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I'd take 10 pounds in 3 or 4 weeks anytime! Look at your average weigh loss over a longer period of time. Does it average the 1 to 2 pounds a month we are told to expect? Start counting your calories, just for a week, to see where you stand ( you say you're not counting) and be sure to add up the amount of Protein. After protein and veggies, add carbs that are Fiber rich only. Look for a high fiber Meal Replacement type bar, that will get your system moving. I am having a constipation problem and have started searching for way to get more fiber in. I really think protein rich diets need fiber. I just started a thread about ways to get fiber in and I've had some great suggestions. It's under the pre-op and post op question section. And at 53 pounds lighter, your body now needs even less calories to continue to lose at the same rate as before. At eight months out and a 53 pound loss, that is approx 6 pounds per month. Seems good to me.

Hello, I was banded 4/13/07. To date I have lost 53 pounds. Yes, that is a lot of weight. This isn't a band bashing post. The only time I lose weight is just after a fill. I will lost 10 pounds in about 3 or 4 weeks after my fill then nothing for weeks . I mean weeks. I had a fill 5 or 6 weeks ago and have not lost a single pound. I am 2.5 in a 4cc band. I don't count calories and I don't eat everything broiled or steamed, but I do eat 3 meals a day from a saucer to control portions. This is WAY less than before the band. I have a friend that was banded the same week as me. We are the same age, about the same start weight, eat similar and exercise similar, but she has lost 30 more pounds than me. Lately I have been constipated and retaining Water. Am I in starvation mode and my body is holding on to everything it can get? Anyone experience this or am I just metabolicly doomed?

I have a 14cc band and I'm currently at 10.25ccs. I had my most recent fill on 6/3, and I was banded in 9/09. I lost 30 pounds in the 30 days after surgery, and another 14 pounds since then. Discouraged is putting it mildly. But during this last fill I asked for a complete empty and measure, and found that one fill was missed. I was only at 9cc's when I shoudl have been at 10. they put the 9 back, added 1.25 on top, and I'm sore sore SORE from it. feels like I was punched in the chest. The soreness seems to be from gas, which is finally subsiding. And i have restriction. BIG time. Either that or i'm just swollen from the unfill/fill. Time will tell. I feel your frustration on this - i don't know what i'm going to do if this most recent fill doesn't do it for me. I was told that as we loose weight, more Fluid has to be added to keep up. How is that going to work when i'm almost at max level now? I'm not very happy with this whole procedure at the moment, but i'm stuck with it. I wish I could give you advice or encouragement, but right now all i can do is sympathize, and hope we both start seeing a positive result soon. Good luck to you!

Hi Levi27, In case you haven't kept up with the other thread, I don't post very often because I cannot use my own computer and have to wait until I visit in RI. Good to hear from you and I see your great weight loss!! Congrats!! I finally was banded on March 6th at Beth Israel, Dr. Jones. I am doing very well. I have lost 19 lbs, but I hope to have a fill my next visit to get a little more restriction. I felt like it took forever to get it done. I was the last one in the group from the get together. I am glad I got to see one of your posts. I figured out how to do the ticker but I cannot for the life of me transfer it to posts:phanvan Nana

I feel like my appetite is getting bigger and my weight loss is slowing down. I gained 3 pounds I’m scared. After a 100 pound weight loss I’m nervous had this happened to anyone. Can anyone guide me?

I have little choice but to be strict with myself regarding white carbs. If I start eating them I finish whatever I'm eating. :huggie: The more you eat the more you want. The less you eat the less you want. Going below 10-20gms daily for a few days to get out of the cycle of binging on carbs is what I do because for me it's all or none.

