Jean McMillan

Yes, I still love food, but it is no longer the love of my life. I'm a little bit more objective about food now, appreciate it for its nutrition as well as its taste, but I've got so many other interesting things going on in my life now that food is not my #1 interest these days.

Each one of our journeys is different. And just like the doctor that has to tweak our fills, we have to tweak our minds and hearts, pasts and presents, hurts and joys and falls and goals. Beautifully said, and so true!

Every time my band has been too tight, I either stopped losing weight or I re-gained weight because I was eating high-calorie, low-satiety "slider" foods. The band does not provide early and prolonged satiety unless you eat solid food. Your stomach has to expand and contract to digest solid food, and that action stimulates the vagus nerves that send satiety messages to your brain. liquids and sliders don't do that, nor do they keep hunger at bay for very long.

Many things besides your band could be affecting your weight. If you feel you now have great restriction and are consuming less calories than you burn through activity and exercise, then you should be losing weight...unless you're on medication or have medical conditions that affect weight. There is nothing in a gastric band that will automatically trigger weight loss. All it does is reduce your appetite and create early and prolonged satiety when you eat solid foods (preferably healthy ones). Have you tried logging your food to see what you're really consuming in terms of calories and macronutrients? I highly recommend weighing/measuring your food and logging it, at least for a week, so that you can determine if you're really consuming less calories than you burn. Personally, I'm terrible at guesstimating food amounts. I cut myself a piece of chicken that I think weighs 2 ounces, but when I actually weigh it, it's 4 ounces. Jean

If you're a person who holds a grudge and feels betrayed about something like that, then my guess is that your friend and your in-laws didn't share their WLS "secret" with you because they were afraid of hurting your tender feelings by suggesting that you're morbidly obese and should have bariatric surgery to deal with it. I see people every day (strangers, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, etc.) who I think could benefit from WLS, but it would be mighty intrusive and presumptuous of me to approach them and say, "You really need to consider bariatric surgery for your weight problem." Their weight is their own business, not mine.

Different people, different scars. Just because two people had horrible scars doesn't mean you will. And honestly, I'd rather have a few small, ugly scars on my abdomen than 92 big, heavy, ugly extra pounds to carry around everyday. As it happens, the only band-related scar you can see on my now is my port incision, and it's pretty boring. Of course, even at my goal weight, I have no desire to wear a bikini in public...

Glad I made you laugh, and that you loved Bandwagon. My advice may be crap, but I'm always good for a laugh or two!

I'd like to tell you you're not a fraud, but you can still choose to feel that way. So I'll just tell you how I feel. I feel like I worked very, very hard using my band and my behavior to get me to my goal weight. Anybody who thinks that's "the easy way out" hasn't been down the same road as me, so who are they to judge? At the same time, the whole freaking point of my WLS choice was to make weight loss easier (and more successful) than all my previous attempts, and it would be foolish of me to deny that. Sometimes when I hear myself telling an acquaintance that I lost weight by eating less and exercising more (which is the truth), I catch myself thinking, "If only they knew!" But I have no way of reading other peoples' minds (my own mind is already hard enough to deal with) or predicting their responses to things I do and say, so I try not to waste a lot of time dwelling on what they think of me. If some of them choose to think of me as a fraud, that's their business. If they choose to tell me I'm a fraud, they'd better duck! Jean

I know of a better place to ask this question, but since it's on the website of a competitor of LapBand Talk, I won't post it here. I'll send you a private message about it.

The first thing you need to do is quit calling yourself a failure. The second thing you need to do is seriously consider counseling. (It's worked for me, anyway). Your bariatric surgeon should be able to refer you to someone experienced with WLS and/or eating disorder patients. Please don't give up! I don't know you, but surely you deserve the best effort you can give this.

You might want to remind your boyfriend that while complications from bariatric surgery are infrequent and unpredictable, the health consequences (including early mortality) of obesity are almost guaranteed.

Can you clarify what you mean by "hand in mouth mood"? If you're saying that every time you enjoy some weight loss, you sabotage it by overeating or snacking/grazing the following week, that's a form of self-sabotage. The reasons for self-sabotaging behavior are sometimes hard to identify. In my case, I think I do that kind of thing because I hate change, I want to have my cake and eat it too, and I sometimes feel like I'm destined to fail anyway, so why not fail with a plate of brownies? I have found counseling to be very helpful and encourage you to pursue that. Your bariatric surgeon should be able to refer you to someone experienced with WLS and eating disorder patients.

P, Have you been getting enough Protein and drinking at least 64 ounces of liquids a day? You might want to give your surgeon a call and get some feedback on the weakness you're feeling. I don't know much about gastric plication, but you could check out this site: sleeveplicationtalk.com.

I was starving hungry the day after my band surgery. I was allowed to drink 1 ounce of liquid every 15 minutes but I felt like I could chug a galloon without any problem. But....don't do that! The reason is that in the immediate post-op period, your stomach is still healing and your band is still nesting itself into your stomach. Drinking too fast/too much, not following your surgeon's eating instructions (liquids-purees-soft-solid) and vomiting (which can happen if you chug liquids and/or eat something you're not supposed to eat) can all interfere with the healing process and even cause your band to slip out of position.

Well, at least you know what you're doing wrong! Now, get going on doing it right! We'll be cheering you on....

