green

Your tour sounds most interesting, by the way.

The flies sure would have grossed my husband and I out but we probably would have bought pastries out of respect for the lady and then discreetly tossed them at a later point. I can't blame you and your husband for running for cover, though. It is too bad that you missed out on dining al fresco in Mexico. This is something which we have done many, many times without any ill effects when travelling in foreign countries. I have been told by my brother the doc that the cleanliness of the local water is the issue which is the most problematic and thus the rule is never to drink or eat anything which hasn't been boiled or which has been peeled by someone else. This means no drinks with ice, no salads, and no peeled fruit unless you know that the place which prepares these items uses boiled/purified water. We have travelled to a lot of places where we have had to use bottled water in order to brush our teeth. When we were travelling in central USSR the only bottled water we could get was a very gassy mineral water. It was horrible salty stuff and went badly with the taste of toothpaste. It was while we were still in that general area that we ended up staying in a hotel where the latrines were immediately outside the restaurant. I call these toilets latrines because they were fly-infested and smelled like a collection of outhouses. In order to dine you had to walk through the stench and the wall of flies. Talk about culture shock!

Yep, I find it difficult to eat many mini-meals but they say that that is much better for you. I tend to be a maxi mono-meal grrl. I tend to like to eat one big evening meal which lasts for hours!!!! Nights are my bad time. And I cannot eat breakfast. Do read labels for the nutrition facts as well as for the calorie info! Do treat yourself well. If you are going to use a teaspoon of margerine - use butter instead. It tastes better and is no more fattening and it actually has trace amounts of vita A. Classico Florentine Spinach tomato sauce actually has tons more vita C than any other tomato sauce that I have found. Make your own salad dressing by combining extra virgin olive oil (which has the good kind of cholesterol) with vinegar (they say cidar vinegar is good for weight loss) and dijon mustard. I learned to do this in France years ago. You don't get any additives, eh. For those who like a less acid taste, add a little Balsamic vinegar. Buy apple juice, a great source of vita C, but make sure that there has been no sugar added. If there is no sugar added, you will get a full day's worth of vita C and less than half the calories than you will get from a glass of orange juice. My husband drinks OJ but he isn't chubby. Eggs, as I have already said, are loaded with nutrition. I also eat those little tins of tuna which come with the pop tops. They make for good snacks. When they are in season I eat avocados. They are kind of fattening but they are very good for you and I figure if I eat an avocado mixed up with salsa as an entire meal then I am not consuming too many calories. If I am in the mood for meat I eat a filet mignon. I buy them frozen and then defrost one when I am jonesing for beef. This allows me to eat beef the way I like it, ultra-rare, and also stops me from eating too much. Anyhow, these are some of my gimmicks for enjoying my food, avoiding cooking, and eating healthily. Sometimes I fall off the health wagon and I do love eating in restaurants. Since getting the band I do eat less and I do get to bring home doggie bags. This works out well for lazy Green. Hope this info helps.

Green has seen that tired old pic. It was making its rounds on the plant floor where Green used to work about 2 decades ago. Yipes! Not a nice thing for an old sperm brain to ambush a cute young grrl with!!! I would have had the same reaction as you. That is in the way of sexual assault in my books. By the way,...105 lbs! Holy Moly! I haven't weighed that since I was 8 years old.

Your question is an interesting one. At the beginning when I was post-op I sort of did feel like I was dieting but this didn't bother me because it was medically indicated and it felt like both a bit of a game and a novelty. The game for me was to find soups and yogurts (actually I substituted tzatziki and raita for the fruit flavoured yogurts) which would make that period an interesting and pleasurable one and ditto for the mushie phase. Because I really don't like sweet drinks I knew I wouldn't be able to do the protein shakes and so I decided I was just going to have to lose out on proteins for a couple of weeks. Except for being a bread, cheese, and pasta freak my eating habits were pretty healthy. I just ate gigantic amounts of food is all. The band was brilliant for killing my ability to eat a lot of food. While the band was still a novelty to me I spent a lot of time working out how to eat healthier given my laziness in the kitchen and my particular food preferences. By the time that this style of eating might have begun to feel like a diet it had instead become kind of natural to me. I now find that I no longer want to eat potato salad or do more than nibble a few french fries off my husband's plate. I do occasionally make myself some pasta but I usually use whole wheat pasta, stir fry a bunch of fresh vegies, and this will last me for a bunch of microwaveable meals. Thank gawd for the microwave, eh! I suspect that I have 2 things working in my favour, two factors which help me work with the band: I don't have to cook for a family (my husband who works shift work is used to fending for himself); and I don't have a sweet tooth. I do take a lot of vitamin supplements, however: calcium because I have osteopenia (a precursor to osteoporosis), vitamin D (which is something that all folks who live in northern sunless climates need), the Bs and a general vitamin for folks who are 50. I take these because I want to cover my a$$ health wise. I am aware that this has turned into a horribly long post but I am going to continue with it because I want to say that when I was first banded I started buying processed foods on the basis of their calories. After a couple of months of this it occured to me to examine the nutritional content of these foods and this was when I received a nasty shock. Vegetable soups and many pasta sauces contain little vitamin C or other nutrients. The same bad news is true of many other prepackaged foods. Through careful hunting I located one or two pasta sauces which are rich in vita C. I also discovered that eggs are low in calories and loaded in vita E, the Bs and contain varying degrees of the necessary minerals. I mention this in order to urge all bandsters to read the nutrition facts when you do your food shopping. You can all breathe a sigh of relief. Green is gonna shut up now.

