Hey all.

So there's a bunch of us in this group, all split up into our different banding days. I was thinking that it might be a good idea to have one master thread as we move through the month, in which all of us could post as we go, from the pioneers going on March 1st to the finalists on March 31st.

I'd love to talk about our anticipation and any worries as we approach our banding date, for people to talk about exactly what happened from the moment they walked into the hospital door until the second they walked out, about how recovery is going, about weight loss and plateaus, about non-scale victories and challenges.

I was thinking that if we all contribute to one thread, it'll form a more substantial channel for information and support. At the moment, I was thinking that we might be too spread out into individual date, and that a central thread would be a really good backbone for the group, in addition to the date-specific threads.

What do you think?

Fenton

Too bad I can't add a little vodka. :thumbup:

Let me know if you ever figure it out!!!:biggrin2:

Hello all:) I'm home.. and amazed at how little pain I feel at the moment!I was at the hospital at 6am. I went into srgery around 9am, ( I was bumped this morning when I got there lol..my luck again!.. Told u Sarah ! lol..) They loaded me up on some happy meds while waiting, which made me doze off quite a bit. Before I knew it Dr. Trieu came in, and they were readyto rock and roll! I remember about 2 minutes of the OR room.. Then they were waking me up! The worst was the recovery room while coming out of everything, but even that wasn't too bad.... All in all I had a wonderful experience, am super happy to FINALLY BE A BANDSTER!!!!!!!! Yay! Sorry for typos, I do have some pain meds in me:)... Their is a bit of pain from some gas, but NOTHING like I expected:) *knocking on wood* ..

Here's hoping that I am feeling alright tommorow.. I am definately nervous!

~Kerri

i did call the dr today they said to try to stick to 10 oz or less for a meal and told me i drank it way to fast. well it goes down easy so i figured 20 oz in 30 mins should be good. I think in need an isulated cup to keep my food hot. I really hate cold food and if it takes me an hour to eat 10 oz everything will be cold.

Hi guys:)

I'm a bit new to this master thread.. Just wanted to hop on the wagon:) I leave tomorrow at 4:45a.m. to be at the hospital for 6.. They are aiming for a 7:30a.m. surgery.. I am hoping to be out by noon-ish:) Just wanted to say hello to everyone, and wish all of other 19th bandsters good luck, and best wishes for a speedy recovery!! :)Kerri

Hi and welcome to the thread. I hope everything is going ok and can't wait ti hear from you soon

i did call the dr today they said to try to stick to 10 oz or less for a meal and told me i drank it way to fast. well it goes down easy so i figured 20 oz in 30 mins should be good. I think in need an isulated cup to keep my food hot. I really hate cold food and if it takes me an hour to eat 10 oz everything will be cold.

Scrappy friend - I bought two small candle warmers that are about 5-7" in diameter and was told to put my ceramic coffee mug or ceramic bowl on the candle warmer plate and it will keep food warm since it takes time to eat. Actually I bought 2 of these at Bed Bath &Beyond for about $6 each and I plan to take one to my job to keep my lunch hot.

Hello all:) I'm home.. and amazed at how little pain I feel at the moment!I was at the hospital at 6am. I went into srgery around 9am, ( I was bumped this morning when I got there lol..my luck again!.. Told u Sarah ! lol..) They loaded me up on some happy meds while waiting, which made me doze off quite a bit. Before I knew it Dr. Trieu came in, and they were readyto rock and roll! I remember about 2 minutes of the OR room.. Then they were waking me up! The worst was the recovery room while coming out of everything, but even that wasn't too bad.... All in all I had a wonderful experience, am super happy to FINALLY BE A BANDSTER!!!!!!!! Yay! Sorry for typos, I do have some pain meds in me:)... Their is a bit of pain from some gas, but NOTHING like I expected:) *knocking on wood* ..

Here's hoping that I am feeling alright tommorow.. I am definately nervous!

~Kerri

YAY! Glad to hear that it went well!!!

So very exciting that we're all in this together.....it really, really helps!

Hello all:) I'm home.. and amazed at how little pain I feel at the moment!I was at the hospital at 6am. I went into srgery around 9am, ( I was bumped this morning when I got there lol..my luck again!.. Told u Sarah ! lol..) They loaded me up on some happy meds while waiting, which made me doze off quite a bit. Before I knew it Dr. Trieu came in, and they were readyto rock and roll! I remember about 2 minutes of the OR room.. Then they were waking me up! The worst was the recovery room while coming out of everything, but even that wasn't too bad.... All in all I had a wonderful experience, am super happy to FINALLY BE A BANDSTER!!!!!!!! Yay! Sorry for typos, I do have some pain meds in me:)... Their is a bit of pain from some gas, but NOTHING like I expected:) *knocking on wood* ..

