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I have been told 4-6 weeks, but just via email. I know what you mean, as I really want my surgery towards the beginning of the summer holidays because of childcare. I went for a consultation at Healthier Weight last week and they could do it the following week, so it's tempting. Although in the long run waiting another month and having the right surgeon and aftercare I reckon is the more sensible option.... Keep me posted on what you decide x katie

Thanks, everyone. Please do not get me wrong, I do love the band, and am happy to put up with some tightness. I was just surprised by difference from week to week.

Really, Folks It starts to get better after the first fill and it gets a little better with each consecutive fill. Hopefully, your band docs will be agressive - or you will get filled under flouro - which might help you get good restriction sooner. Right now, particularly if you have the big Vanguard band, it isn't doing a thing for you. It's the rare lucky soul who gets restriction right out of the box. The rest of us just have to slog through that 2-3 weeks of pre-op type starvation until we start getting fills. So long as you don't go completely insane and start eating EVERYTHING you can reach, you should be ok. You are still healing - so try to take it easy, and definitely DON'T eat till you're stuffed - but if you eat more than a cup or whatever fantasy serving size your doc gave you - don't panic. It will be ok. Let it ride until you start getting fills - and keep demanding fills until you get restriction. ***WATER is important. The only way I get close to enough is to drink in the car on my way to and from work. I try to drink a litre bottle each way and drink addl water throughout the day. Sip, Sip, Sip. The only downside to great restriction is that you really can't guzzle water anymore. You have to sip and pause, sip and pause. Good Luck!!!

On the other hand........don't know when your surgery was, but notice you just joined the board in May. If you are just a few weeks out, you may be limited in what you can eat. Don't try eating anything in public that you have not already tried in the privacy of your own home.....it can ruin your party if it's something you can't handle (chicken being one of the common culprits:scared2:). Eat at least 30 min or so before you go so you won't be hungry and tempted to eat things there that might cause a problem. Be sure you drink before you eat anything then quit during your meal.....and don't drink for 30-40 min. after eating...if you get your pouch full and then try to drink, it may come back up. Nibble around, think of something interesting to talk about and have a good time. Parties have got to become about more than food.........something many of us (like me!) are learning late in life!

5 miles per day is impressive. How many times per day do you walk and how far each time? I upped my time and speed this morning during my first walk. I walked for 30 minutes at 2.5 mph. I’m working my way up to 3 mph.

Well where do i start im a young mum ( or mom for everyone else) Never have time for myself and have always been big!!! I spend the first half of the year dieting and the second part putting it all back on!!! cant be good!! I figured i will soon be 30(next year) and well Im just not prepared to spend my 30s this big! I have a good 150lbs which is about 60kg to loose and I have every intention of doing it. I have made and cancelled 3 appointments because it is such a dastic step for me but its something that needs to be done and a I know in my heart that it will be the right thing to do! Im worried that I will fail! just like all the other diets ive ever been on but this is a lifestyle change and just a tool I need to get my head around it all! I have an appointment that im actually looking forward to on the 18th feb08 and if any bandsters out there have any suggestions on what to ask on your first visit that would be really great. Well wishing you all the very best of luck on your journeys well done for doing what is right for you! And to " banded and feeling great " well done mate all the best to you as well Cheers:cool2:

Hi Allie. Thanks for getting back to me, I appreciate it. I was banded June 16 last year. You have done a great job losing 137 pounds! I've lost 92 pounds. I have another question for you. Did your problems start shortly after a fill or not? That is my concern. I had a fill 10 days before my problems started but that is also the day my mom fell and broke her hip. I only have 3 cc's in me. Thanks again for any help. Pam

Yeah, the holidays are a killer. I've gained 4 pounds since Thanksgiving. UGH...... I have to say, the sodium seems to be a part of it. I haven't gotten up in the morning with swollen fingers in MANY months. Have several times since Thanksgiving. Alcohol seems to be my pit fall. Spiced rum, and extra wine will get you every time. I've been good about limiting the Christmas cookies. But stuff like potatoes and gravy???? Hard to resist. Slacked off on the exercise as well. I know where I'll be next week!!! LOL