And I am slowly beginning to feel better. I slept the whole night through last night and on my side. This was a very good thing. My voice is still hoarse but less so.

Well, my neither of my docs - the family one or the band doc put me on a liquid diet - and this is because I didn't see my band surgeon who is a tough guy to get ahold of and my family doc knows nothing much about the band. I did see a fill nurse and the idea which I had to get a complete defill came through LBT and through you. Thank you, eh. I have, however, been keeping up with my usual band-style eating habits which is to say that I eat small, healthy, light meals and make a point of avoiding carbs and fats most of the time. I also try to eat slowly and chew, chew, chew. I am now at goal and I sure don't want to lose what I have gained.... My big weakness is that I love spicy and even when I was in the soup stage I had a habit of putting a couple of drops of hot sauce in my soup. I must stay away from spicy until I am okay!!!! :help: My old weaknesses, the giant portions and the breads and pasta dishes, those I've got under control thanks to the miracle of the band. But yah, I am afraid that the hunger is going to come back. :nervous Have you experienced this since your big defill?

Flashover, waking up choking with acid is not healthy. A constantly inflamed esophagus can lead to esophageal cancer, something which you absolutely do not want. Moreover, you are losing a lot of sleep. Get a total defill. (My acid reflux meds and all the other measures I was taking were not working with a mini-defill.) Let everything calm down and then get filled up again. Yes, having to spend the money is painful but what you are currently going through is both painful and very unhealthy.

Thanks, Mike. This is nice to hear but I am afraid that I may be an idiot. I find myself feeling and sounding a bit better and so I do something dumb, something along the lines of loading my food up with hot sauce (a weakness of mine) and then I find myself croaking when I talk. I was sounding pretty good yesterday until my husband and I went out for lunch at a Vietnamese place. I leaned a little heavily on their chili sauce and I have been hoarse ever since. The sore throat seems to be subsiding which is a wonderful thing. I am still coughing a bunch, though, and this is a drag. Of course I can't tell whether I am coughing because of the reflux or because of the bronchitis. I suspect that it is both. I am hoping that I am back to normal soon. I want to go back to restriction land. Speaking of restriction city, how will you know when you will be good for a refill?

PS, I really enjoyed Croatia's reply.