I don't think that's an indictment of the band or its safety. It's about poor medical and surgical practice, and I'm glad Allergan is refusing to sell bands to that program now. It's scary to think of general surgeons jumping on the bandwagon without fully understanding endoscopic and bariatric surgery and all the patient education and support it requires. I have banded acquaintances in California who are livid when they see huge billboards advertising clinics like that place who promise effortless weight loss.

I'm a bandster with fibro, though my fibro wasn't diagnosed until 18 months after I got to my goal weight. What is your main concern? That your initial recovery will be difficult? Or that your fibro will affect your weight loss, or that the band might affect your fibro? When you had your gall bladder removed, you weren't being treated for fibro, but if you're being treated for it now, I would expect your recover from band surgery to be a bit easier, but that's very hard to predict. You might need to enlist more help from friends and family to make the first week or so more manageable. I've encountered quite a few bandsters with fibro. One has had very disappointing weight loss, partly because along with fibro she has some other serious health conditions and can't even walk without a walker. Another lost all her excess weight and feels that the weight loss has improved her mobility and reduced her fatigue, but it hasn't cured her fibro either. I write for Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain LIFE magazine and have a lot of information about the relationship between obesity & fibro that I could share with you, depending on what your main conern is. Let me know if I can help you in any way. Jean

As Elcee said, it's normal to lose weight more quickly at the beginning, when you're heaviest, than later on when you're smaller and therefore burning fewer calories. I thought my last 10 pounds were never going to leave me, but they finally did, a little at a time. Sometimes a weight loss plateau means it's time to change things up - different foods, different workouts. If you know what you're doing wrong and just can't seem to work yourself up to it, maybe you need a weight loss vacation. Not a long one! It's very hard to keep up the same level of enthusiasm for any new venture month after month after month. Hang in there! You can do it!

I think people tend to post more often when they're struggling, confused, disappointed, upset, etc. than when they're doing fine and out living life, so that tends to skew the view. I've had my band for 4-1/2 years and I'm still feeling positive about it even though Ive had a band slip, a port flip, and now I'm having some issues with my esophagus refusing to do its job. This whole journey has been amazing and the weight loss is just one aspect of that. I've learned so much about myself and my body, made so many new friends, I'm doing things I'd never draemed of before.

1. To find a bariatric surgeon in your area, go to the top of the forum page and click on Surgeons, then on Surgeon Near You. Follow the prompts to search in your area. 2. Filling you in on anything you need to know before or after surgery would fill a book. In fact, I wrote that book (see my signature line for more info). 3. How long does it take to get the green light from your doctor? Which doctor? The bariatric surgeon? That will all depend on whether your insurance and/or your surgeon requires a medically supervised pre-op diet (3, 6, or 9 months), what your existing medical conditions are, how busy your surgeon's practice is, what tests & evaluations you need, etc. etc. It took me 16 weeks to get from the 1st WLS educational seminar I attended to the operating room. I've heard of other people who had to wait a year or more, and I know someone who had band surgery a week after her first consult with her surgeon. 4. How much it will cost and whether your insurance will cover it depends on the terms of your particular insurance policy. I suggest that you call your insurance company's customer service number and request details of your policy's bariatric surgery coverage in writing before you go much further with this. In addition to coverage of the surgery, you need to investigate coverage of other important things, like fills (just because the policy covers surgery doesn't mean it'll cover fills, or it may cover only a certain number of fills), pre-op tests & evaluations (like a psychological evaluation, a sleep study, heart stress test, pulmonary evaluation, etc. etc. etc.) and nutritionist services. I could tell you billion more things about the adjustable gastric band, but at this point, the most important things you need to know are: 1. Success with the band takes a lot of work. There is nothing in the band itself that will make you lose weight. 2. When deciding whether to have band surgery or another bariatric procedure, you must take into account the possible cost (in money, time, and energy) of the necessary aftercare. The band very rarely works without fills, and it almost always requires several fills and quite a lot of tweaking to achieve optimal band performance. Jean

You'll get more answers if you post this as a thread of its own.

My port flipped a few years ago. I had no idea it had flipped until my surgeon's NP started having problems accessing it for fills. I had one fill in the hospital radiology department which cost something like $1500 and took up an entire day for a stupid 2-minute procedure and decided to have it corrected. I had surgery to repair it and it's been hunky-dory since then. I didn't lose any Fluid from my band as a result of the flip or as a result of its repair. I suppose that could happen if the surgeon were careless and punctured the tubing, but since my port is about 12" away from my band, my surgeon would have had to make a major effort to get at it by way of my port site. I asked my surgeon what could have caused my port to flip - could abdominal exercises have done it, or what? She said it could be the result of poor surgical technique by my original surgeon (long, long story), or stress on the sutures during exercise or lifting, or none of the above.

That feeling of pressure usually means that your esophagus is unhappy about what you just ate. Did you mash the banana before you ate it? If not, that's probably why it's bothering you. When something like that happens, it's a good idea to revert to your previous diet phase (in your case, liquids) for 24 hours to let everything in there calm down. If the discomfort continues and/or becomes severe, and/or you aren't able to swallow liquids, call your surgeon ASAP. I don't know why bananas are problematic because they seem so soft and friendly, but even now I have to be careful of them.

I'm 2 lbs. below my goal weight and doing fine, thanks!

What can I do to increase my weight loss? That's really a question for your bariatric surgeon and/or nutritionist, but here are some things to consider. Are you exercising? Keeping a food log? Making good food choices? Getting plenty of sleep and drinking lots of Water? How long do your meals keep you satisfied (that is, in terms of physical hunger)? Do you feel like you might need another fill?