MacMadame

But I'm not calling it an addiction. That was my point. Not everyone who over eats is addicted to food. I don't think it's the same thing. Also, as one of those people not particularly addicted to food, I never got much of it and I still don't. Sometimes I look at trigger foods and think "I want that" but then I turn away and forget all about it. I don't intend to get treated for my hobby of doing triathlons.

My TOM is a pain. I even get cramps now. I would ovulate maybe 4x a year before I had my second kid. Now I'm regular as clockwork and I'm really late getting into menopause. I hate it!

Okay, who else is training for triathlons? I've done 2 so far and am doing a small one on Sunday in my hometown. But the biggie I'm training for is a Half-Ironman in Oct.

I found I got better over time at knowing when I'm full. My signals are still pretty subtle so I really have to pay attention though.

I think the husbands discourage their wives from learning English so they can keep them under their thumbs, personally.

From "ASMBS Allied Health Nutritional Guidelines for the Surgical Weight Loss Patient" "One popular myth is that only 30 g/hr of Protein can be absorbed. Although this is commonly found in both lay and some professional literature, there is no scientific basis for this claim." http://www.asmbs.org/Newsite07/resources/bgs_final.pdf Two articles about it: 30 Grams of Protein In One Meal Rule 30 grams of protein per meal myth - the truth about how much protein per meal

Not if the reason is physiological IMO. What I see is that some people are overweight mostly through being very hungry or not having a strong satiety sensor. This leads to yo-yo dieting, which leads to be being obese and (sometimes) having an unhealthy relationship with food. For these people, WLS is usually enough. They now aren't hungry all the time and they feel satisfied. They weren't truly addicted or had a compulsion triggered by emotions. So they adjust to the new reality and thrive. Other people are in the gripe of something stronger and more mentally based. These are the people who sabotage themselves or trade one addiction for another. These are people like that gal on LBT who would binge eat until she vomited on a regular basis and finally lost her band (and then went ballistic and got banned apparently). Just putting a band around her stomach wasn't enough -- she needed to work on her head. Of course, there is everything in between as well. But most people that I've seen adjust just fine eventually and don't develop true addictions. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Doing something to the point where it controls you and is destructive, not positive. That's a true addiction. I think people, in general, through around the word "addiction" too casually. Maybe it's a sore spot for me because I have so many true addicts in my family and I've seen what harm true addiction can do. So when people talk about being "addicted" to shopping or exercise when all they really mean is "I like it a lot!", well, it bugs! :001_smile: I exercise 7.0 hours a week and I'm working on doing it every morning and every night. But I am not addicted to exercise. It's my hobby and I have goals and I am doing what I need to to meet my goals. If I overdo it one day, I take it easy or take off the next day. If something comes up and I can't make a scheduled session -- like my son's thesis defense on Thurs. night, I'll try to make it up, but I won't go nuts to make it up and I won't sacrifice his happiness for it. So it's not an addiction, IMO.

I think the incidence of transfer addiction is actually pretty small. Most people who suffer from it were truly addicted to food in a way that was more of an eating disorder than what most of us experience. I don't think buying a lot of clothes when you need a new wardrobe counts either. :eek: I think you'd have to do something like buy 7 purses all almost identical that you couldn't afford because you couldn't help yourself. (And there are people who shop like that.) It's the lack of control to the point of destructive behavior that makes it an addiction.

I haven't particularly noticed anything different... and I'm annoyed that I'm still getting TOM too. I'm too old for this shite to quote a famous movie character.

After my surgery, I was told to stop taking my meds and to monitor my blood pressure. It did jump around like crazy the first week, but then it slowly came down to normal. You really need to talk to your PCP about this as it's a situation that needs monitoring.

Well I went back later and checked my food diaries and realized that I hadn't been doing that many bullets and that my protein had gone down quite a bit the week before I had issues. I was quite shocked because my memory of what was going on at that point didn't match my reality.

Thanks! :smile:

This is why I hate the requirement to lose weight before surgery. It delays people from getting the medical care they need and, most of the time, it's a luxury, not a medical necessity.

Well, in the US, most surgeons I've heard about don't charge for a hiatal hernia repair if you are self-pay. It's only a single cut and 1 stitch! I'm not surprised Almanza charges, but I'm surprised Zapata does.

I carry beef jerky in my purse for emergencies.

A bunch of us did the cottage cheese test and the people two years out reported being able to eat no more than they could at 6-12 months out. So that isn't something you have to worry about, I think. What most people do that I see who have sleeves and complain about regain is start to graze so they are eating small amounts at a time but they are eating about twice as often. Or they don't exercise.

The week I ended up in the hospital, I was only consuming 50 g of protein a day because I had stopped using things like bullets and the Isopure and was stupidly trying to get most of my protein from "real" food. :smile:

The collagen based Proteins are controversial. They are mostly collagen but they do have some whey in them. They are also very similar to something called Protonex which is used in hospitals for patients who can't eat and need to get their Protein levels up. It works too. This is why I think the controversy over the bullets is overblown. For one thing, they aren't going to be our sole source of protein for months at a time. OTOH, they are kind of gross. :smile: I was able to take them for a while, slightly diluted with Water or Crystal Light, but then I just couldn't gag them down any more. I ended up making my Protein shake with extra water and 1.5 servings of powder instead and that worked better for me. I still do it, in fact.

Actually, it's a myth that we can only absorb 30 g of protein at a time. I'll post my link about it when I get home.

Amen, sister!

