MacMadame

Your body needs a certain amount of Fluid. If you consume fluids and your pee is no darker than the color of lemonade, you are getting enough fluid. People have all sorts of opinions about the best fluids and what counts and doesn't count, but the bottom line is your pee color. If it's anywhere between clear and lemonade, you are okay. But you asked about weight loss. If you drink a non-calorie fluids, it takes up room in your stomach. That's room that food can't fit into. :biggrin: So I have found that if I increase my fluid intake, my calorie intake goes down and I lose weight. I don't even have to "diet" to see this.

I have often wondered about that. When you watch lap band surgeries online, you see this incredibly long tube. Then they cut away to the talking head and when they come back, they are stitching the port into place. I always wonder where all the tubing went. It seems like he did have erosion. Isn't his band inside his tummy? Do port infections increase the chance of erosion? Something you said earlier seemed to imply that. But how can that be?! US surgeons are the best! Everyone knows that!! (j/k) I don't think that's why. I think it's because he's a big ol' drama queen and he's been quite insulting to many people, including, but not limited to, all nurses. I'm sorry, but he brought his treatment on himself with his drama, preposterous claims and nasty sniping at anyone who challenged him. That doesn't make it right and I wish people would calm down about it, but it is understandable and I don't think it has anything to do with fear for most of us. For myself, I don't want to die having elective surgery. My kids are still young enough that I want to be around for them. I will take more complications on the back-end for a safer surgery. There are other reasons I prefer LB to GS but that's a biggie. I'm sorry to hear that. I think it is different because I doubt you went to that board and posted a bunch of crap about how if you spoke out about your problems, you'd be car bombed by the evil Bariatric Industry in your very first couple of posts. I actually think what happened to you was worse because you were a known entity and there was probably a certain level of trust that was broken by that person being nasty to you.

I agree with that. This happens to me too. But what also happens is that my numbers are much better than theirs. My blood pressure is lower. My Iron is higher. My cholesterol is lower. Etc. Flabby and what size you wear isn't necessarily about health. :biggrin: I just read that BMI is inaccurate for 25% of the population. That's more than the elite athletes with lots of muscles. The problem with BMI is not just that it tells people who are healthy that they aren't; it also tells people who AREN'T healthy that they are. There are better measures IMO of health. BMI is just the old weight charts slightly updated and turned into a single number.

We diagramed sentences for about 5 seconds in some grade in elementary school. I guess the practice was already falling out of favor. We would take the sentence and put it into a chart that reminds me of those timelines they do on Without a Trace. They look like this: Sentence Diagramming My kids only circle nouns and verbs or underline other parts -- whatever part they are studying. They don't ever diagram the whole thing.

I think you are both right. The thing is, if .05% have life-threatening complications -- a high estimate because most complications are not life-threatening, even the ones that require a second surgery and in many band studies, there are over 1500 subjects and not one mortality -- and only 1000 people in the US are banded, as was once the case, that's 5 people. But now that there hundreds of thousands being banded, that's hundreds of people -- 500 for every 100,000. (If I did the math right.) So, sure, there are more people. But the risk factor doesn't change because the absolute number goes up. One thing that sways me towards Lap Band surgery (vs. other WLS) is that this is the surgery that many of the Bariatric Surgeons have done for themselves and for their families. I don't think they'd be putting the band in themselves if it really was a dangerous appliance due to be pulled off the market.

This is a common misconception. The difference is not that dramatic. First of all, half a century ago is about 1958. In 1963, the average age of menarche was between 12.9 and 12.75 depending on what study you quote. Now it's about 12.5 to 12.8, again depending on the study you quote. The average hasn't been 16 for well over a century and we have a ways to go until it's 11 because there has been a leveling off in the drop. From reading the stories on LBT, I get the impression that entering puberty does start obesity in some women and for others having a baby does it. That doesn't cover everyone, of course, but those two themes seem to be the most common. Also, there is a correlation between weight and onset of menarche. But it's not that menarche causes weight gain. It's that you have to have a certain percentage of body fat in order to have menarche. This is one reason why the age has gone down -- nutrition has improved and there are a lot less starving kids with low body fat percentages in the world.

I remember that very well. Of course power windows are much more reliable now. OTOH, my car's power windows will often refuse to go down. Then a few days later they work again. So they aren't perfect. :biggrin: In a lot of areas of my life, I am very cutting edge. I have an iPhone, a Blu-ray DVD player, and we were one of the first people I know to get an HDTV. I often upgrade to the whatever new version of software as soon as it's out. But this is our bodies we're talking about! When it comes to things like surgery, and implanting a device in my body, I'm MUCH more conservative. I figure, let someone else be the guinea pig. :tongue:

I think bands are relatively new to that program. They seem focused on RnY. My medical group also has a program but they *only* do RnY. Which is why I'm shopping around. :shrug: I found a surgeon with over 400 bands near my work, but now my insurance issues are getting in the way. (Their group takes my current insurance but not the one I have to switch to in order to get it covered. Catch-22!) There is another hospital-based program near me that seems to have an experienced surgeon and takes both my old and my (maybe) new insurance, but I haven't had time to grill them yet. I'm pretty sure she's been doing bands since 2004 though. Plus they have a lot of pre-op classes and I like stuff like that. :cry_smile:

I'm a software engineer. I had my own business for a while doing photography & videography but I couldn't make any money at so I went back to software.

I was emailing back and forth with a patient coordinator of a surgeon my insurance covers and she proudly told me that they had had no slips and no erosions. Of course the guy had only done 50 bands. :cry_smile: My understanding is that there is a big learning curve with bands. I know the industry has learned a lot as a whole over time so I'm not sure if that is as true today as it once was. But I would not want to be my surgeon's first couple of bands even so. This is an elective surgery and I want to do everything in power to make it as safe as possible.