Congratulations, Bitter, on yer 60th birthday. I just turned 58 on the 4th of July and spent the day the way I spend all birthdays and Christmases, feeling sour, hostile, and in need of chemical obliterants to help me get through 24 hours of disappointment. I, too, have a strangely balding pubis because my hair growth seems to have migrated upwards to my lower face. Electrolysis is not an option because this only works on dark fur and my whiskers are the colour and the texture of basteing thread. This means that I have got to hand remove the bastards. I guess that I am fortunate that I don't yet have a major problem with the nose hairs but I did buy a weed-whacker designed to attack the nasal woolies and I occasionally use this tool. I don't know whether this will cheer you up but men seem to suffer from nasal hair issues much earlier than we do. My husband who is still in his 40s sprouts one single long hair from his nose which both grosses me out and frightens me. This hair is awfully thick and looks just like a goddam antenna! The trouble is that he doesn't notice it until I point it out to him. I also worked for a very lovely man who was still in his 30s at the time. He looked like he had thatches of armpit hair growing out of his nostrils. I found it terribly distracting. His wife sure was not taking care of his business. I certainly find your dream about noses interesting; have you been reading Gogol recently? Bette Davis said that "ageing isn't for sissies," and she is right, of course. Given that you have plans to fall off your perch at the age of 72, you might do well to make an assessment of how you wish to live your next 12 years, something in the way of a cost-benefit analysis. You certainly do sound like an adorable individual: witty, intelligent, affectionate (as evidenced by your relationships with your students) yet not lumbered down by sentimentality, and a good cook to boot. And Green admits to being particularly fond of those who, like her, have opted for animals in lieu of children. She is inclined to think of them as kindred spirits. From having read quite a few of your communiques I get the impression that you do enjoy the company of your animals. You must correct me if I am wrong. Your mother seems to be an altogether separate question. I suspect that she truly is a burden on your limited resources and here I speak of your time and energy both physical and emotional. Crudely put, if I were you I would be inclined to warehouse her in a nursing home and get on with enjoying your life, your next 12 years. (I guess this is the point where I should mention that although we were fond of our parents neither of my 2 brothers nor I were especially guilt-ridden with respect to our relationship to them when they became old and infirm. This is possibly because they placed so much performance guilt on us when we were young that they wore us out. It is also true that we were aware that they had lead extraordinarily rich and interesting lives while they were still in good trim.)

Sadly for us, we don't have Target in Canada. My mum once came home from a visit to my brother who lives in Virginia and she had been to a Target. She absolutely loved the store and spent quite a bit of time raving about it. "You must visit your brother and see the Target store," she said. I have only been to 2 Canadian Walmart stores but both of them were clean and well-tended. We Canadians are an orderly and docile (boring) bunch and tend to put things back where we found them. We also tend to pick up after those individuals who are slobs and knock merchandise onto the floor and then leave it there. The thing that used to freak me out about Walmart when it first opened locally was those greeters. In my city we are not used to aggressively cheerful people accosting you unless these are Mormon missionaries. It seems, however, that Walmart has now tapped into local cultural norm. The new greeters hang around and ignore you unless you ask them a question or the alarm goes off when you are in the process of leaving the store. They are not so much greeters as enforcers. Everyone here much prefers the new approach.

My problems occur whenever I eat with my husband. He's a competitive eater, we both were, and I find myself instinctively trying to keep up with him. I have to remind myself to slow down and chew, chew, chew. It does help to use mini-sized dining utensils I have found and so I prefer desert forks and teaspoons. I should buy more of them.

Oooh, excellent post. :clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2::clap2: Thanx for the info.

Oh, they were pretty funny. They used to tell me absolutely filthy jokes (which, by the way, I adore) and this would always freak out the newbies. "Hey!" they would say, "there's a woman present." "Green?!? Naw, she's one of us." And one time this seriously creepy and very unattractive office techie type developed a crush on me. My co-workers were both incredulous and highly amused by this. Of course they were used to seeing me in work boots and safety glasses. But come to think about it, I have always worn perfume.... Ya think they woulda noticed, eh.

In a New York minute, girl!

Ah, now Green is good at being an ass but she has always had a lousy ass! No junk in her trunk! *sob* My butt has always been flat and kind of squarish, not high, round, and perky. Bummer....

Yep, we were awfully lucky. We spent some considerable amount of time that evening talking with the manager about Mexico and Canada. His English was pretty good and I had an English-Spanish dictionary which helped. Canadians don't usually get any exposure to Spanish in high school, you know. (Up here we tend to get fed French.) This took place in a village somewhere in the Copper Canyon.

You are right about wanting what you don't have. All my family are very curly and I am actually the least curly of the bunch. My mum wore her hair in something like an Afro for a number of years. What upset me was being a blondie. Both my parents and one of my brothers were brunettes and I happen to find brunettes most attractive. Unfortunately for me I am a total genetic recessive - a strawberry blondie with blue eyes. And I inherited the fatty gene. :angry It's a bluddy good thing that I inherited charm, intelligence, a good sense of humour, as well as money. :heh: :heh: :heh:

There is no popcorn like movie popcorn. It really is zee best. I used to like it best with the slimey butter product on it. I also had fabulous popcorn in Mexico once. I think that it may have been popped over an open wood fire. It tasted smokey. This was served to us in a lodge in the interior of Mexico. We were the only guests there and we were treated like gold. It was an altogether fine time apart from the fact that they served us fish for our supper. Green loathes fish. Fish is something I can do without! As it happened we had a number of people hovering discreetly around us. When they spied that I wasn't eating my fish they were mortified and scurried off to cook different.

