MacMadame

One is more interesting! I love it when we run in the park more than the track for the same reason.

Dr. Huacuz is on the top of mine and he's the first 10 entries too. :wink2; But I'd also avoid anyone associated or formerly associated with a Betancourt clinic, particularly: Contreras, Pompas, and Lopez. I'd also avoid verboonen because of his arrest for insurance fraud. If your doctor has no integrity, then how can you trust him to cut off most of your stomach? Then I'd eliminate anyone who hasn't been doing the sleeve for at least 3-4 years and has done less than 250-500 of them. Let someone else be their learning curve. Oh and anyone who uses a 40 f boughie or bigger.

Food intolerances are common with VSG, DS and RnY. Lactose intolerance is the most common. But once your stomach settles down, they tend to go away. I couldn't drink milk for a while but I can now, for example.

Actually, it's "excess" weight loss.

No, what happens is that everything gets so expensive that people making 6 figures can't live in the area either. Or everyone moves to a "cheap" place to live and then that place suddenly isn't so cheap any more and it's certain less attractive in other ways (traffic and pollution increases, harder to get your kid into a good school, etc.) The local economy is an ecosystem. It needs all it's parts to function. This includes unskilled labor. It is not in our best interests to tax unskilled labor to the point they can't function on their salaries because that only increases the welfare rolls. There is something kind of sick about a system where your quality of life is better on welfare than working. In order to guard against that, we need minimum wage laws, and lower/no taxes for the lowest paid workers.

I can't find the post I wanted to quote. Darn. Anyway, here's my answer. I have often been "active for a fat chick". When I was overweight and even obese, I still did things. For a while, I mountain biked with some guys from work a couple of times a week at one job. Then I figure skated for over 10 years. But I didn't do them to the level of a truly athletic person either. Also, when I get close to 200 (and then over), it gets really hard to move and my exercise slacks off and I turn into a couch potato. This is part of what got me to consider WLS. I stopped figure skating after 2 years of only doing it about half an hour a week. (You can NOT make progress in figure skating with that little time commitment.) I realized then that I was in big trouble and it was only going to get worse. When I had my surgery, I hadn't skated or been to the gym in over a year. I started back to the gym to get ready for surgery about a month before and was going 1 or maybe 2x a week and riding the stationary bike for 30 min. only. IOW, it was a very marginal effort. So I would say I have had periods of activity in my life and periods of total couch potato-ness. But I never looked on thse activities as "exercising." I did them because I loved them. Too many people look on exercising as something they "have" to do and think of exercising as going to the gym or going running. Exercise is moving your body and there are tons of ways to do it that are fun. Maybe taking a ballroom dancing class or going bowling isn't the best aerobic exercise in the world, but it's more exercise than staying at home and watching tv. So I think we all have to change our attitudes about it. Otherwise, you see people dutifully going to the gym, hating every minute of it, until they get to goal and then they stop. At which point the weight starts coming bakc on. I admit, there are times in my life when that was me. But now I go to the gym because I love the stuff I do there and I have goals that keep me going on days when I don't love it so much. I'm not going to stop when I get to a particular goal weight because my goal is to do an Ironman some day. I can't do that if I don't bike, swim and run at least 2x a week. It has nothing to do with weight for me at this point in time. Hope that answered the question. And sorry to be so serious in the PJTP thread.

Myth, myth, myth!! Calories are a unit of energy. You can't burn energy (i.e., workout) and then store the calories. If you burn the calories, they are gone. If you operate at a calorie deficit, you lose fat and/or muscle. This is physics and has to do with the laws of conservation. The problem is that scales measure your absolute weight which includes everything you ate that hasn't been disgested and all the Water you are retaining. Remember: your body is mostly water. So water fluctuations can mask what is going on with your fat and muscles. For example, if you weigh yourself in the morning and you are 200 and then you immediately have an enormous BM and you weigh yourself right afterwards, you will be under 200, maybe even as much as 1 lb. But you haven't actually lost any weight, of course. Your body fat percentage is the same and your muscles are the same. Also, when you work out, you tear down muscle and use up the glycogen stores in your muscles. Then, overnight, your body puts the glycogen back and also rebuilds your muscles. When you use up glycogen, you release water (4 lb. of water for every pound of glycogen) and when you build them back up, you put that water back into them. This is why you can skip a few days at the gym and still "lose" weight. You haven't really lost weight. But your body released some water because you aren't tearing down your muscles and building them back up. It's also why you can drink a lot one night and "lose" weight the next day ... alcohol is a diuretic and you can lose water weight when you drink it. This is also why you can go out to eat, but not eat off your plan, and still "gain" weight the next day -- restaurant food has a lot of sodium and that makes you retain water. The other thing is, it takes about a day, sometimes two, for the effects of your exercise and eating to make their way through the body. That is why sometimes the day you do intensive exercise, you may not be that much hungrier than usual, but the next day you can be starving even if you don't exercise the next day. Your body rebalances your energy stores overnight while you sleep and so sometimes it takes through the next day to see what the impact was of what you did the day before. So as to how a contestant on this show can gain a pound, there are number of ways: 1) Eating... sneak eating, eating bigger portions, putting more "stuff" on your food (more condiments, more sauce) 2) Working out a lot and being in a state during the weigh in where your muscles are packing on the water as they restore glycogen 3) Drinking or eating too close to a weigh in 4) Being constipated 5) Slacking off on exercise (maybe working the machines at a lower intensity than in the past) 6) Not drinking enough water (water helps flush out the remains of your fat burning) 7) For women, TOM and retaining water. Some women also retain water when they ovulate.

