MacMadame

It's hiding out with the answers.

Also, if your company has a FSA for medical expenses, take advantage of that. Lots of OTC stuff is deductable and it comes off your wages as pre-tax income.

I have brown hair that is starting to go gray. That's why I went for pink. I thought it would look good with the gray. I'm going to get just a hair cut one more time and the next time I get my hair cut, I'm going blue. The pink is almost gone. Tattoos are too permanent. Get a body piercing isntead. :tt1:

I think so. The obese have up to 10x the ghrelin as normal-weighted people. Ghrelin makes you feel hunger even if you should be satisfied. WLS interferes with ghrelin production for most of us and allows us to move beyond the physical addiciton. But it doesn't nothing for the mental addiction for those that have it. Which is why it doesn't work for everyone.

Legally they can't make you show the register unless it's a membership place. Lots of employees don't know that though and they'll make a big stink if they ask you for your receipt and you say No. But they are in the wrong and you shouldn't let them push you around.

I can't wait for my pink streaks to grow out so I can get blue streaks.

You've updated your picture! You look great!

Thanks... I had a heard time telling from the web site how exactly was involved. They only list the main doc.

My mom used to live in West Virginia. Now she lives in Virginia. But she made a circle around the country to get there.... first upstate NY, then Oregon, then to Virginia. It's pretty funny, really.

That's my birthday! I'll be thinking of you.

I know about Aceves. I want to see how his prices compared to local. If I can stay within 45 min of my home/work, I think that would be awesome. But if I can't...

Who did your surgery? I looked into that group, but they weren't that convenient to me for pre-op appointments and things.

People who follow teenagers around stores because they just know they'll steal suck too. (I've noticed this lately as my kids get older. I really hate the security guard breathing down my neck and following me around the store. Those dudes are seriously creepy.)

It's definitely a function of size IMO. I'm a lot of boards for more than WLS and the bigger ones tend to be like this. With the smaller ones, there probably is a whiner or a troublemaker or two, but everyone knows who they are and doesn't fan the flames. Or the board owner cracks down on them (the troublemakers, anyway) and they go away. But sometimes it's a bit stifling. Big boards, on the other hand, can't be policed like that and if 1% of the members annoy, it's a lot more people in terms of raw posts. But they can be a lot more free-wheeling and that's good in its own way. This is why I'm on both big and little boards. Not everyone has the same sense of humor. I thought it was funny *and* educational because it really shows the flaws in some of the thinking some people have and maybe it might make them see the light in a way that saying "it's really important not to go to solid food too soon" does not.

Smarter than a tootsie pop, huh? Um, that's not really that smart, is it?

Eating food when you aren't hungry is just as much wasting it as throwing it out.

In the US, we use beef instead of lamb but still call it Shepherd's Pie.

I hate exercise and I never do it. What I do is have at least once "active" hobby that gets me out and moving. It's not "exercise" but I get exercise doing it. I pick something I love to do, not whatever gets me the best workout. This way I can stick with it for much longer than I've ever gone to a gym. I did figure skating for 10 years for example. The most I've gone to a gym regularly is 10 month!

It's working for me now too.

Pringles give you the runs? That's so sad.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If I preview it first, it always shows up. But if I don't, it doesn't.

No, he's a poser. This is where I part company with you. I'm well aware of the science behind obesity and this may be how lots of people got there, but once you get there, you are now a prisoner of your body which is doing everything it can to keep that weight on. This is the whole reason to get WLS, IMO. WLS, unlike diet and exercise, will break the physiological cycle and give us fatties the same kind of body chemistry as the non-obese. That gives us a fighting chance. The rest is up to us. But one reason that WLS works for so many people, IMO, is that for many of us, it really is a matter of being hungry all the time and not a matter of unresolved feelings or low self-esteem leading to destructive behavior. But it doesn't work for everyone so obviously the biology isn't the whole story for everyone. There's a whole philosophy of therapy that concentrates on behavior. You change our behaviors and that changes your thinking instead of the traditional method of working on the feelings. It's sounds like you've figured that our yourself -- that you can change your feelings by changing your behaviors.

Well I didn't even get through 2 pages...

I think whether or not it is worth it, is going to depend on your outcome. You need to do everything you can to maximize your outcome or it won't be worth it. This means really researching your surgeon, following all the rules and making sure you do all the head work you need to do so you don't sabotage yourself. Otherwise, you'll end up like some of the people on here who paid big bucks to get banded, then big bucks to get unbanded. Or have only lost a small amount of weight after a year. For those people, I suspect it's totally NOT worth it. I just found out I will be self-pay. I worked my insurance but it turns out that none of the 3 carriers my company uses covers it because the company excludes it. This isn't what the insurance carriers told me when I called them, but it's turned out to be true, nonetheless. So I have to work the "is it worth is?" analysis too and I found being self-pay changed the equation for me. It made me less gung-ho for a band and more inclined to get a surgery that doesn't require as much follow up or have as many long-term complications that require re-surgery -- which I'd also have to pay for.

Okay, now I'm dying to read the particular thread that started all this off.