I have got a friend who is a 38 double A. You can't even find a 38 A bra anywhere in my city. They don't make 'em. I made it my mission to look. She has been my friend since we were in our 20s. I used to be very envious of her. She was a tall, willowy blonde with long slender arms and legs, and she could tan - unlike me. She also weighed between 15-20 lbs less than me. Then she hit menopause and turned into her mother just as I turned into mine. Now she is a cobby 200+ and has thick calves. (She is boobfree, though.) I turned into my mother; all my fat went onto my torso and so I retained the delicate calves of a racehorse. My post-menopausal mother used to say about herself that she looked just like a spider with an egg sac and so did I before I was banded. Great arms and legs and a body like a loveseat. blehhhh! :tired

I have no problem with a young person being banded as long as they are aware of the stringent rules which must be followed once you have been banded. I would be inclined to say that 13 might be a little too young and I will explain my reasons for this. According the Canadian Diabetic Society teenage insulin-dependent diabetics tend to go through a period where they bitterly resent their food restrictions and the general care which they must take with their health. They naturally want to live like the rest of their friends and they will eat carelessly and ignore or postpone other aspects of their daily regimen. This behaviour will always lead to sudden collapse into coma-like states and visits to the local ER. Moreover, screwing around with type I diabetes can lead to blindness or amputation. But, nevertheless, teenagers will go through a period of irresponsibility because they are tired of being different and of always having to be careful. Folks who have been banded also have to be careful. We can't drink soda because carbonated drinks are bad for the pouch. So is overeating and so, too, is making a habit of PBing. Gobbling down our food is bad and living on fat and carbs is wrong, too. Banding a young person who is morbidly obese, mature, focussed, and disciplined certainly seems like a good thing to me. Why require that young people suffer through years of yo-yo dieting, feelings of frustration and personal humiliation, as well as finding themselves socially marginalized? I can easily imagine that there are many 16 year olds who are ripe for this operation. In the case of this particular child her psychological profile is very different. She is much younger and she has already been raised to expect that surgery will take care of everything for her. She has, afterall, already gone through the lipo route with the blessing of her parents. Nor is she morbidly obese but only merely a chubbette at this point in time. And she is just entering her teen years; of course she is going to want to drink sodas and eat hamburgers and fries along with the rest of her friends. There is absolutely no way that this young teen is going to adhere to the protein first, vegies and fibre second rule when her pals are inhaling junk food. This means that the band is not going to work for her and she will find herself with an enlarged pouch. She may possibly suffer other, uglier complications through her inevitable inability to comply with Da Rules: slippage, erosion, acid reflux, hiatus hernia.

I am very, very pleased to hear that you have chosen to do this. This sure is a positive step to getting yourself in a good place. I have been seeing a psychologist for some years now and have found my visits with her to be a most useful tool for helping me wade through my own nest of issues. Because I am a major depressive and do have anger issues rooted in my own painful childhood I have seen a number of mental dentists throughout my adult years. Some of them are much better than others. If you find that you are not clicking with this one, do not blame yourself; find a different one. This is my only advice to you, sez Green.

When I was a naive young militant feminist I thought that porn had absolutely no place in a relationship between a man and a woman, that it was an insult to the woman. After working in a man's world (I used to build aircraft) for many, many years as well as doing a lot of reading on the differences (many of these rooted in our evolutionary past) in male and female psychology I have come to change my opinion on porn. While I am still personally kind of uncomfortable around it - I find close-ups of genitals that I am not actively involved with to be kind of icky - many men do like to look. Looking for them is rather like reading sexy novels is for many of us. Many of the guys I worked with looked at porn, ogled the office chicks, and sometimes went to strip clubs...and then they went home to their wives and children who were the only people who really counted in these men's lives. After working there for awhile I became treated as an honorary man, a situation which I found both flattering and unflattering at the same time. :phanvan It certainly lead to some weird experiences - offers to go to the strip joints with the rest of the guys was one, offers to look at their porn collections was another. :tired It was at times like these when I would gently remind them that I am a woman and not really interested, but thanks for thinking of me. Porn is porn and men do enjoy looking at sexy material, even if this is just a cute young girl in a bikini. It seems that this is the way that they are built. It is when porn or any other specific aspect of an individual's sexuality becomes an obsession that a couple's life becomes out of whack and suffering is the result.

Curly hair is complicated.