MacMadame

I hate airline seats too. Now I do fit into them. Barely. But I swear my legs have NO ROOM. And I'm 5'1" tall! Also, other people have no concept of personal space. I don't know how many times the people on either side of me have spilled into my seat and taken my armrests even though they were not even morbidly obese. Jerks.

I didn't see that thread. Are you sure the "per day" wasn't a typo? Or is this another "sucess" story? :smile:

When I had my own business, paying the mortgage each month got to be dicey. We managed it but the mortgage company was not interested in working with us until we were seriously in default. Same with the credit card companies. We didn't want to be in serious trouble -- that was the whole point of calling them! Anyway, I eventually gave up on the business and am back to making the big bucks in my chosen field and things are much better, but not everyone has a job that pays like being a software engineer does. Once you get in a hole, it's very hard to get out, too. The interest alone will drag you right under.

That would be my suggestion. They may not want you to have the card because they think you will be constantly adjusting yourself, but they shouldn't object to transfering it -- and your records -- over to another doctor. In the US, it would be illegal to object. I don't know the UK system enough to know if it would illegal, but it seems like it would be and it would definitely be unethical.

You should definitely call when you are told they have the paperwork. Just because the doctor's office sent it, doesn't mean the insurance company got it! How much you call after that is up to you.

At my nutritional consult, the dietician presented so much info that it would have made any prepared questions moot. I just asked questions about what she presented and that was enough. If they don't talk about the post-op diet, I would ask about that. For the surgeon, I have a list of questions that I try to get the info from for any surgeon I am considering. A lot of it, you can get from their web sites and the seminar, but then I send the rest via email and at the surgical consult, you can ask anything that you still don't have a satisifactory answer to. Here's a copy: %20Checklist.doc I'm working on an article and I've beefed it up to include questions for all the different surgeries and whether you have insurance or not. Just cut out the parts that don't apply.

It can happen a lot when it gets really hot too. People just guzzle and guzzle.

It is huge, but if you are an infant or an athlete, it's not as hard as you think. Those are the people most likely to die from water intoxication. Oh and people who are high on something.

Thanks! I've been thinking of writing one for a while. I write all this stuff on message boards and then it's gone .... articles are more permanent. If I could find my old post about Realize vs. Lap Band AP, then maybe I'll turn that into an article too.

Hey, I finally got up the nerve to publish an article on the LapBandTalk magazine! I can't decide if I'm happy or scared. Heh heh.

