Hello all. My husband had his band placed 18 months ago, and to date he’s lost 180 pounds (down from 600 pounds). One of the many changes that have happened has been the different way he now relates to food. When you eat half a stick of butter in one sitting, well, you’ve got problems…. He also tells me that he used to go to the drive through and order 2 or 3 full combo meals and scarf them all down before coming home for dinner.

Mike has now become a huge fan of cooking shows, especially Alton Brown. It’s pretty funny when he insists on giving me cooking tips. (One of the reasons my first husband left me was because I “was too good of a cook.”)

I don’t know what my current relationship to food is. I suppose I need to sit a while and ponder that before I have my band placed. I’m not a binger, I’m not a stuffer, I do use food as a reward, although I’m trying to change that to rewarding myself with other non-food treats. I do love really good food, and I love to feed my friends and family really good food too… and unfortunately, it shows. I’ve seen a couple of different therapists as part of diet and “non-diet” programs, and they were baffled because I don’t have any eating disorders, which seems to be unusual for someone with my BMI.

I would like to know how other people have noticed that their relationship changed with and to food.

Thanks in advance.

Great question!!

I don't think I really understood my preband relationship with food until I was banded. I didn't really realize that I binged and gorged. I mean, I weighed 308 pounds so I knew I had a pretty crappy relationship, but I didn't really "get" where I was with food.

Now that I have been banded...I realize that with any stressful situation- be it happy/sad good/bad I want to eat. I can be in pretty big denial about how something in my life is affecting me...but now the band tells me. I have to deal with the issue because I can't just eat something and feel better - or at least numb.

The biggest change with my relationship with food is that I no longer eat Pasta and potatoes when I am stressed. My band doesn't allow it. But I have noticed that I am able to eat candy and Cookies with no problem- so sometimes I find that I am binging on those items. I am currently trying hard to not eat those things for a week to cleanse my system of all the sugar and I can't believe what a hold it has on me.

What the band has also taught me is that I have a very slow metabolism. I am a slow looser even though I have significantly cut my calories down and I choose healthier foods. Before the band I would have given up a long time ago because I "Wasn't losing weight" but I didn't really realize that each pound adds up.

Megan

My relationship with food is very screwed up. I have issues with "abundance." For example, if someone offers me a cookie or a taco or a piece of chocolate, I can easily walk away. But if there's a heaping platter of the Cookies or tacos or candy, my head swims, and I can't concentrate on anything but that food.

This comes from a childhood of never having food. We were not poor, but my mentally ill mother would not keep anything in the house that children would eat. There were brown, mushy rotten bananas, plain yogurt, lentils, and liver, and she never prepared anything. We used to eat mouthfuls of Creamora (powdered coffee cream) since it was the only palatable thing in the house. There was no sugar or Cereal, Snacks, soda. We learned to survive by stealing money from her. My older brother & sister would buy huge bags of junk food, and we'd hide and gorge ourselves. Or we'd steal cake batter from our neighbors. I never had meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, lasagna, pot roast. Not even Top Ramen. My sister and I turned out with the same food obsession. We can easily say "no" to a handful of chips, but put us alone in a room and the bag will be gone in 20 minutes. When I see meatloaf, my eyes Water and my mouth drools. When I see picky eaters I hate them, I mean I can't stand people who are finicky about food. People who scrunch their noses up because they don't like what I'm eating, or ask for things that aren't even on the menu, holding up the restaurant so they can have their picky little food exactly the way they want it. To me, a hunk of dried out meat and raw brocolli is survival. So thanks to Momster (my mother) I will never have a normal relationship with food. Sure, I've been to therapy, and I have a band, but I still eat too much because my head can't stop obsessing on all the food around me. And today is supposed to be the start of a new year, but someone brought platters of ham and party leftovers - a large abundance. So I'm trying to focus on work but I'm being harrassed by a dead pig.

When I order a meal, I can never order small. Now that I make my own money, I order way too much. Hubby always wants to know why I order so much, but I can't help myself. I see the menu and all those choices and my eyeballs spin in their sockets like I'm hypnotized. Waiting for the food to come causes anxiety, even till this day. When I see actors on TV pretending to eat, I can't concentrate on the show, but instead I wonder if they'll ever actually take a bite of the phoney food.

I could go on for hours, but I think you got the picture! Sorry for taking so much time.

Hi, Vines, how much are you wanting to lose? If you're a good cook, that's great! You'll just learn to readjust your thinking and try to avoid the fried foods, pasta, salt. I grill a lot of meats, steam vegetables. When you go out to eat, split a high price dinner w/your DH. (Shrimp brichotte and fajitas is one of my favorites.) You'll save $$ and get plenty of good food to eat. And a big Congratulations to your DH! Super weight loss! He has to be a tremendous example for you. And he'll be your Band Buddy!

