green

Eddie, it strikes me that you have lost quite a lot of weight - 24 lbs in 2 months is nothing to be sneezed at, you know. It also seems to me that you will continue to lose weight. The fact that your mate is losing weight much more rapidly than you may be blinding you from seeing the positive aspects of your own weight loss. You have mentioned that your clothes are getting really baggy and people who know you are commenting on your weight loss. This means that you are losing inches as well as having lost those 24 lbs and all of this is really great. I have also heard that sometimes those inches start melting away just while the scale seems to be stuck. Our bodies really are very weird!!! Some people lose weight more quickly than others. This depends on body type. It seems that you and your mate have different body types and because you both have undergone the same surgery and have engaged on the same mission this difference is hurtful to you. I know that I would be having the same feelings right now if I wearing your shoes but do try to focus on how far you yourself have come. You might wish to remind yourself that a slower weight loss is generally considered to be less stressful on the body, the skin, the metabolism, and the internal organs, and thus more healthy. It is also said that folks who lose weight more slowly are less likely to regain. Try to remain your happy, charming, loving self and remember that Sean and the kids love you and you love them. By the way, we miss your voice in Rants and Raves, eh..... :kiss2:

Now that is way over the top! Nevertheless I have come around to tossing my spare change into those jars when I am buying food and drink in cafteria-style coffee shops. This is because I suspect that those kids make mini-money and I do find that they usually do give me cheerful and thoughtful service. You see I am one of those who likes an atypical iced coffee; I want it cold but I don't want it sweet and so this means discussion and a certain amount of emphasis on my part because they tend to assume that everyone loves a sweet drink. In fact most of those iced coffees are pre-made sweet and this means that they have to build me one from scratch. Then too, I usually eat my little cake and drink my coffee on site and that means one of them will have to collect the plate and clean the table after I have left. A friend of mine always leaves a tip in the tip jar at her local coffee shop and this has paid off big for her. As soon as the staff see her coming they get her coffee ready for her and hand it to her even though she isn't in line. She pays, tips, and leaves. This means she doesn't waste her coffee break by standing in a line-up waiting for her turn.

My experience of medicine is very different. A few years ago I had to see my family doc every 2 weeks for a period of some months. I would make an appointment, see her, and then would sometimes be sent to the on-site lab for blood tests. No money changed hands. I have been sent by her to various specialists for various tests for various reasons over the recent years and now I see a psychiatrist because I am a depressive. No money ever changes hands for any of these services. I have had bone scans, X-rays, colonoscopies, mamograms, and ultrasounds, and no money changes hands. I had a bunion removed 5 years ago and that was free to me. The document which permits me access to all of this is my Ontario Health Plan Card, a card which looks much like a credit card. Now it is true that if I were to turn up in the emergency intake at any hospital I might have to wait awhile depending on the nature and the severity of my problem. They practice the triage system in these joints and attend to the critical patients first. I was sent to Emergency twice by my company, once for having run my thumb into a bandsaw blade and once for giving myself second-degree burns on my right hand. :help: I had to wait a little; they prefer to deal with heart attacks and strokes first, eh. Luckily there were no gunshot victims in either time.

Wow! :omg: What a loving remark! Not!!

Our vet, a guy who was once given the best vet in Toronto award by Toronto Life magazine, told us that male cats and female dogs tend to make superior pets. Bitches are generally less aggressive and are more tender towards their host families. If we were to have a dog we would definitely want a female. Neutering costs less than spaying but that is a one-time only expense. And it is true that we have had generally better fun with our male cats than with the girls. At the present we are down to one prima donna household terrorist. She's not picky about her food, however.

I think Lee4 is wondering why these women have a raft of kids, each by a different and absent father. Talking to women who have children so carelessly makes him want to run away from them. He has kids but they are by the same woman. They are in his custody because she wasn't interested in them. At least this is how I understand the content of Lee4's post. You can correct me if I am wrong, Lee4.

Yah, I must admit that it drives me bluddy nuts, too. I am a member of a website where people regularly get banned by the editor of the site for using language in a, ahem, non-conformist fashion. Foul language is permitted but not lack of capitalisation or over-capitalisation, missing punctuation, etc. And the other members are allowed to savage the individual as well. That site makes Rant&Raves look like a most gentle and civilized zone, one suitable for sensitive children to play in.