How many of us have been "on a diet" for most of our lives? Too many, in my opinion. Not just because it's bad for our health or because diets don't work. It's bad for our mental health too. It leads to something I call "Dieter's Mentality." If you have Dieter's Mentality, you need to cut it out because it's going to sabotage your success. This is true whether or not you have had Weight Loss Surgery, are on your pre-op diet or are doing it the traditional way through diet and exercise. Diet Mentality is evil and it puts you in a bad place! What is Diet Mentality? It has four major components: 1) Putting food into Good and Bad buckets First of all, food is not Bad or Good -- it's just food. Some food is a better choice than others, but even then it's really just all food. If you are getting in enough of the essential nutrients and you account for your calories each day, you are doing good no matter if you have a bite of dessert once in a while or not. All food is bad food if you eat too much of it or only eat one kind. It's just as unhealthy to eat nothing but Protein as it is to eat nothing but birthday cake. A healthy diet is balanced and can even include a certain amount of junk food as long as it's a small amount and it doesn't trigger you into bad behavior. 2) Judging your worth by what you eat Making bad food choices does not make you a bad person. Your self-worth shouldn't be tied up in what you eat. Good people make bad choices all the time. Instead of beating yourself up when you make a bad choice, hating yourself, seeing yourself as a failure and otherwise engaging in destructive behavior, just figure out how to make a better choice next time. It's not easy to be dispassionate about your own behavior, but telling yourself that you made a bad choice and next time you'll make a better one is a good start and much healthier than telling yourself you are a bad person and you'll never lose the weight and you hate yourself. 3) Judging your worth by how much you weigh/how much you've lost this week The scale is just part of the picture. If you get too tied up in the scale, you get a distorted view of the world. Weeks where you lose are good weeks even if someone close to you died. Weeks where you don't lose are bad weeks even if you got a big promotion at work and did everything "right" in terms of diet and exercise. One of the dangers of measuring everything by your weight on the scale is that you can convince yourself that making bad choices is okay because sometimes you can make bad choices and still lose/maintain. You can also convince yourself that making good choices is pointless because some weeks you make all good choices and the scale doesn't move. But clearly making more bad choices than good will lead to weight gain in the long run. Anything thinking that leads you to conclude otherwise is destructive thinking. 4) Waiting until you are thin(ner) to start living Stop waiting until you get to goal to start living or loving yourself. Love yourself now. Live your life now. It's easy to fall into "when I lose 25 pounds, I will start..." type of thinking. It's a fine line between thinking about how you will reward yourself when you meet certain goals and putting your life on hold until you meet certain goals. Many of us have had the experience of thinking we were so fat back when we were in HS or college or a young adult and not being happy. But then we got even fatter and we look at those pictures from back then and we realize that we were actually pretty hot. In fact, we'd give anything to be "that fat" right now. Why not love yourself now while you're living your life instead of waiting until 10 years later to tell yourself how good you had it back then? What happens when we stop "dieting"? One of the best things I ever did for myself was to decide I was never going to diet again. It really allowed me to examine my relationship with food and to start listening to my body and figuring out why I eat what I eat. That would never have happened when I was caught up in "Dieter's Mentality". One of the things I found is that my approach to food was that of a child. I wanted people to make me or bring me food because I associate being fed with being loved. So I got myself to a point where all my meals were either quick things that require no cooking or can be zapped in a microwave or are made by my husband -- who does all the cooking -- or were purchased. In other words, other people had complete control over what kind of food I ate and how it was prepared! I never saw anything wrong with this until I decided to grow up about food. I realized that by approaching food this way, I was giving up tons of control over what I ate. Someone else buys the groceries so it's not my fault that there aren't healthy Snacks in the house. It's not my fault that I had that ice cream cone -- there was nothing else to eat and I was HUNGRY. Once I saw this pattern, I vowed to change it and start being an adult about food. I now plan out what I'm going to eat before I go to work. If I'm going to work late, I bring extra food so I'm not eating out of the vending machine. I don't eat lunch at the Cafeteria every day so my food choices aren't limited to what they want to make for me. I have healthy snacks in my drawers at work so if I do end up working late without having planned ahead, I'm eating a Protein Bar instead of a Snickers bar. This change in attitude and behavior has made a big difference. Which is not to say I haven't got much farther to go ... I still don't cook and I still eat way too much prepared food (because I don't cook). But I'm much better than I used to be and it's great to feel like a grown up! You may relate to what I said about having a child's approach to food or you may not. Not everyone gets fat the same way or has the same issues to work through. But one thing I can guarantee is that once you throw off the shackles of Dieter's Mentality, you will have the brain cycles available to see your relationship with food more clearly. You will be on the road to having a healthy relationship with food.

Actually there are bypass patients who find the weight doesn't just fall off with no work even in the beginning. There are no magic bullets. That said, I do think that WLS is easier than diet and exercise alone because WLS will change most people's "set point" so that their body doesn't fight as hard to keep the weight on or work to put the weight back on after the loss. But again... so what? I live in CA and sometimes I go to NJ to visit relatives. I could walk to New Jersey, have it take months, if not years, maybe never even get there or I can take a plane and get there in 5 hours. I think I'd be pretty stupid to walk there knowing how much work it is and how little chance of success I'd have. I'm going to take the plane! If that's "taking the easy way out" so be it!

When I was growing up, my neighbor ate a watermelon and grew a baby in her tummy! Well, that's what she tried to tell me anyway.

I can swear I read this article somewhere on some Fat Acceptance site. I'm all for loving people at all sizes and not assuming all fat people are lazy and gluttons and all thin people are healthy. You can make those points without LYING.

Extreme is cyber-stalking someone. Putting them on ignore is just being efficient.

Even if it is easier, what does that have to do with anything? It works and that's what's important. I suppose I could spend a year losing the weight on Jenny Craig and then just gain it all back so that I wouldn't be "cheating" but what's the point in that? The idea that there is only one way to lose weight and anything else is cheating is just ridiculous. You do what works for you so that you're healthier. My son's gf is staying with us and her mom is a loon. She refuses to give her kids antibiotics even if they need them. So son's gf once suffered for 10 days with a UTI before mom gave in and finally took her to the doctor for antibiotics. I'm sure that woman thinks antibiotics are "cheating" but I think she's insane.