:clap2:Thanks so much you guys...thats just what i needed to hear. Support is few and far between for me here and your feed back means a lot! LB i agree that carbs are not the enemey, but right now for me they are...and today i haven't had any processed carbs only a few berries - the rest Protein. I am feeling it now already, but fighting through it. WBB Going without for a few days is exactly what i started this morning. I am like you and the others too no doubt...its all or nothing...I had to get DH to hide the Cookies i baked for the kids yesterday! BLAH I wouldn't have stopped until they were gone! Denise technically there is no room! But I can make chocolate fit i am telling ya! The thing is to control them, and i have taken that step today. Gosh it feels good to just be able to chat about it! Dh thinks i am weird because i have these cravings...he has no idea what i am talking about and thinks its just an excuse...wish it was:( Anyway, the good news is that i have just about made the whole day through, a couple more hours to go.:huggie: I even got out on the kids trampoline today for 10 mins (and collapsed in fits of hysterics..LOL and I also ahve a touch of the flu developing i think..)which is more exercise than i have managed in a long time! Its a good workout for your legs too if you didn't already know!

MANDA: I can totally relate to you and I'm super excited for you that you have chosen to get the lap band. When I was 17, I weighed about the same as you, and as the years went by, i only got bigger. My intentions were to lose weight but somehow i just couldnt. Now I'm 19, and I just got the lap band 2 weeks ago. I'm super happy and I wish that I could have done this sooner! My parents didnt want me to go to Mexico, even though I'm sure they are great doctors and surgeons there...They chose to do it here in the U.S., around where I live and it cost me about 16,000. They payed out of pocket, which was hard, but it was do-able. I hope that you get everything situated, and on to the road of a new life! I'm excited for you! If you need to talk, I'm here. <3Nina

Beth, my insurance company required my psych evaluation, not my surgeon. It is not clear to me if your insurance company is the one who requires it. If they do, you then need to ask them what they are looking for. My insurance company wanted to know the following three criteria: 1) Am I an alcoholic? 2) Am I a drug abuser? 3) Do I have any psychological disorders? If the doctor is the only one that requires it, the only thing he/she wants to know is if you are aware of your decision and understand the ramifications and risks of the surgery. Although the fatality rate of the band is less than .01 to .02 percent, doctors still want to cover their backs. P.S. An added note: it is my understanding that there is a legal issue in most states of having a friend or acquaintance who is a shrink or psychologist doing your evaluation. One could say that he is writing the letter and knew you had issues and is doing you a favor.I know you want to save money, so the best place to find a psychologist that supports bariatric surgery is on the website for www.obesityhelp.com. THey have a list of bariatric friendly psychologists.

My surgeon never gave me a pre-op diet, just directions to lower the carbs, go high protein, and try to lose 10-15 pounds before surgery. He said the most important thing is to shrink the liver to allow better access to the stomach and reduce chances of complications. It's also a chance to practice what you'll have to do more stringently after surgery, so that you don't go into emotional shock in the first two phases after surgery (liquids and full liquids). So I just dieted like normal with salads, veggies, no soda, cut out sugary stuff, ate lots of chicken, tried out a few protein shakes. But I still made time to have some of my favorites, just in very small bites. Then of course, clears 24 hours before surgery for anesthesia reasons.

Hi all! I have finally decided to move forward with the surgery and will hopefully be "banded" before Thanksgiving. While I am only 23, I have struggled with weight issues since the age of 10. Looking back now, I wish I could have been happy with myself when I was active and a size 12... but you don't know what you've got til it's gone, right? I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) when I was 18 and was placed on a plethora of medication to help regulate insulin levels and the possibility of diabetes. Then college happened along with inactivity and sport injuries and I quickly ballooned from weighing 160 to 230 in just over a year. Also, most of my dad's side of the family is not just overweight, but morbidly obese - so I know that there is a family history as well. I've failed at all other attempts to lose the weight, including but not limited to: prescription diet pills, exercise, over the counter diet pills, Weight Watchers, nutritionists and sometimes a combination of some or all the above. I consider the moment the light bulb went off that I had a serious problem was when an acquintance started to tell a joke, but first turned to me and said "Now don't get offended." I gave him a confused look and then he proceeded to start out his joke with "So there was this really fat girl...". That's a tough thing to hear when you're only 21. Sorry this is becoming a novel, but I wanted to introduce myself to all the other "banders". I look forward to getting to know everyone through the next few months!