Hi everyone! I was just banded last week and everything has been going well so far until day 4 when I am now experiencing problems drinking the protein shakes I was on pre-op. After even a few ounces I feel so full I could explode, get sharp pain in my chest over the upper incision point (heartburn?). I have not had this problem with other clear liquids thus far, even jello or popsicles. When I feel this pain I also feel it intensify if I breathe deeply. I am making them with milk, could it just be that I'm not ready for this yet or something else. I am now having to take mylanta for the heartburn pain which I have never had before in my life. I havent even been taking the percocets for the last two days because there is only mild pain otherwise, but this is stronger. Anyone out there have a similar problem so soon post op? Should I wait it out and continue the meds for a few more days?

You'll have to ask each Dr what their protocol is. Each Doc can be different. I had one Dr visit 1 month before surgery, 1 nutrition consult 3 months before surgery, 1 hospital prescreen 4 days before surgery, 1 Dr appt 35 days after surgery. But my Doc is fairly lenient about appts, fills, pre-op diet. tmf

@stephyanders -- Thanks! That's good to know. But do you know if that includes the "screening" appointments? When you come in and meet with a dietician/nutritionist (and get your diet for the next 2 weeks all settled and everything), psychologist, and surgeon (I know you meet with him before your surgery, but I think it's also important to meet with him earlier than that too) -- don't those appointments kind of get spread out over the course of a month before your surgery is even scheduled? Again, thanks so much for your help!

Oh DeLarla!! thats sad. I also went to a "specialist" for eating and she told me to join WW b/c her mom did it and I should be able to do it too. When I told her I was doing Atkins she bashed the living crap out of it. Then 3 weeks later she said, you know, maybe you should try a low carb diet "DUH" I said "well, its obvious that you are not listening to me and its obvious that you don't know what the heck an eating disorder is." I walked out and never went back. What a dumb little girl she was. I'll say it a 1,000 times. Having that degree on the wall doesn't make you smart. Anyway, the nutritionalist wasn't 90 lbs. Actually she had a little meat on her She was very nice and told me that I didn't look like I qualified for the surgery, I wasn't big enuf. I thanked her and then steped on the scale to prove her wrong. Her eyes got as big as golf balls LOLOL !!!! NEXT..........................

I had 30 days of "last meals" and enjoyed every minute of it. I ate everything that was not nailed down and the weird thing was, I did not gain a pound. The clear liquid diet was for a week prior to surgery and I wanted to make sure I had all I wanted before that time came. I failed to realize that I really didn't need all those last meals. Everthing i ate before surgery, i can have today, just not all at one time. I cna have a steak, bread, salad, and dessert, just not all in one meal. Today I have to pick and choose what I really want to eat and then feel free to have a taste of whatever I wish. The key is now it is just a taste. If I forget and overindulge, my band reminds me. Sometimes it really sucks but it is about the greater good. I ate everything for over 30 years and I feel okay giving up a few things to be healthy. It's not a bad trade off.

Oh gosh Brandy, tell me about it. They have been monitoring me and I have been having weigh-ins, so I have been good for about 1 1/2 months. Now that I know my surgery is next week...I've been a piggy wiggly for the last few days. Darn Easter candy...lol... They call it the Last Supper Syndrome and I was warned about it at the clinic last week. They told me "try to be good"....lol. I had my little treats, now it's back to business..You really want to lose as much as you can prior to surgery if you can. I know..it's hard!! :rolleyes

Thats how I was until I got a slight unfill .25cc now I eat breakfast, I dont hurt when I eat and I still get full quickly...of course this is coming from someone who hasnt lost a single freaking lb in about 3 weeks or more now...

I really haven't been restricted yet, but I can tell that week before, I am praying to be tight! Right now its like I lose really good up until a week before, then I can inhale anything then after I start, I have to work off the damage from the week before. My body is insane!, but I'm learning how to take control!