Delarla, I could have written that entire post myself. When I was a young girl, (never little), I would take my lunch to school. I couldn't concentrate any of the morning for thinking about what was in my lunch. I could hardly wait to eat it.

When we go to a restaurant, I always ordered a salad because I couldn't stand watching someone else eat while I was sitting there and to give me something to do while waiting for the main course. And before ordering, I always ordered something that I knew came in abundance, I wanted to make sure I got my money's worth you know.

I want to loose about 5 sizes, my goal is to be a size 12-14 and damn what the scales say! I worked with a personal trainer for a while (before I went back to school) and she was a 12-14. I learned the very hard way that the scales lie. Wwhen I was 19 I was an athlete and didn't know it. I weighed 190 pounds, but was a size 12. I was doing judo and tae kwon do 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, but I was still being told I was morbidly obese when I had a BMI of probably around 25%

Mike and I now frequenly split a restaurant dinner, since it is a very rare case where I eat the entire dinner. If I do eat the entire meal, it is usually because I will have done something really dumb like skip Breakfast and lunch. Oh, and he really is my hero.

Boy oh boy, DeLarla, you sure gave me a "WOW" moment. I like to say I was raised by wolves, but Mike tells me that isn't fair to wolves. My mother would come home from work and imediately get stoned on pot and pills. Every couple of months she would so us a favor and cook us dinner, but it had to be a "big" occasion. I can't ever remember her going grociery shopping either. My dad would never buy groceries when I was a kid because we "were just going to eat all the food anyway." He would buy 30 pounds of cheese and a 25 pound box of baccon and call it groceries. We usually had milk, although when I was very small the kids only got to drink powdered non-fat milk mixed half strength while my mother would sit there and drink whole milk. We would have to eat chicken bones. If you pressure cook a chicken long enough the bones have a mushy consistancy. Oh yeah, DeLarla, I think I know exactly where you speak from.

I have to admit that I am a food horder. I do not feel safe unless my pantry and freezer are over stocked.

Pat, I like how you said, "young girl" cuz I was never a little girl either. And I'm right there with you having to order a salad while waiting to eat, and getting agitated if the waiter marched by me holding a salad only to bring it to someone else. I have urges to join strangers in restaurants because they pick at their food then just have the waiter take it away. I feel like yelling, "NOOOO, I WANT THAT!."

Food is my Lord. I can pretend that I'm healing, and I can fight the urges sometimes, but this is just how my brain was wired in the food department.

I have to admit that I am a food horder. I do not feel safe unless my pantry and freezer are over stocked.

I still do this!!! That is security to me, more than $$ in the bank. But now I try (most of the times) to have healthier stuff in them. I used to bake all the time. Now that stuff is just about down to none. When you look in my frig. now, you find a huge selection of drinks as opposed to the previous junky-junk.

"that isn't fair to wolves." Gosh, we just gotta laugh at this stuff now! I never even knew I was a food horder till I read this post about stocked pantries (that could be a fun typo.. stocked panties.)

Every couple months our mom would give in to her PMS and buy 1/2 gallon ice cream, and like starved wolves, nobody would take their eyes off the container in fear someone would get a bigger share (it never made it to the freezer.) She sliced right therough the carton with a sharp knife and slap a quarter - container and all - on our plate. We'd scamper to individual corners and devour then lick the carton clean, like wolves. Now I hate the grocery store. It's like sending a cocaine addict to a cocaine factory with huge piles of white powder everywhere: boxed, canned, packaged, fresh, frozen, wrapped in sparkly paper. So I always come home with a trunk load of stuff, most of which gets thrown away.

And your dad buying all that cheese, gosh, I love these stories cause they make me feel less of a freak. We also had powdered milk... we were the only ones I knew that had the crap, but I never drank so much as a sip. I don't know why Mommy Dearest wasted her money on it, because nobody really drank it. And I thought we were the only ones that had a pressure cooker! Till this day my sister can't eat chicken Soup, which is what the Momster called the plaster she made once a month. Put a whole chicken in the pressure cooker with barley and a whole onion and it came out thick paste. Momster would sucking the insides of bones dry, but I got lucky and always got the neck. I was the youngest, so chicken necks to me are like prime rib to normal people.

Getting back to how my food relationship has changed... well, it hasn't really, but I work at it. Right after getting banded I took a plate of food to the trash can and tossed it out. I felt like I just made my first poopy in the toilet. I like putting food in the garbage disposal for fun, too. I go to the park to feed the ducks once a week, and I love feeding horses, cows, mules, kids. Food, feed, eat, food, food. I wish it would get out of my head.

My childhood stories aren't quite as dramatic as some others, but similar in many ways. My mother was obsessed with trying to keep me from overeating, so there were never any seconds or dessert for me. She was also a terrible cook whose idea of a kid's meal was okra and liver. GAG!!! My father, when he moved out, served great meals but also with the powdered milk. (I forgive him, though, since he really was doing it out of an effort to have milk available when his kids visited. Otherwise there never would have been any. He didn't know it was horrific.)

