We belong to a food co-op to reduce the overhead on other grocery items. We found freecycle.org before we moved from MD to WA and it was fun meeting people who could use the things we found to be surplus for our new lives. We enjoy finding new ways to save energy, reduce/reuse/recycle, and buy locally, and we're always looking for new ideas, so I'm avidly reading this thread!

Dianne - I posted about it already (#38), but it went down sometime after I stopped feeling restriction, thank goodness. I didn't ever have a moment when I realized it was gone - I still felt a little irritated and thought that was the gum still. But when they did my fill under fluoro we couldn't see any obstruction to the flow of liquid, so it's gone. Thanks for the interest :-) The first post I saw today when I logged in after a few days away was the "swallowed a fly" thread, and I though we were going to have a Flywatch, lol.

Before the upgrade I could select forums to ignore, and I really appreciated that feature. Is it still possible but I can't find it? Thanks -

Here's mine: 1. I'm walking much better and using my cane less frequently 2. I can bend over to pick things up off the floor 3. My stomach isn't right on the steering wheel, and my seatbelt has more give 4. I've lost 25.5 (!) inches off my measurements compared to pre-banding

I was banded 12/18 but I did my pre-op measurements on 12/3, just before starting two weeks of pre-op Medifast. My husband just measured me again, and I've lost 25.5 inches since 12/3!!! I'm measuring 14 places (neck, upper arms, lower arms, thighs, calves, chest, bust, underbust, waist, hips) and I've lost around 35 lb. I haven't started exercising yet, but I will soon because I want to see those numbers keep going down!!!

I'm the person who started the "Crud. I swallowed a piece of gum" thread above. I'm glad you don't feel it - that was not a pleasant feeling! My doctor said that if it happened later he would have me in for an unfill and flush the gum through. I think I had a significant amount of swelling (I felt pretty restricted in both amount and type of foods) at the point when I swallowed the gum, and that it went down sometime after the swelling decreased. HTH!

The fill wasn't bad at all. To me it was less painful than a vaccination. It was a little weird to have a needle hanging out while they syringed the Fluid in and out, but not particularly painful. You might be one of the lucky ones who has restriction right away and doesn't need a fill. I thought I might be, then I went from totally satisfied on 4 oz at three weeks post-op to feeling hungry despite 8 oz servings and a snack or two at four-and-a-half weeks post-op. So wait and see how you're doing - maybe you won't need a fill :-) HTH-

I know my doctor recommends 2 days of liquids after a fill, but do you think that is 48 hours, or do you think it means to eat a mushie/solid Breakfast on the third day after a fill? Thanks for any input -

There were two videos made in the 90s called Yoga for Round Bodies: [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Round-Bodies-set-vols-1-2/dp/188131104X]Amazon.com: Yoga for Round Bodies (set-vols.1 & 2): Video: Genia Pauli Haddon,Linda DeMarco[/ame] I don't think they've been re-released on DVD, but they're pretty good for beginners and anyone who needs to modify yoga positions. There are also a few yoga studios around the country that teach classes inspired by the videos, and the realization that rounder people can do yoga, but they may need help figuring out how to modify the poses to get around their roundness

Have you seen Calbee Snap Pea Crisps? One serving (1 oz ~ 22 snap peas) is 150 cal, 8 g fat, 1 g carb, 5 g protein. Much better than chips and they satisfy my crunchy, salty cravings when I'm PMSing. Amazon has a pretty good price if they sound good and you can't find them locally.

Thanks for sharing - I was wondering about this!

I had a fill this week - 5 ml in my APL (14 ml) band. I can definitely feel cold Water going through slower than it did before the fill, and I can only drink about 4 oz, compared to the easy 8 oz before the fill. I'm not expecting this to be perfect restriction, but I'm hoping once I start solids again I'll have at least a little more than I did! I have a second fill appointment in 3 weeks, on the 13th of Feb.

Thanks for the advice! In another ten or twenty pounds I think I'll get out my old "Yoga for Round Bodies" videotapes :-)

I'm feeling a bit restricted, like I did when I was swollen during the first couple weeks after surgery. For example, I can feel cold liquids going down slooowly compared to the last couple weeks when I was definitely wide open. Ouch on the cough drop! My doc didn't have any warnings about gum or hard candy in his literature, but it does make sense! And the breath mints he has in a dish in the office are teeeny tiny.

I'm definitely tired, but I'm not sure if it's because of the fill or because I went to bed at 1am and was woken at 5am by my daughter and couldn't get back to sleep.... I thought it might hurt, but it was just a prick - less painful than a vaccination, IMO. Hopefully we'll both feel more peppy soon!