Congradulations on getting approved. I was born and raised in Cincinnati also. My wife and I are in the process of getting are paper work in for approval. We have Pre-op testing in a couple of weeks and then meet the doctor. Hope to be approved for the fall time. Chris Pre Band St. Louis

Hi all!!! I was banded on May 31st and I had my 1st fill on June 23rd. when I did teh gross drink, x-ray test my Dr. said I had good restriction after she put in 2 cc's (I have a total of 3 cc's) However I feel hungrier after this fill than before and I can still eat pretty much anything and teh scale has not moved since June 14th. I can eat a chicken breast on a bun and breadsticks or bread are not a problem for me. My next fill appointment is the end of July as the Dr. is on vacation. Should I try get in sooner, do I need another fill already? Thanks!!!

Well during my mushy week, I ate alot of mashed cauliflower, butternut squash and tomato Soup. I tollerated really well. I just hit the 'normal food' stage today and already I've had some salad, carrots w/low fat dip, zucchini and it all went down really well (chew chew chew)... I am almost 4 weeks post-op. Tonight I ate for dinner 1/4 of a ckn breast in a sauce, cooked carrots, and a few bites of a baked potato, and a few bites of my salad. All is good (so far lol). I'm gonna hit some fruit tomorrow

It's after lunch, so everybody is full. Then, in comes a luscious chocolate confection. The sight, the smell—even the sound of the word "cake!"—stimulate the reward-and-pleasure circuits of the brain, activating memory centers and salivary glands as well. Melinda Beck asks the age-old question: Do you eat to live, or live to eat? Scientists, it turns out, have learned much more about how appetite works in the brain - and the findings have major consequences. Those reactions quickly drown out the subtle signals from the stomach that are saying, in effect, "Still digesting down here. Don't send more!" Social cues add pressure and permission to indulge. Soon, everybody is having a slice—or two. Scholars have understood the different motives for eating as far back as Socrates, who counseled, "Thou shouldst eat to live, not live to eat." But nowadays, scientists are using sophisticated brain-imaging technology to understand how the lure of delicious food can overwhelm the body's built-in mechanism to regulate hunger and fullness, what's called "hedonic" versus "homeostatic" eating. One thing is clear: Obese people react much more hedonistically to sweet, fat-laden food in the pleasure and reward circuits of the brain than healthy-weight people do. Simply seeing pictures of tempting food can light up the pleasure-seeking areas of obese peoples' brains. Two Reactions to Cake Two conferences this week on obesity are each examining aspects of how appetite works in the brain and why some people ignore their built-in fullness signals. Scientists hope that breakthroughs will lead to ways to retrain people's thinking about food or weight-loss drugs that can target certain brain areas. In a study presented this week at the International Conference on Obesity in Stockholm, researchers from Columbia University in New York showed pictures of cake, pies, french fries and other high-calorie foods to 10 obese women and 10 non-obese women and monitored their brain reactions on fMRI scans. In the obese women, the images triggered a strong response in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a tiny spot in the midbrain where dopamine, the "desire chemical," is released. The images also activated the ventral pallidum, a part of the brain involved in planning to do something rewarding. "When obese people see high-calorie foods, a widespread network of brain areas involved in reward, attention, emotion, memory and motor planning is activated, and all the areas talk to each other, making it hard for them to resist," says Susan Carnell, a research psychologist at the New York Obesity Research Center at Saint-Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital and Columbia University and one of the investigators. Similar brain reactions occurred in the obese subjects even when researchers merely said the words "chocolate brownie"—but not when they saw or heard about lower calorie foods such as cabbage and zucchini. Reactions were far less pronounced in the non-obese subjects. More such studies are being presented in Pittsburgh this week at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior. In one, neuroscientists from Yale University's John B. Pierce Laboratory had 13 overweight and 13 normal-weight subjects smell and taste chocolate or strawberry milkshakes and observed their brains with fMRI scans. The overweight subjects had strong reactions to the food in the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain—whether they were hungry or not. The healthy-weight subjects showed an amygdala response only when they were hungry. "If you are of normal weight, your homeostatic mechanisms are functioning and controlling this region of the brain," says lead investigator Dana Small. "But in the overweight group, there is some sort of dysfunction in the homeostatic signal so that even though they weren't hungry, they were vulnerable to these external eating cues." Studies have found that a diet of sweet, high-fat foods can indeed blunt the body's built-in fullness signals. Most of them emanate from the digestive tract, which releases chemical messengers including cholecystokinin, glucagon-like peptide and peptide YY when the stomach and intestines are full. Those signals travel up to the brain stem and then the hypothalamus, telling the body to stop eating. Obesity also throws off the action of leptin, a hormone secreted by fat tissue that tells the hypothalamus how much energy the body has stored. Leptin should act as a brake against overeating, and it does in normal-weight people. But most obese people have an overabundance of leptin, and somehow their brains are ignoring the signal. All these findings beg the question, which came first? Does obesity disrupt the action of leptin, or does a malfunction in leptin signaling make people obese? Similarly, are some people obese because their brains overreact to tempting food, or do their brains react that way because something else is driving them to overeat? Researchers at Yale and elsewhere are turning to such questions next. "It's possible that these changes reflect how the brain has adapted to eating patterns in obese people, and that could create a vicious circle, putting them at risk for even more disordered eating," says Dr. Small. There are plenty of other metabolic mysteries, too: Why are some "foodies" who get intense pleasure from eating able to stop when they're full and others aren't? Is the tendency to eat way past fullness genetic or learned behavior, and how much can it be changed? The answers are still elusive, but neuroscientists and behavioral experts are finding some tantalizing clues. Some fMRI studies have found that while tempting food stimulates the release of dopamine in obese people, they actually have fewer dopamine receptors than normal weight subjects do, so they may derive less pleasure from actually eating, setting up a craving for more. Curiously, several studies have shown that some forms of gastric bypass surgery can actually create changes in the brains of formerly obese people —and not just because their stomachs are smaller and fill up more quickly. Levels of leptin and glucose tend to drop in bypass patients, ending diabetes for many of them. PET scans also show that bypass patients have more dopamine circulating in their brains, which may help control appetite as well. Bypass surgery seems to make food less tempting, too. In a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition last month, Swiss researchers had 123 severely obese, 110 non-obese and 136 bypass patients take a test that measures vulnerability to hedonistic eating, known as the "Power of Food scale." The bypass patients and the non-obese had scores far lower than those who were currently obese. (Exactly why is still unclear, but some experts think it could relate to "dumping syndrome," in which high fat and sweet food creates nausea and dizziness in bypass patients. They may have learned to associate such foods with discomfort rather than pleasure.) Some of the most intriguing imaging studies have peered into the brains of people who have lost significant weight and kept it off through diet and exercise alone—although researchers say they're hard to find.