I too like to have my cupboards stocked. It's a real sense of security. But my relationship has changed in that my vision of "enough" has truly changed; at least most of the time. I look at a plate of food and what used to be a first serving is now enough for three or four entire meals. I'm not kidding! Even when my band was loose and I had little restriction the amount I call a meal is no more than HALF of what it used to be. And that's what being banded has done for me.

With no restriction it's harder to physically accept that a small amount is enough; the "full" signal takes longer to get to my brain, I guess. But even without good restriction I've been eating smaller meals long enough that it's finally sinking in. I don't EVER eat a "whole" anything, anymore. And I know that if I want more it will be there for me later.

WITH good restriction it's amazing how little really is enough. I am continually surprised at how cool it is to be hearing that "full" signal so early, when pre-band it was something I almost never felt. I LOVE MY BAND.

"my vision of "enough" has truly changed"

This is what I wish to achieve. There never seems to be enough.

I've only been banded about six weeks (tomorrow), so my experiences are kind of new. I, too, am a hoarder. My childhood experiences don't sound quite as horrific as some, but we were very poor and food was rationed. The funny thing is now that I look back, that rationing is probably the only thing that kept me at a normal weight up through high school. dinner would be one hot dog, a small portion of mac & cheese and green Beans, with no seconds. Now I realize that was probably an adequate sized portion but boy at the time I felt deprived!

I seem to have lost all taste for sweets. Usually during my cycle, I crave chocolate, but this last time, I just craved beans. For my son's birthday, I tried a bite of his chocolate birthday cake and it was so sweet, I had to spit it out. The two boxes of ice cream I bought for his party are still in the freezer unopened (the kids were too full from pizza to eat them). So that's a huge change for me.

Also, when going out to eat, ordering appetizers was a must for me. I haven't gone out to eat too often yet but I didn't order any appetizers.

I've pretty much changed the way my whole family eats to avoid temptation myself. Anyway, one of my son's is overweight, another is getting pudgy, and my husband was a little overweight. And my third son is the skinniest little guy, so I worry about cutting out all his Cookies and things but I just can't bring myself to buy them. Instead, I buy cinnamon graham sticks for them or crackers. No more chips, cookies or sugar-laden sodas anymore. And no more white bread. Lots of bananas, apples, and for my oldest, sushi.

I also love to cook a lot and have always tried to make things from scratch. Lately I am torn. Part of me says "Well I can't eat very much so I want to make it the best tasting thing I can" and another part of me says "I can't eat very much, so why go to all the trouble?"

Since my surgery, my oldest son has lost six pounds and my husband has lost about eight pounds.

One of the biggest things I did was take the deep fryer out to the garage. I had this expensive professional deep fryer that made the best fried foods! I replaced it with a steamer that I bought my husband for Christmas.

Mentally I'm not there yet. I have always had some problems with binge eating, where I would open the refrigerator and take bites of everything (used to do it when babysitting during my food-rationed teen years). I found myself doing that one day while cooking. Fortunately I can't "binge" much because my stomach is too small! But I recognized what I was doing and I'm working to keep it under control.

Also, every time I sit down to eat, I feel a little sad that I can't eat "everything." I can't have a heaping plate of spaghetti or if I eat salad, garlic bread, and grilled chicken, having more of one means less of another. I don't make huge multi-course meals anymore because of that. I also struggle with the no drinking after eating rule. Sometimes I do drink after I eat but then I just force myself to wait until the next meal time to eat even if I feel hungry (usually I don't feel hungry anyway). I don't snack.

I also dream about food a lot lately. I dream about heaping piles of food. I am still in love with food.

Interesting. Growing up I figured there were two kinds of parents. My insane mother, and a bunch of June Cleavers and Carol Bradys. I never imagined anything inbetween, with mothers smoking pot and fathers buying 30 pounds of cheese.

Violet, wouldn't it be wonderful to have those small serving meals handed to you on a plate these days? That would be awesome! No more thinking, like living with Jenny Craig or one of Oprah's famous dieticians.

One thing good about doing your own cooking is that you can control the type of ingredients that go into a recipe. I haven't added salt to my cooking for years. You can choose low or fat-free, egg beaters, low sodium.....just to name a few.

I am SO glad I don't have to do the cooking in this house. I agree, if you can't eat much there's very little motivation for cooking. I'm perfectly happy with something tiny for dinner and then, that's it. Cooking for other people has never been something I like to do, so I'm immensely blessed that I don't have to.

It's absolutely true that this mental journey takes time. Even now, almost 18 months out, I still sometimes reflexively heap a plate full for myself. There were lots of times I found it frustrating and even saddening that my eat-till-I'm-busting days are done. But my band doesn't let me down and I simply can't eat more than a relatively small amount. And isn't that exactly, precisely what we want it to do? Can't lose weight until we EAT LESS than we were eating before.