I have a rep power of 1 so I think one person has left a comment. I'm going crazy trying to find it! :cry_smile:

They've been banding longer in Europe than they have in the US so I can't imagine it will be a problem finding someone. Insurance might be an issue though.

I don't have that section. Weird.

Naw, the grades are BS too ... I'm 50 and no one has ever asked me about my HS grades and I only got asked about my college grades the first couple of years out of school when going on job interviews. Good grades in HS will make it easier to get into college, but once you are accepted to college, they become meaningless.

Just go for body fat percentage and waist to hip ratio and forget BMI. Not only is it too "one size fits all" but it's not based on the best data.

I really don't know what the answer is, but it makes me nervous to see people who haven't finished growing having surgery and getting foreign objects implanted in their bodies. This is elective surgery when it comes down to it, so why not elect to wait a few years? It may seem like forever to you now, but 3-5 years is nothing in the scheme of things.

You could always have Free Sale too. It's like a garage sale but you don't charge any money.

I'm new and haven't even been banded yet. But feel free to not believe me either.

oops. didn't see someone post this exact same info.

I am thinking about switching from Aetna (WLS not covered by my company) to UCH (WLS covered if you have co-morbidities) and from what I can tell, the requirements really seem to differ depending on which UHC policy you have. Which makes me nervous. I think I am going to call and ask for their policy in writing before I definitely switch at Open Enrollment. But if they don't require the 6 month diet, that would be great since I can't switch until Aug and I want to have surgery in Oct.

I have been told that since they changes the weight history requirement to only 2 years instead of 5 that they've become much easier to deal with by a surgeon's office. Doesn't help me, though, my company excludes the surgery.

I'm a photographer and I'm not a guy. I think I got you confused with PhotoEgor.

Oh there are more of us. Unfortunately not enough to stop him from appearing in enough places that I can't avoid him no matter how much I try. I think it's more that people don't listen than that they weren't told. There was some study about how much info people retain from their doctors visits and it's something really low like 30%. It's interesting that HH went for lap band. Lots of people post here that over a certain weight their surgeons try to steer them towards RnY and maybe that would have been a better option for him.

Bemused? Is that why in the very first sentence of your very first post you say "I'll assume that some of my comments won't be all that popular here"? Then you don't "get it" at all. We have no problem with you telling us about your complications. If we did, there wouldn't be an entire section on complications and another whole sections on "life after banding". The problem is that you are on a mission to stop everyone from getting a lap band because you had problems. :thumbup: Except you seem to think your mistake was in getting a band to start with. I think you mistake was not getting your port infection taken care of right away and also letting your insurance lapse instead of paying the big fat COBRA fee.

Actually, if I were in your position, I wouldn't be posting here at all. But if I did, I would type out the whole story ahead of time in Word and go over it and over it to make sure I was communicating clearly. I would take a few days to do that too, working on it slowly. Then I would post that as my first post. All the details up front. Not in bits and pieces. I would also cut out all the drama. Drama is fun for the person having the hissy fit but it turns everyone else off. Finally, I would recognize that my problem is one that a very small % of people have and the fact that I was one of the unlucky ones doesn't mean that no one else should have this surgery. Only if you define "a LOT" as "less than 1%". I'm amazed that you can't see that the lap band is a great decision for the vast majority of morbidly obese people and the fact that you had a port infection and erosion issues doesn't change that. I don't have to justify my decision because I've done the research and I know the risks. I know that can happen. The risk is low enough that I am comfortable taking it. Someone else might not. But neither of us is wrong or burying our head in the sand. Everyone's cost-benefit analysis is going to be different. As for people jumping in when all the facts aren't known, whose fault is THAT? You are the one who chose to dribble out the facts a bit at a time. We are debating what you are presenting. <o:p></o:p> I think you are the one who isn't objective. Something bad happened to you, therefore the surgery is bad seems to be your reasoning but that isn't logical. So don't do it. Ignore those comments and concentrate on the questions about what exactly happened to you. The questions you wouldn't have to answer if you had posted the whole story in your first post, btw. <o:p></o:p> Speaking of snippy... seems you can dish it out, but you can't take it. <o:p></o:p> No, I'm saying you should have perspective and concentrate on helping people going through what you are and not on trying to convince a bunch of people that they are idiots for having a lap band when the data doesn't support that conclusion. <o:p></o:p> That wasn't the idea. Once you make the blog, you put a link to it in your signataure. Then you go where people are who are thinking about having surgery (most of whom are not on this site) and you post a bit about your story and direct them to your blog for the rest. You will actually get more people to read your story this way and it's a lot less effort than going to every Lap Band site and posting in every forum your entire story over and over. After all, those threads will eventually die, but with a link in your signature, info about your blog could be on every post you make even if it's in the social section of the board or on a board not even about lap band. Btw, there are plenty of people who like to stir up trouble in the internet. They come here and post about how someone they know had lap band and THEY DIED and beg us not to have the surgery and then they sit back and lurk and watch the fur fly. Or they post some answers to some of the questions but ignore most of the rest and are really just posting to keep the drama going. You can't expect people to think you couldn't possibly be one of those people unless you post with credibility. While I believe your story, I don't think you've posted with as much credibility as you could and I'm not the least bit surprised that people are pushing you to supply more information before they will believe you. I am surprised that you expected to be believed right off the bat just because you said so. That's not realistic. People make up crap on internet message boards every day. We'd be dumb to just take everything posted here as the gospel truth. And, in spite of what you think, I am not dumb.