I just had a fill this week....had 1.25 in my band but my surgeon only pulled out .50. He said he also pulled out some air so some saline may also be in the band. He then pushed in another 1cc on top of the .50cc. Kinda has me wondering with the original .75 went but, my doc also said some can evaporate. I know my tubing didn't get punctured the first time because he got the port first shot. I'm just taking this last fill easy and see if the restriction stays. If not I'll see if he'd check me with flouro just to make sure. Did your surgeon use flouro this time around?

They put 2.4cc in me the first time and took out only 1.8cc....I wonder if all that food pushes some out?!?! Just a thought.... God BLess, Melody Banded 3/20/06 -77lbs

Oh no, Carol! I haven't thought yet about how that might be, the first time my family cooks an awesome dinner and I'm on liquids... If all goes well this week, I will start my pre-op diet on Nov. 8th, and be banded on the 23rd. I'm excited but really nervous. Turkey broth for me for Thanksgiving! Did you get a surgery date yet?

I was nervous the week before, but very calm the morning of the surgery. You'll breeze right through it.

Thanks for the advice. I think I will wait for a few weeks and see if my progress stalls. I have been walking more, but have not made it back to the gym yet. The gym should provide a metabolism boost that has not yet been realized. Wanttobe110: My liquid diet portion was only for a week prior to the operation. After surgery it was only a couple of days. I lost about 4-5 lbs before the actual surgery and about 25 lbs in the 5.5 weeks since.