So I've lamented on this board before about how my MD office doesn't have a scale that goes high enough to weigh me. That could very well be A BLESSING for me, it turns out. I went to the MD today and told him that I went to the NUT, started the carb counting diet, and that I have a psych eval tomorrow. I asked him what would happen next and was a little sad when he told me that the insurance will want 3 months of supervised diet.

Well, I can wait if needed, but the doctor then said he would talk to the medical group and see if there's a way to skip that part... since his scale only goes as high as 350 and I'm in the 440ish range, there's no way I'm going to lose enough weight in 3 months to be able to get on his scale and show progress. He's hoping that since I've been his patient for 10+ years and my medical record shows other weight loss attempts in the last few years (Phentermine, etc.) that they MIGHT waive the diet part of it. Plus my recent hypertension dx could also scoot things along with getting the referral for surgery approved.

I'm not gonna hold my breath since I know insurance companies very rarely bend the rules. But I'm on an *** and my medical group is very small, he's only one of 5 MDs in the group, so I'm thinking I MIGHT have a shot... with the ***, BCBS will pay for the surgery as long as the medical group approves the referral, so there's a chance my MD could convince the medical group that the referral is warranted. Otherwise, we wait the 3 months... looking at December-January for a surgery date. And while I don't particularly want to be laid up from surgery at Christmastime, I'm not going to put it off. He did say that once you do the requirements, they are pretty quick with a response and you get approved for surgery right away - so even if I have to wait 3 months, it's still good news because once the diet part is done, we can get things rolling pretty quickly.

At least, that's what I'm hoping for!!

Good luck with it. I have 6 months of supervised diet and now 4 1/2 months in I'm getting very antsy. I know that in retrospect it won't seem that long but while you are going through it the time just drags.

As you wrote, worse comes to worse you wait the 3 months. It's going to happen even if it's tough to be patient.