No, I don't think we all do have an eating disorder. An eating disorder is not just eating more than you need. It's about body image and disordered eating. If someone gets hungry 6x a day and 6x a day they have a healthy meal or snack, they may be overweight but they don't even have disorderd eating, let alone an eating disorder An eating disorder is a very serious thing. People who have them often die because they can't stop themselves from their destructive behaviors. Disordered eating isn't quite as severe and probably everyone engages in it at least sometimes in their lives in a very mild way, but most people don't exhibit those signs very regularly so it's not really a problem. So some overweight people have disordered eating and some of those have an eating disorder but not everyone who is overweight.

Ghrelin? That's what the sleeve does. Actually, all WLS interferes with ghrelin production to some extent. It's just that the sleeve takes out the portion of the stomach that produces it. There is still some being produced in your intestines though. They are working on a pill to supress ghrelin production, but right now it doesn't work too well. I think that's true. But I also think you can't make policy based on trying to keep the fringe lunatics from harming themselves. If the policy is sensible (and I don't think ours is), then that has to be good enough.

People talk. Butter, butter, butter! (I'm not feeling annoyed enough for LARD. I can't check in my changes because the stupid build won't work. I've been waiting since 7pm!)

But it's arbitrary. It assumes that "last resort" is the same for everyone. Chemo isn't preventative though. People do get their breast cut off when they have a family history of breast cancer--the virulent kind that kills you. Surgeons are often in the forefront of treating new diseases. Their work often helps us understand the disease well enough to come up with non surgical treatments. I see a lot of breakthroughs coming out in the next 5 to 10 years, at least some of them non-surgical now that we understand about ghrelin -- which was only discovered in 1999. When there are other viable choices, less and less people will get surgery. Not I think surgery is always the last choice. Sometimes it's less risky than non-surgical alternatives. I got my gallbladder out when it had stones instead of having the stones smashed by a laser and taking medicine for 2 years to dissolve them, for example, and I'd do it again if I had the same choice to make over again.

Well, lard is a four-letter word .... LARD, LARD, LARD!! (At least I'm home now.)

I'm sorry, but no one who is morbidly obese is completely healthy and I'd argue that (almost) no one who is obese is completely healthy either. You may not have outward signs, but your inside are feeling the extra weight and it's going to come out and bite ya eventually. I understand your attitude because I used to have it but now that I've finally accepted that I can't do this on my own, I find my previous attitude towards surgery to be misguided. Whether or not people have tried things is not a function of their weight. Some people who are 300 lb. have never tried anything, not really tried. Personally, I have been dieting since I was 13. I once lost 70 lb. and got down to a normal weight and kept it off for a few years. I've been on Jenny Craig, I've been on WW, I've been on Nutri/system. I did Atkins back in the 70s when only crackpots did it. I've even done it on my own. Getting surgery is not about lack of effort on my part. It's about finally realizing that doing the same thing over and over hoping for a different result is madness. It's about finally being willing to do something extreme because it works and my fears of the extremeness of it being outweighed by the fears of what would happen if I didn't do anything about it. But let's say I hadn't... should it really matter? We know that diet and exercise doesn't work once you have a significant amount of weight to lose. We even know why. Why should we force people to try something that we know won't work for them and also make them be in an unhealthy state for years (2 to 5 depending on the insurance company) before we're willing to give them a medical treatment that actually works? I think it's madness. Can you imagine if we made cancer patients have to prove their worthiness for chemo? Or if we wouldn't give them treatment that works until they'd spent two years trying herbs and hypnosis? Just imagine the uproar! None of this is about health or doing what makes sense medically IMO. It's about making people prove they are worthy. Frankly, I don't approve.

Butter! Butter! Butter! (I need to swear a bit. I'm still at work again and my programming isn't going well.)

I think the mental game is the hardest part of this process. Just wait until your outsides match your insides... people will not put you in the Fat Club and will talk about Fat People around you as if you aren't one of them. That will be weird too. In the meantime, just look at them funny. I find my "mom" look shuts up more than my kids.

I wish more people had a sense of humor.