like at Scottrade or one of the other discount brokers, you can open an accunt for $500. I think I opened my account with a whopping thousand dollars...or two. You can make small quantity purchases. Each purchase costs either $7 or $12, the lower price if you just say "buy this," the higher price if you say "buy this at a price no higher than ___." So, the fewer shares you buy, the more it costs per share because of the commission. (ie--if you buy stock that costs $10/share plus commission, ten shares will cost you $10.70/share, a hundred shares will cost $10.07/share, because the commission costs are spread over more shares.) I didn't buy Inamed, because I thought it had done its thing, but I bought Johnson & Johnson, since their clinical trials are over and they should be about ready to market their product. I made about $11/shqare, but panicked at the vioxx/Celebrex thing and sold. Had I held on, I'd have made another $6/share. But like my best friend says, "If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs...if we had eggs." Happy trading. PS--some discount brokers give free trades to members who send new members their way, so if you have a friend who trades, go through that person. https://scottrade.com/

Not only have you lost weight, but you've lost about 10 years too! LOL! keep up the good work! You're a beauty!

How many of us have been "on a diet" for most of our lives? Too many, in my opinion. Not just because it's bad for our health or because diets don't work. It's bad for our mental health too. It leads to something I call "Dieter's Mentality." If you have Dieter's Mentality, you need to cut it out because it's going to sabotage your success. This is true whether or not you have had Weight Loss Surgery, are on your pre-op diet or are doing it the traditional way through diet and exercise. Diet Mentality is evil and it puts you in a bad place! What is Diet Mentality? It has four major components: 1) Putting food into Good and Bad buckets First of all, food is not Bad or Good -- it's just food. Some food is a better choice than others, but even then it's really just all food. If you are getting in enough of the essential nutrients and you account for your calories each day, you are doing good no matter if you have a bite of dessert once in a while or not. All food is bad food if you eat too much of it or only eat one kind. It's just as unhealthy to eat nothing but Protein as it is to eat nothing but birthday cake. A healthy diet is balanced and can even include a certain amount of junk food as long as it's a small amount and it doesn't trigger you into bad behavior. 2) Judging your worth by what you eat Making bad food choices does not make you a bad person. Your self-worth shouldn't be tied up in what you eat. Good people make bad choices all the time. Instead of beating yourself up when you make a bad choice, hating yourself, seeing yourself as a failure and otherwise engaging in destructive behavior, just figure out how to make a better choice next time. It's not easy to be dispassionate about your own behavior, but telling yourself that you made a bad choice and next time you'll make a better one is a good start and much healthier than telling yourself you are a bad person and you'll never lose the weight and you hate yourself. 3) Judging your worth by how much you weigh/how much you've lost this week The scale is just part of the picture. If you get too tied up in the scale, you get a distorted view of the world. Weeks where you lose are good weeks even if someone close to you died. Weeks where you don't lose are bad weeks even if you got a big promotion at work and did everything "right" in terms of diet and exercise. One of the dangers of measuring everything by your weight on the scale is that you can convince yourself that making bad choices is okay because sometimes you can make bad choices and still lose/maintain. You can also convince yourself that making good choices is pointless because some weeks you make all good choices and the scale doesn't move. But clearly making more bad choices than good will lead to weight gain in the long run. Anything thinking that leads you to conclude otherwise is destructive thinking. 4) Waiting until you are thin(ner) to start living Stop waiting until you get to goal to start living or loving yourself. Love yourself now. Live your life now. It's easy to fall into "when I lose 25 pounds, I will start..." type of thinking. It's a fine line between thinking about how you will reward yourself when you meet certain goals and putting your life on hold until you meet certain goals. Many of us have had the experience of thinking we were so fat back when we were in HS or college or a young adult and not being happy. But then we got even fatter and we look at those pictures from back then and we realize that we were actually pretty hot. In fact, we'd give anything to be "that fat" right now. Why not love yourself now while you're living your life instead of waiting until 10 years later to tell yourself how good you had it back then? What happens when we stop "dieting"? One of the best things I ever did for myself was to decide I was never going to diet again. It really allowed me to examine my relationship with food and to start listening to my body and figuring out why I eat what I eat. That would never have happened when I was caught up in "Dieter's Mentality". One of the things I found is that my approach to food was that of a child. I wanted people to make me or bring me food because I associate being fed with being loved. So I got myself to a point where all my meals were either quick things that require no cooking or can be zapped in a microwave or are made by my husband -- who does all the cooking -- or were purchased. In other words, other people had complete control over what kind of food I ate and how it was prepared! I never saw anything wrong with this until I decided to grow up about food. I realized that by approaching food this way, I was giving up tons of control over what I ate. Someone else buys the groceries so it's not my fault that there aren't healthy Snacks in the house. It's not my fault that I had that ice cream cone -- there was nothing else to eat and I was HUNGRY. Once I saw this pattern, I vowed to change it and start being an adult about food. I now plan out what I'm going to eat before I go to work. If I'm going to work late, I bring extra food so I'm not eating out of the vending machine. I don't eat lunch at the Cafeteria every day so my food choices aren't limited to what they want to make for me. I have healthy snacks in my drawers at work so if I do end up working late without having planned ahead, I'm eating a Protein Bar instead of a Snickers bar. This change in attitude and behavior has made a big difference. Which is not to say I haven't got much farther to go ... I still don't cook and I still eat way too much prepared food (because I don't cook). But I'm much better than I used to be and it's great to feel like a grown up! You may relate to what I said about having a child's approach to food or you may not. Not everyone gets fat the same way or has the same issues to work through. But one thing I can guarantee is that once you throw off the shackles of Dieter's Mentality, you will have the brain cycles available to see your relationship with food more clearly. You will be on the road to having a healthy relationship with food.