Nope, but sometimes it is called "the runs." :heh: I guess this covers the more severe cases, eh. :help: LOL

Mrspruett, you bring up a very good point in your latest post. The attitude which the new arrival takes towards the host country will determine his or her success. To tell you the truth, this has become a unmentionable topic up here in Canada, a country which prides itself upon being both a country of immigrants and a country that is careful of the rights of all its inhabitants. Our attention to the rights of our minorities has been a fine thing indeed but it has also created an environment that is so politically correct that it sometimes shuts down discussion. The distressing truth is that certain ethnic/cultural/national groups do manage better than others when it comes to integrating and mastering the environment of the host society. It would be easy to say that problems arise when one is a member of a visible minority but the truth is that in my multicultural city our Chinese, Korean and South Asian communities seem to be able to acclimatize. Their children go on to university and are successful in developing careers. Other visible minority groups remain ghettoized and watch their sons drift into gangland activities and their daughters become babymothers. This question of which cultural/national or whatever groups are most likely to not only survive but do well does not only concern visible minorities. One of our invisible (white) minority groups is known, I have been told, amongst inner city teachers to have especially grave difficulties in mastering the rules of their new home. Of course when I refer to these rules I mean, rightly or wrongly, all that middle-class stuff: getting a good education, getting and keeping a job, not breaking the law, settling down and choosing to have children in a thoughtful and careful manner, remaining clean and sober and paying your bills on time, not beating up on your mate, your kids or the next door neighbour just because you are in a bad mood, not living on welfare and playing your stereo at 4 AM, not keeping your dog chained up and barking 24/7 in your backyard.... The disturbing truth is that some cultures do fare better than others. Up here in Canada we are uncomfortable about entering into these discussions for we are afraid that such discussions may open the door to bigotry, and this is a valid fear. At the same time this blocks us from examining why some folks do better than others.

Fee to pee! Love the expression, eh. Thanks for posting this. Yup, there is a fee to pee in many countries. :phanvan My husband and I went on a tour in Turkey a couple of years ago and sometimes you had to pay and occasionally you didn't. Of course when you did this meant small change and this often resulted in polling your friends for coins. One of our friends, a Kiwi with a great sense of humour, liked to hand out coins while saying "have a pee on me." Toilet rules when you are away from home in a foreign country are probably the most stressful part of travelling. This is because we are all so embarassed about talking about that stuff in the first place and then there is the additional problems of language and culture to contend with. I have been lucky enough to have had quite a bit of experience with foreign travel but the toilet biz always promises to be humiliating, possibly nauseating, and definitely weird. And then your guts never co-operate either; it is either constipation or da trots. :help: Waaah!

I had steri-strips on the surface and something dissolvable in the interior.

My lapband surgeon's office uses Tanitas but these are very hi-tech and look like they cost very big bucks. They are hooked up to computers and give printed read-outs of all sorts of data, including the BMI and BF. I hop on one of these machines whenever I go in for a fill.

As for the other question, once you are banded and you have good restriction you will simply be unable to eat as much as before and you will have to take smaller bites and chew, chew, chew. If you attempt to guzzle down large amounts of food you will suffer from pain and then you will cough the food up. Most of us refer to the pain as a golfball for it does feel like you have swallowed a golfball. And as for the puking up, it is kind of like a cat coughing up a furball, we call it a productive burp or PB. Unfortunately certain head hunger foods go down real easy and that is known as eating around the band. This is an unwise move because this does interfere with the weight loss and leaves the bandster feeling guilty and bummed out. :think We all do it from time to time though and is because we are human. :phanvan

I think that when you are truly hungry you will want to eat almost anything - you will want real food - but when you are suffering from head hunger then you are specifically hungry for a treat. This may be a sweet or a salty carb depending on your personal weakness.

Ouch! :eek::eek: LOL

Thanks for the info. I'm a cheese loving city grrl. :hungry: Cheese was what brought me to bandster land.

I will see what I can do in the way of before and after pix. I just bought a digital camera. Now I have to figure out how to use it and I am very, very blonde. I still haven't figured out how to load music onto my Ipod and I have had the bluddy thing for 2 years! :faint:

Mmmm, chevre. And goats are great for keeping the grass short, nature's lawnmowers, are they not?

Thanks, mrspruett. You sure are a sweetie and you certainly understand the spirit behind the R&R zone. The way I see it, it is kinda like Las Vegas - whatever happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. You should be warned that Green has big plans to come over to your place and raid your vegetable patch. As for you, Jasmine, I think that your voice is one that carries great value and that you simply must for all sorts of obvious reasons continue to keep on posting on this thread. Afterall, what we are all attempting to discuss and to try to understand is the migration of human beings and how this affects other humans. I should tell you that this is a subject that interests me on many levels and one of them is personal. You see, my father was a Polish Jew who opted to leave Poland in 1937 and he ended up illegally migrating throughout most of western Europe before finally washing up in England. His life history during this time was perilous and painful for him for he was an illegal and he was broke. In retrospect his life makes for a most astonishing story. It also saved his bacon. He did finally end up in England and eventually, after he proved himself, was granted British citizenship and finally ended up in British Intelligence. His story is a fascinating one but he was not unique. There was a quite a movement in Europe at that time of distressed and displaced people. Some were luckier than others but the shift in displaced populations went on for many decades, before, during, and after this war. I believe that people move only when they have to, their home hunting grounds are no longer viable and they are forced out, but at the same time, when a mass of people move into neighbouring territory they place sudden great stress on an environment which had previously been harmonious and well balanced. I know that I am describing this issue in simplistic terms but it continues to strike me that the government is at fault by opting to play a laissez-faire role in this situation. The American government can choose to legalize the status of these individuals and then these folks will be on the hook with respect to paying taxes and following local, state, and federal laws. Or the American government can insist on a crack-down on illegals. This would mean that all individuals or companies caught hiring or in any other way profiting from illegals (i.e. landlords) would be subject to heavy fines and slammer time. For sure this business of illegals is a dreadful problem for both the American taxpayer and for the dude who has arrived in America with all his hopes for a better life for himself and his family.