Here's hoping that I am feeling alright tommorow.. I am definately nervous!

~Kerri

Glad your home and feeling OK. Glad to know it was a good experience.

THANKS EVERYONE FOR YHTMUCHNEEDED SUPPORT!:thumbup: I am ffeling good tonight! No gas pians that I had earlier under my ribs?! Does everyone have the left shoulder issue? I'm wondering if itwill happen and hit me full force tonight or tomorrow? The only pain I'm having now is my lower right abdomen... It feels like it's gurgling down there?? Once I sit on my couch I have to move once and a while, and it hutrs there and pulls a bit.. I am sooo hoping I didn't mess up my port?! I assume they stitch it in pretty well.. Any one with advise or a similar experience? Iam sonervous that the gurgling or whatever it is isa very bad thing??? Thanksin advance!! You guys rock:)

~Kerri Marie

k-pod, superfast bandster, don't worry! That gurgling you hear is your stomach working, and gas moving from one area to the next. I found that sometimes when I was walking I'd have this fantastic feeling of froth moving inside me, like a rush of champagne bubbles, followed by a wave of relief.

I don't know if you're so looped out on pain meds that you can't walk, but walking is really great for you. I think it gets everything moving inside, and it keeps up the blood flow through your legs, which is really important, and it helps ease the gas pains, plus it's what our bodies want to do - the more active you are, the more you accept that you can be active.

I think the thing is that - partly because of our size, partly because of all the hoop jumping we have to do - getting the band installed seems like Major Surgery. And of course, from our perspective it is!

But really, to surgeons, a lap banding is a nothingburger - most of us (Rhonda, I'm thinking of you!) are all fixed up in less than an hour; a neurosurgical procedure, by contrast can run twelve hours! We come out with tiny little incisions which we (Fenton, I'm thinking of you!) obsess over, whereas the woman across the way from me in recovery had a patchwork of stapled incisions, as well as drains filled with blood dangling off her as if she were a peach tree.

What we get is a simple surgery, a short surgery, with very very little in the way of surgical complications - I believe it is genuinely extremely hard to damage the band or to damage the port by rolling over or getting up, yet it's something we all worry about. I think we can relax a bit.

From all of my reading, the important things in the post op period are:

1. Keep moving your legs so you don't develop a clot

2. Keep breathing deep so you don't develop pneumonia - use that spirometer!

3. Keep sipping Water so we don't become dehydrated

4. Get moving as soon as possible - it helps with the gas pain and the not-getting-leg-clots and the breathing and the sanity

5. Don't overdo our intake - we don't want to rush things, cause retching or vomiting, and jog our band into the wrong place during the healing process; and we want to learn how we can feel full with less food/liquid

6. Concentrate on keeping your Protein and Fluid intake up

7. Follow the guidelines our docs set for us. One thing I've realized is that different TYPES of band have different guidelines for when you can advance from one stage to the next, and, even within the same type of band, different doctors will have different guidelines reflecting their different experiences with the bands.

I think the surgery itself demands relatively little from us. It's not hard for us to get our bands to heal properly, all it takes is a little patience. And then, once the bands have healed, we can really concentrate on the weight loss part of this journey.

You're a great guy, Fenton!

I'm so glad to be part of your March Harem!

Such practical advice.....walking is the greatest source of relief for me!

I am (he thundered pompously) something of a "foodie". I love food, particularly good food, and I detest bad food. I'm loathing the Slimfast shakes - people say they're good to have around in case you run out of things to eat, but, crimminy! I don't want to drink them any more.

I'm actually looking forward to figuring out how to eat well under this particular set of limitations. One of my heroes, the musician Brian Eno, is of the opinion that great art is often the result of a response to specific limitations. So I'm looking forward to figuring out how I'm going to eat with my band.

I think the first order of the day is CONCENTRATION - at several levels. I'm going to concentrate first of all on the texture of a food - is it something that I can eat, or is it something that will get stuck? Then on the flavor, then on the calorie content, and then on the Protein content. I'm not afraid of high fat or high calorie food: I think there's a place for everything you love in your diet, just as long as it's part of a balanced plan.

So, gorgonzola dolce. I love cheese, and I'll continue to have cheese, just less of it. Gorgonzola dolce is a young gorgonzola, an Italian blue cheese. When the cheese is mature, it's white and blue and crumbly and fairly pungent - one of the cheeses that some people like to think of as "stinky" (although, in the world of smelly cheeses, gorgonzola is a ROSE, I tell you!). I love a piece of blue cheese - a Stilton or a Roquefort, for instance, with fresh pear and toasted walnuts; since I was on mashies, I picked up some pear sauce from Trader Joe's. I absolutely LOVE this stuff! It's a little too sweet, but it has a beautiful texture, liquid with just a bit of pulpiness, and a slightly caramelized flavor. And when I tasted it, I thought, this would go well with gorgonzola dolce (which has a fairly mild flavor, for a blue). And indeed, it's a lovely combination.