I have so many sites I'm on that have blogs. So I just keep one and direct people to it. http://fattyfightsback.blogspot.com Come by and check it out!

I had my body fat measured at the gym today and they claimed it's under 18%! I'm not sure I believe this, but it still makes me happy. My scale hasn't budged on body fat % in months and I've lost visible fat pockets so I know it's down from what it's saying.

We went to Lake Del Valle. The kids' school camps there every year and it's definitely fun.

Anyone else get their sleeve in Sept. '08?

I have chronicled my journey on my blog and encourage anyone who is thinking about either getting a sleeve or training for a triathlon to try it out. But here is a summary of my story: A little over a year ago, I was in big trouble. I was at my highest weight yet. I had stopped exercising. My blood pressure required medicine to control. I had plantar fasciitis and my allergies (I thought) were out of control. Toward the end, I started to get very bad heartburn that would not respond to medicine. I was getting to the point where I had to sit down to tie my shoes and I was moving less and less. I looked into the future and it was not pretty. But I didn't know what to do. I had been dieting for 35 years and it obviously hadn't worked. I didn't think I had another diet in me. Then I ran into my next-door neighbor, who had had WLS about 6 months before. And contrary to the media portrayal of WLS, he had lost weight and looked good -- healthy. This somehow made WLS seem acceptable and I started looking into it. Like most people I only knew about the band and RnY and I didn't want RnY. So I started researching the band and found LapBandTalk.com. It's a good thing I did because watching what people with bands went through -- normal people who followed the rules and still had problems -- made me more open to other possibilities. Then the long-term studies on the band showing what a high re-surgery rate it had started coming out. In the meantime, I had learned about ghrelin and how it makes people think they are hungry. That was an "aha" moment for me and I realized that the reason I was hungry all the time was because I had too much ghrelin in me. I wanted a surgery that directly addressed that and the band did not. So I changed my mind and started the process of getting a sleeve. I was sleeved September 24th and had a hiatal hernia repaired at the same time. As a result, my GERD went away completely. It turned out a lot of my "allergy" symptoms and some weird back pain I was having also went away. They were all caused by the hiatal hernia! At first my weight loss was slow. I was eating to plan but I was only exercising two days a week. When I went to see my surgeon for my three week check-up, he was not happy with me and told me to exercise more. So I did. I worked my way up to four days a week, but now I had a new problem. Riding the stationary bike four days a week was boring. I wanted to do something else. But I didn't know how to use the machines at the free gym at work. I tried a few of the free classes, but they didn't float my boat. This is when I felt the treadmills calling to me. I resisted at first. I had never had much luck running before even at lower weights than I was at that point. But I heard about the Couch-to-5K program and people swore by it so I gave it a whirl. And, suddenly, I was running. I was a runner! This is when another strange thought popped into my head. I had watched the Ironman World Championships (aka as Kona) on tv and thought it looked like a blast. At least when they all jumped in the Water at once and started swimming. And when they staggered out and hopped on their bike and pedaled away. But then the announcer would say "and now they are going to run a marathon" and I'd think "are you freaking kidding me?" That part did not seem like fun at all. But now I was running. And it wasn't fun exactly, but it was rewarding and, if I could run, I could do a triathlon. Maybe. Some day. So I started looking into it and found out about the Sprint distance. The swim is only 1/2 a mile, the bike only 13 miles and the run was a 5k. Hey, that sounded completely doable! I signed myself up for one and started training. At this point, I was still heavy enough to qualify for the Athena division! But the weight was coming off and much faster than at first. Every time my weight loss slowed down, I added in another workout or increased the time of an existing workout. In Feb. I joined a triathlon club and started doing their coached workouts on top of my gym workouts and I started improving much faster than expected. This is when I did something a bit crazy. It was a week before my first triathlon, so I was completely unproven. But I found out that a friend was flying into town to do a famous -- and tough -- Half-ironman race three weeks later called Wildflower. It was part of a whole weekend of triathlons and I told him I'd come down and cheer him on. Then I started thinking -- I'm going to be there anyway, why not sign up to race myself? I could do a Mountain Bike version at the Sprint distance I'd been training for, but I had no mountain bike. Or I could do the Olympic Course, which was twice as long. The voice inside my head that coaxed into getting on the treadmill, started whispering "do it, do it" So I did. I did my first Sprint tri as planned in April and came in 10 min. faster than my "in my wildest dreams" time. Then two weeks later, I finished Wildflower right in the middle of my expected time window. I had done it -- moved up to the Olympic distance, took on one of the hardest Olympic courses around, and did better than surviving. Now I felt like a real triathlete. I had challenged myself to do something I wasn't quite sure I could do and I had delivered. I knew at this point that I could do anything I set my mind to do. In the meantime, I've lost over 100 pounds, my body fat percentage is under 20 and my resting heart rate is under 60. I am also off my blood pressure meds, my plantar fasciitis is in remission -- even with all the running I do -- and I recently stopped taking my allergy meds as well. (I find with the GERD gone I can keep my symptoms in check just with Simply Saline.) I don't think any of this would have been possible without the sleeve. The band would have made me eat less, sure, but getting rid of my ghrelin did more for me than restrict my food intake. Now instead of having a voice in my head that screams at me to eat and sit down more, I have a voice that whispers to me to get up and move (and do triathlons). It's like a switch flipped in my brain and now I have the brain of an athlete. I like it and I look forward to where it's going to take me next. Dare I start dreaming about Kona for myself? The voice in my head seems to think so.