I ran 3-ish miles today.

We did our track workout today and I fell and scraped my knee! Got in 3 miles before it was time to cool down.

But if everyone who can't make 100k a year moved away from an area, who would serve us our coffee at Starbucks?

But that's exactly why you have to post. So the newbies to exercise know that not everyone starts out doing 3 hours a day and running 10 miles at a time. So you found your happy weight! :smile: I'm trying to now eat like I will eat for the rest of my life. Which means slower weight loss. But when I stop, it will be where I will stay because nothing will change after that. See... this is why tap has to post. And Gloucester too. :w00t: The scale isn't that accurate. It measures all sorts of stuff you don't care about. It's really body fat % that you should look at. What happens if you are steady in your calories in and out is that you lose steady. But the scale masks it by also recording water weight and other stuff like that. So let's say you are eating and working out so that you should be losing 2 lb. a week. But one week you have something salty and the scale says no loss because you've lost 2 lb. of fat but gained two pounds of water. The next week, you lose another 2 lb. but you see 4 lb. on your scale because you've lost the water weight too. Does that make sense?

I had my first real "mourning" experience today. We went out to eat with my boss' new boss and I found out I don't like Indian food any more! It used to be my favorite!

I'm taking the day off. But I'll be back tomorrow!

Not necessarily. It's unfair because 10% hurts "me" more. Let's do some math. Say I make 40,000 and live in an area where basic necessities for my family are 30,000 a year on average. That means I have 10,000 in disposable income. If there were a flat tax of 10% on income, then I'd pay 5,000 in taxes. Which would give me 5,000 in disposable income. For my family of four. For a year. Now we have someone who makes 200,000 and lives in the same area. So their disposable income is 170,000. Their tax is 20,000. So they have 150,000 left over. See how the flat tax doesn't make a dent in their disposable income but renders my family not able to not be able to do anything besides scrape by? And how it that good for the country to have a bunch of people who can't even afford to save for a rainy day. One emergency will wipe out my entire disposable income for possibly years to come. Or how about someone who makes 30,000. Their tax is 3,000 so now they have less money than it takes to live on. That's not sustainable. Can bankruptcy and welfare be far behind? What possible purpose does it serve society to set up a system like that? At least with sales tax, what people pay is proportionate to what they have to spend. If you want to have a flat tax, you have to do it on disposable income to be remotely fair IMO. That way the family of four living on $40,000 is only being taxed on $10,000 and has a chance to get ahead. But I still think the graduated system is better and I say that as someone who has spent most of the past 10 years in a high tax bracket, those two years of no income not withstanding.

We didn't explicitly talk about it but he's mentioned it before at support group meetings and he's mentioned it to others when talking about their goal weight. The thing is, there are physiological reasons that bypass patients have bypass. Their malabsorption goes away and their pouch and stoma stretch which lessens their hunger control. The rest of the surgeries don't have that sort of thing. So I don't think bounce back is inevitable. It happens, but I'd rather be one of those people whose weight loss is like a plane coming in for a landing. A steep descent then a leveling off and slowing down until it gently kisses the gate. I think going too low and then bouncing back would be a problem for me. So if 120 or 125 is what I'm destined to be then I'd rather just get there and stop. Plus, if I go down to 115 or lower, I think that might be unhealthy. Because I'd really be 105-110 plus 5-10 lb. of loose skin. Me too.

Exactly. You can't be refunded more than you put in.

Millions of others think milk is unhealthy? I think that's quite the exaggeration. Plus, of course we'd think of drinking dog's milk. If it was worth milking a dog. (It's generally not.) People drink goat's milk as well. People drink all sorts of milks from all sorts of animals. Personally, I don't get the need to demonize certain foods. Milk is a food like any other. It has it's good points and it's bad points. It may not be the best food to feed a human baby when they are little and getting nothing else, but that doesn't make it BAD for you.

A refund check is most definitely NOT a welfare check. It's your own money that you put in coming back to you.

I'm not even sure what they look like but they just SOUND cute. Mine either. He wants me below 120! He says that they consider anything below a 30 BMI to be a success, but prefer people to go under 25.

So yesterday I bike the bike route for my tri to test it out. Then today I did the actual triathlon. Here's my report: Fatty Fights Back: I iz triathlete

I have my own special brew that I make and am constantly tinkering with. It's safe in the sun, thank goodness. But I was quite surprised today when I came back to my transition area and all my Protein bars had melted. I was going to eat them afterwards. But they were shite.

Also don't drink alcohol the night before. I want to run a half mary now. I'm wondering if I can do it by the Fall?

But it's not something I'd want to be keeping in my transition area. It would spoil in the sun!

You should ask the doctor about his experience (how many bands, how many other surgeries) and complication rates and what he considered to be a "success" and what % of his patients are a success.

You might want to check out the Plastic Surgery section. There is a thread on laser lip there.