I think that, after a month of liquids, I appreciate the flavors more. And I'll discover more of these flavor combinations as I try foods I don't normally eat. And I'm hoping that's the pattern for the rest of this process - if I'm eating less, I want to enjoy it more. And I really do believe I shall.

So, I'm excited about this! I'm curious to learn how I'm going to eat when I go to restaurants, to try all the great things I've ignored in my rush to the steak or the lobster. More fish, for a start - and that won't be a hardship.

So yay! Here's to great food, and less of it!

You're a great guy, Fenton!

I'm so glad to be part of your March Harem!

Such practical advice.....walking is the greatest source of relief for me!

I agree with Harley, you make common sense points, but did you know you had a harem!!:thumbup:

The Learning Channel - or is it the Discovery Channel? - is broadcasting a series called I CAN MAKE YOU THIN! It is a 4 part series where the British answer to Tony Robbins - a motivational speaker/hypnotherapist named Paul McKenna - takes a studio audience through a kind of "retraining" of their eating habits over a 4 week period. He claims a 72% success rate (although he doesn't really define "success").

Now it all sounds like hogwash, but I watched the first episode, and I have to say he is EXACTLY right, and what he says is EXACTLY what we bandsters should be doing.

Unfortunately, the show is put together like an infommercial, with a lot of shots of audience members nodding firmly in agreement and going "Woohoo!", but I do think he's got it 100% right.

Here are McKenna's Four Golden Rules - his entire diet plan:

1. When you're hungry eat

2. Eat what you want

3. Eat consciously

4. When you're full, stop

The first thing he does is have people go into their refrigerators and pantries and throw out anything they don't look forward to eating. Diet frozen dinners? You don't like 'em, throw 'em out! And he has them keep what they like, from chocolate cake to hamburgers or whatever.

Then, when they get hungry, he insists that they eat. But they can't just grab their chocolate cake or their hamburger and sit down in front of the TV set: eating has to be conscious, with no disturbance.

He has them sit at a table, nothing in front of them but the food - any food, french fries, whatever. He has them take a bite, but then they must

1. Put down the knife and fork

2. Chew that mouthful for a minimum of 20 times

3. As they chew, focus on the flavor of that food, really concentrate on tasting it, on the texture of the food in their mouths, on its saltiness or sweetness

4. When they've swallowed and appreciated that mouthful, they may pick up knife and fork, and have another bite, and continue as above.

After a while, they pause, and he asks them if they're full.

If they're not sure, he has them take another bite, focusing fully on the food as they chew. When they've swallowed, he asks them again - fairly quickly, they begin to feel full.

And when they feel full, he has them stop eating.

And using this technique, he claims, he's gotten many people to lose huge amounts of weight. And you know what? I believe him.

He started the show with an observation: that overweight people may love food, may obsess about it, and dream about it, but when it actually comes to EATING it, they almost become unconscious, ploughing through their plates, mindlessly shoveling in the food, not truly savoring it.

I recognize myself in that. I have kind of dual eating modes - sometimes, particularly when I'm in a good restaurant, I concentrate on the pleasure of the dish. How it looks, what it smells like, what's inside it, how it tastes, if it relates to other dishes I've enjoyed, if I can figure out what inspired the chef to make this dish, if it's an ethnic food, what other foods or culture or history played into the existence of the dish. But when I'm eating mindlessly, I sit in front of the TV, open the Cherry Garcia, and then it disappears; sometimes, about 1/2 way through, I may pause and say, "I should probably save the rest. It wouldn't be so gluttonous, plus I'll have some tomorrow morning." But that's usually a temporary pause, and the Cherry Garcia carton is quickly finished. And it's the opposite of conscious eating - it's ABSENT eating.

So I'm going to give Paul McKenna a chance. I'm going to watch the next three episodes - in which, I suspect, he'll introduce techniques to break the established patterns of eating behavior - and I'm going to try to do it his way.

I'm trying to be more focused, but I know I can do it better. I know I HAVE to do it better. It's the best way to make small amounts of food hugely satisfying.

Edited March 20, 200818 yr by Fenton

Hi fellow Harem members, I have found out that I will be joining the land of the band around 11:30 tomorrow. I'm anxious, nervous and excited all at the same time.

I do so appreciate those that have gone before sharing and being so positive.

T

I've ALWAYS had a harem! That's how I roll!

Although it would be nice to have another guy in here. Y'know, someone who I can talk about, like, guy things with... guy things... like how great it is to have one's belly hair grow back...

NOTE: If any of you ladies feel the urge to talk about how great it is to have one's belly hair grow back, STIFLE THAT URGE!!!

Edited March 20, 200818 yr by Fenton