Oh, er, was that slimebo that I was thinking of??? Ooops, my blonde.

Slimbo - a place where I am gonna meet up with all my pet snails. Oooh. Cain't hardly wait. Reminds me of a line of a poem written by some Canuck or other: "muted azygous life Himself his viscid wife...." I was introduced to this when I was in high! skule and, as you can see, I have never forgotten it. The poem was a meditation on the life of a snail as I remember it. I guess we are all involved in acts of high jackery, eh?

Paris has been very generous with respect to spreading her legs and sharing herself with the on-line geek community.

Grrl, ya got good points there. I am a very curmudgeonly and cynical cow by temperament and I will admit this. I also come from one of those countries which are perhaps less star-struck. We are accustomed to conducting government funded independent inquiries or paying heed to the results of university research when it comes to assessing complex social, economic, environmental or political issues. The results of these inquiries are made available in the more responsible media outlets and then come under debate by specialists in the field, average citizens, and parliamentarians. Sound bite activism makes many folks who are not American nervous. We simply don't understand it and we feel that it is precipitous even when it does agree with our own politics. (Bear in mind that most of western Europe and Canada are on the same political page as the Hollywoodly lefties.) Why we are uncomfortable with the notion of entertainer activism is because we view that it stands in place of real thought. You see, entertainer activism is all too easy even when it does work in favour for those causes which you, BJean, and I like. The average person ends up buying these unexamined ideas or ideals in exactly the same way that he or she buys any other fad...it could be Uggs, it could be skinny jeans.... And let's get down to the nitty-gritty here. Although these individuals do have the same right to express their opinions as any other citizen they do make use of their fame to ensure that their opinions will resonate. At the same time, these cats have not always troubled to educate themselves in the complexities of the issue which they have now decided to own. This is forgiveable; they are not political scientists, economists, agriculturualists, cultural historians, international diplomats, sociologists, or any of the other array of specialists needed to understand the complexities of effecting change in an alien and badly damaged environment. These folks are not even hooked into the network of these specialists, I suspect. Bono makes me want to cough up furballs. He has taken on the entire continent of Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is arguably the single most wretched place on earth. Most Iraqis lived better lives while still under the rule of Saddam. Even now Afghanistan is less of a mess than much of Africa. We in the west have been treated to the horrors of the tribal slaughters in Ruanda. Darfur is an on-going horror show. Liberia and Sierra Leone have been in free fall for many decades now. So-called rebel groups kidnap small children from their families and turn them into killers. The people whom they can't use as soldiers they either kill or mutilate by cutting off both hands, thereby consigning them to a slow death. And then there are the corrupt power structures of these countries; this means that we can donate gobs of cash but this aid will never, ever help those individuals who need it. And, too, there is this point of logic when it comes to this issue of the helping biz: don't buy a fish, buy a fishing rod. I guess what I am trying to say is that there are many of us out there who are both unaccustomed and uneasy with this notion of celebrity authorized sound-bite thought. We think that it is careless at best and has the ability to turn toxic if the latest Hollywood style turns out to be less humanist.

Yah! BJean, you da man!

Thanks, BJean, for your always kind, thoughtful, and intelligent words. It could well be that that sudden rapid weight loss towards the end played havoc with my skin. My skin had always been one of my best points, that and my thick bushy hair. I am fairly distressed, to tell you the truth, to see my skin in this stringy, tissue-y condition. My skin has always been plush and had even retained a trace of dewiness. The irony is that I have always avoided the sun thanks to my red-head skin type and I have always eaten well (lots of fresh vegetables and high quality protein, no soda ever, and loads of water) only far, far too much of everything! Portion control and a passion for carbs, high quality carbs but carbs all the same, was what brought me down. This is why the band works so well for me. But you are probably right. The illness which caused my sudden rapid final weight loss was likely what ruined my skin for up until that point I was slowly and steadily losing weight and suffering no grief over my skin tone. It really is a good thing that I am going in for the plastic overhaul this September, I guess. Well, it goes to show that life is always interesting and quite the adventure.