I went for my first fill today, not really sure if the small piece of gum had passed through or not. I started on solid foods on the 16th and I could still feel it bouncing around when my stomach was empty. But after a couple days (including an English muffin and a piece of toast) I didn't feel the long thin gum. I did feel something, but not the same thing. So I thought maybe it had become a different shape? Anyway, today I went for my fill, and they pulled the priming liquid out (apparently they put a little in to rehydrate the band?) until they got air bubbles, then watched the flow on fluoroscope as I took a big swallow of barium. They couldn't see any disruption of flow, so in Dr Neal's opinion the gum is gone, and what I'm feeling is just a banding difference. So hurray, my gumwatch is done. I'm actually not going to chew it anymore - I'll switch to listerine strips or breath mints... Thanks again for all the support and advice!

I'm not sure about insurance companies, but an over-50 BMI person on another board said her doctor wouldn't do lap band for people with BMI over 60. My BMI was over 60 and my doctor didn't have any problems scheduling my surgery. I think the thinking behind not doing lap-band for high BMI patients is that the average patient that loses 50-65% of their excess weight would still be obese if they start out at a high BMI. I've seen quite a few people here with BMIs over 50 (I look for those over 60, and have seen them, too) and many have achieved a normal or "overweight" weight goal. I'm hoping I'll do better than average, too.

We just found Sushi Revolution in Tacoma, another new conveyor belt/pay-by-the-plate restaurant. We went last week, once before I was off mushies (I had lots of tofu in my miso soup) and once after I started solids. The second time I had 4 plates in front of me (I chose edamame, tamago, and the insides of four pieces of crab rolls). My 5-y.o. daughter had 7 plates (four of hers were cream puffs!) and my son, who is called "Sushi Boy!" at numerous local sushi joints, had twelve! Total cost was around $35 - gotta like that! One of my concerns about lapband was whether I would be able to enjoy sushi ever again - I'm glad to say I can!

In response to issues like this on another forum, a friend of mine wrote the following analogy (some phrases changed for applicability to this forum): I think tensions start not when someone adopts an opinion that differs, but when that person asserts that everyone should follow what they believe. For example, if I were to say that my DH and I choose to eat low on the food chain (more grains and vegetables, little meat, we're willing to pay more for food that's been raised organically and animals that have been given free range to roam and not injected with drugs and hormones to make them produce meat faster), because I believe this is better not only for our health, but for the planet, and if I quoted the studies supporting my view, we might have a good debate on economics vs ecology. However if I came in and stated that anyone who can't see the Truth about factory farming and continues to eat meat or buy food at Wal-Mart promotes cruelty, cares nothing about what's really important in life and is too hard hearted or deluded to understand the Truth, I expect I'd get called on the carpet--and rightly so. So it's not what you believe, but how you choose to express it. Sharing what you believe in a manner that respects the fact that others choose differently and debating the point is what this forum is all about; there are other forums for finding fellowship with people of similar beliefs. Claiming that there's only one acceptable and proper way to view things tends to lead to a lot of tension, because the folks who disagree will step in and say 'we see it differently.' We all have reasons for why we believe (or disbelieve) what we do. I was a Christian for over 25 years; I was a steady churchgoer from early childhood, brought up with Bible stories leading up to a personal commitment to Christ, and including 5 years of intensive Biblical and historical research. When I converse about Christianity that background is not gone just because I am now an atheist. We all use our accumulated experience to formulate responses here. That's what makes these types of forums interesting to me. Though I have (or have had) friends who are Christian, Pagan/Wiccan, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu, agnostic, atheist, etc., there are subjects I would never discuss with some of them. In that sense, R&R-type forums are revelatory to me - I can question them to find out WHY they believe what they believe and I get to find out how someone with a different worldview sees things without the risk of losing a personal friend.

Hey, Cerrin - we're living parallel lives. We started at similar weights, were banded a day apart, I'm having my first fill today, too, and I haven't lost weight in several weeks. You're doing much better than I am with exercise (good for you!). I'm starting to do some weights and physical therapy exercises to strengthen the muscles around my arthritic knees and hips. But I'm also feeling much more energetic, and finding it easier to walk than I did just 30 pounds ago, so I'm excited about the future, imagining myself bouncing around with tons of energy by the time I get down 100 lb! Good luck with your fill today. I'm looking forward to finding out whether I've gained a little or held the same - I got a new scale and I've been +/- 5 lb on it, but I didn't get it til several weeks after my last doctor's appointment, so I have no idea how it compares. I'm also looking forward to possibly having a little restriction!

Here's my 108g Protein day today: Breakfast - 1/2 cup eggbeaters omelet plus 1/4 c cottage cheese lunch - 2/3 cup tofu with teriyaki sauce, 1/2 cup lettuce dinner - 5 oysters, 1/2 cup spinach, 2 T light mayo, 1 T dill relish Snack - Zensoy chocolate pudding cup It's higher in fat (47g) and carbs (77g) than I'd like, but I could have decreased it by reducing the teriyaki sauce, sauteeing the oysters instead of pan-frying, subbing nonfat sour cream for the light mayo, skipping the pudding cup. Most days I'm hitting 70g protein with less than 40g carb and less than 25g fat. If I had to regularly hit 100g I'd probably add a Protein shake snack...