Aarial and others, What you are going through is normal. You just got banded so of course you can eat whatever you want after the swelling goes down. You will be able to eat whatever you want until probably your 2nd or third fill. I did the south beach diet until then. And it's also normal to gain weight at first because you were probably doing the liquids and then went to normal foods, so your body is going to gain a little. This is just temporary, I promise. Also, and I know I'm gonna get bashed here, but I don't give a crap, I still drink with my meals and it hasn't affected my weight loss at all. Somebody said that eventually you can't drink, but, if you don't get too tight, which you shouldn't then it shouldn't back you up. Granted, I use to drink 3 glasses of tea with my food and now I only drink half a glass, but it helps with the hot food and the dry throat. And I usually wait about 10 minutes after I'm finished to drink more. I've never PB'ed or felt nauceous either, but again, I don't allow my band to get too tight. The main band rule I follow is no bread and no pasta's. Good luck. And this will all be easier in a month or two.. youll figure out how the band suits you.

Actually, I do know of a surgeon who will operate on under 18. In fact, I believe there are only 3 hospitals in the U.S. that operate on children under 18 because lap band has not been FDA approved in that age group. I actually had mine done at Arkansas Childrens Hospital with Dr. Evan Kokoska. He is leaving, but there is a new surgeon stepping in at the end of the month. I went through the Fitness Clinic, and I am working there now. They are part of a study to do the surgery on 14-17 year olds, but unfortunately you do have to do the 6 month being monitored by a physician. However, this is the BEST place in the world to have your surgery. They are so accessible and every time I ever have a question I get a response in 10 minutes max, plus they are very supportive which you just need sometimes!! They did my surgery in August and I have lost about 65 pounds. Hope this helps!!

How much are you walking everyday? I had some pretty bad pain at the large incision site and just getting in and out of bed took some serious planning. At first I was just managing maybe 1/2 a mile a day. On day 7, I was really irritable and just went for a 3 mile walk. During the walk, I felt the muscles at the incision site relax and by day 10, the pain was gone.

Okay here we go. Some of you may have seen me looming around for the last past couple months. Hiya I’m back yet again to give you guys’ mai updates. Im 19 female from Chicago i weigh in at 365 now and not happy about it!!! I have been trying to get lap-band for the last past year. I have gone through mai 6 month dietary evaluation for Ingalls and then I did all the pre-opt tests such as the EKG CxR barium swallow blood work and all those super things. I even had a surgeon picked out through Rush Hospital in Chicago. Mai insurance even said I was good to go even though I had to fight them tooth and nail to have them say that lol. I was to go in on FEb 19 and get mai surgery date scheduled BUT get this… After all that the surgeon that I HAD (Dr. Meyers) the insurance called me on the 18th of Feb and told me that they’d pay for the surgeon himself but NOT the hospital or the surgery center so i needed to find someone else to go with or the surgery would be a no-go:crying:. GO FIGURE!! So now I’m getting re-pushed to a different surgeon (Dr. Rashand from University of Chicago) they scheduled me to meet with their nutritionist, psychologist, and the surgeon himself:scared2:. I tried to explain that I’ve been though the ringer and have already done the preemptive workup multiple times. I had to give them 4 days of mai food logs and then they were to discuss me on Wednesday which was yesterday. I got the call on Tuesday a whole day earlier that IM APPROVED!!!!!! WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I now have to go to an information session on March 11th with mai support person from mai family. After that I go back to University of Chicago and meet with the team and stay there all day doing blood work, physical, chest x ray, barium swallow, EKG, and anything else they can pull out of their bag of tricks!:thumbup: Once that’s all done (AGAIN! ]=) then I will be appointed a surgery date and start mai 2 week liquid pre-op diet. I am really hoping i am banded by the end of this month i really honestly am !! 2 years is soo long to have waited for a start to a new life now to have had it in mai reach and pulled back again is just heartbreaking and im a tender heart gahhh im just flustered :cursing:soryyy ppl. Has this ever happened to anyone else?!?!?!?:confused2: if anyone has myspace and wants to talk to me add me please im lookin for ppl around mai age or even close to mai area MySpace.com - nikole ♥ - 19 - Female - Chicago, Illinois - www.myspace.com/yourockmaisocks

I am currently one month and 1 day post op. I have been stuck at a weight loss of 19 pounds for almost 2 weeks. I hear this is normal. Can anyone tell me how long this will last? How much am I suppose to eat in a day? :noidea: Banded 6 Sep 06 Walter Reed Army Med Ctr-Dr. Carmody 251/232/150

Hi all, wondering if anyone else has a similar experience: some days I can eat no problem and other days the sight of food repulses me. Some days I hit 60 grams of protein other days I barely get to 40. Just wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar?

I have only been banded since 10/27/11 and yes have only lost 9 pounds so far. What you heard is incorrect there are many people on here that have lost 100 pounds in a year and probably more than that. It is a slower process they want us to lose 1-2 #s per week. t also depends on how much you have to lose depends on how fast you will lose it.

10 years last month!! It has been on my mind so much lately that I can't focus on much of anything else. I am now 54, and I must say that I do have more energy with the lost weight. Years of my doc telling me to lose weight really didn't sink in, one day he casually said "You know that one of the side effects of obesity is cancer?". That was all I needed to start seriously looking at WLS. It's been 3 years and I only wish I had done it earlier. Right now I am not following the rules and paying the price. Scale is going in the wrong direction, I am one who really doesn't have true restriction so I have to stay on top of things. I don't get hungry so my problem is usually due to liquid overflow (coffee creamer). I wasn't hungry befor surgery, I was a mindless eater and now a mindless drinker. I was listing surgeries the other day and was shocked by how many I've had. The breast reconstruction was 12 hours and I am so glad it was an option. No I'm not even, and the scars are unreal; I even managed to burn my fake nipple off with a heating pad. Oh well. I am reasonably healthy, very much happier and I dang sure look better

What sort of research did you do on him? I would highly suggest you do research before you use this DR. do your reasearch.He is cheap for a reason..!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I did and I chose not to use this Dr. Do your research... Go to wasabubblebutt thread on how to search for a mexican dr. it is vital to your health and extreamly important.......................................!!!!! Please!!! I had my surgery on 3/7/08 and I have lost 10 lbs and I am feeling great.. If you want more information pm me. Dr. Aceves MD Mexicali, Mexico

yay i was just added!!! sleeved 12/10!!! thanks!!