I’ve had Lise The Loser linked in my blogroll for a couple weeks now. She did a good post the other day though, that I wanted to link quickly because I really approve of first person information. You gotta talk to your doctor, but I think that hearing from the people who have been through the process already makes a huge difference in your decision making.
I was writing to my friend Christina complaining (go figure…me…complain…unheard of!) I was afraid that I’m becoming a boring bandster now that I’m in this post-surgery/pre-fill/no restriction phase. So, the brilliant recently banded Christina wrote:
“First of all, you are not a boring bandster, you can always give updates on your pain. I know that is always a popular topic, people always to know what to expect. You can give an update so the people behind you can get an idea of how you are doing these days… are you totally pain free? do you not feel like your innards are coming out anymore? Are you pooping normally, eating normally, getting all the protein, do you have hiccups (I do) yadda yadda yadda. How it felt the first time you sneezed. (hurts!) that’s all stuff that at least I would want to know. we all know you hate exercise so i wont look for that :-)”
Isn’t she a smart cookie? I think so! So here are the answers (I feel like I’m being interviewed…how fun!):
Then she goes on to answer the questions. The first question is about pain, so I know that a lot of people are interested in that:
Are you totally pain free? Yes! I’m totally 100% pain free. I would say I became pain free at the 2.5 week mark. I can now sleep on any side I like, twist, turn, bend, and all of the other wonderfullness that comes with being pain free. I remember feeling like I would always have some pain during the 2nd week…when it hurt to even sit for long periods of time - but this is over. I forget I even have the band in me. Port pain is a thing of the past.
Good news there. I thought the questions on food were interesting, and Lise’s answers certainly echo what Lorraine Kay had to say in her videotaped interviews.
Eating normally? Totally normal. Everything except for bread, pasta, rice, crackers, etc. Basically nothing with wheat or too many carbs. But I eat steak, carrots, all fish, chicken, mushrooms, tuna fish, squash, etc. Have not had a problem yet…no vomiting…sometimes I wonder if the band is really in me or if it’s all a mental test and I’m “rat number 2128″.
Getting all the protein? Most definitely. I eat tuna everyday for lunch and have either steak, chicken or salmon for dinner each night. I am Mrs. Protein. I also drink a SlimFast-a-ccino shake every night before bed because it makes me feel like I’m having ice-cream. Yummm. It’s packed with protein, as well.
Lise is a prolific blogger and I’m sure you’ll see a lot of the questions you have answered in the course of her journal.
In some ways this is my favorite clip in the entire series. The interview was over and we were packing stuff up to leave, when I finally remembered to ask Lorraine about her career change. She talks about becoming a script supervisor and how she never would have done that when she was heavy. And she also talks about her life as a professional musician and performer and how that has changed with her weight loss.
Here is the link to Lorraine Kay’s MySpace page where you can hear some of her music:
http://www.myspace.com/lorrainekay
I just stumbled on Gwen’s WLS Journey blog this morning. She’s an RN who is studying nurse anesthesiology. She’s been banded for a year and she’s very thoughtful about the process and her relationship with food. Her entries aren’t short so if you’re looking for pithy little blurbs, she’s not your writer. Her slide show with different images of herself at different stages of weight loss is really nice.
She has a new physician who is advising her to increase her protein intake. I haven’t read anything quite like this before:
So anyway, I see Dr Pennings, at last. He didn’t seem super impressed with my weight loss at 1 year, but he saw I was within 20 lbs of goal. He liked how much I am exercising. They did a Tanita body composition thingie and determined that I had 120 lbs of lean mass, and he used that number with his personal number of 1.5 gm protein per kg lean body mass to determine that I need 90 gm of protein per day now. Um, what? How am I going to do that, without protein shakes? I think 75 gm might be more doable. My “people” at the Portland office told me 45-52gm, which I have been going by for the past year. Pennings believes that my weight loss will pick up again if I get 90 gm protein in per day. I believe he might be full of crap. But anyway, I’m trying to increase it some.
One useful tidbit he did give me was the calories-per-protein-gram rule. He told me to check labels on foods, and “gravitate” towards foods that have a ratio of 15 calories or less per 1 gm of protein. This seems reasonable and simple to do
Anyway, check it out, if you’re interested. I’ve added her to the Lap Bandee blogroll so you can always find her.
Los Angeles Lap Band patient Lorraine Kay shows us a couple items of clothing from her pre-weight loss days. I like her whole thing about skinny clothes versus fat clothes - she’s right. Skinny clothes are so much more fun. She says it’s been 25 years since she wore anything smaller than a size 16.
While grabbing the embed code for Lorraine’s clip, this popped up as a similar clip. It’s a video clip of a doctor performing a fill on a patient. You can see the whole process is very quick and easy.
Los Angeles Lap Band patient Lorraine Kay talks about a few different things in this clip. She talks about exercising, her husband’s reaction to her weight loss, and most importantly for most people thinking about getting a Lap Band, she talks about the process of having a fill. Doest it hurt? How long does it take? What do you do?
I’m always looking around for new and interesting blogs to add to the blogroll - the idea of this whole site being to provide as much info as possible for people thinking about gastric banding as possible. MJ, from A NEW START, talks about the changes in her life. Small post. Thoughtful post.
I can’t do this by myself. Putting weight on by myself is easy. I can just eat and eat and eat - I don’t need any help with that. Without all of the supportive comments that I get here, and on my piczo page, and on the yahoo message boards I don’t think I could do this. Thank you all. The support I’m getting in real life is priceless too - my boyfriend, most of my family, my friends and my colleagues make it so much easier.
Every study done finds that people who attend support groups do better than people who don’t. You can’t just get this surgery done, and then get it right without help. I know from people I’ve spoken with that having a good support system in place, even if you’re doctor doesn’t provide a group for you, will make a big, big difference in your level of success.
There’s a whole new world of flavours, textures and tastes out there. I think I’m eating better than I ever have in my adult life. I’m enjoying eating and loving all the different things going on.
It’s true - wolfing food down really isn’t the best way to sample it. Even skinny people have to learn this lesson.
I think my life is richer now. I’m more confident and happier, so I’m doing more. I’m trying different things and I’m less scared of what people think. Oddly enough, I’m not the centre of everyone’s world. Who knew?
Who knew, indeed? Funny how we all think we’re the reason for all the whispering and todo-ing in the world. And it turns out that everyone has got their own drama and they are, largely, ignoring ours.
It’s a good blog. She’s an accountant and I’m always interested in how they think.
I like this clip - it’s purely practical. Lorraine talks about what food she can eat and how much she can eat. She also talks about when she eats too much and gets “in trouble”.
In this video, Lorraine Kay talks about the first month after surgery. Lorraine had congestive heart failure and wrestled with a tremendous amount of edema - which largely disappeared the first month. Her legs had been so swollen that she couldn’t bend them to walk up stairs. Now, she could walk and felt like a different person. She didn’t need pain pills but she was kinda hungry.
Lorraine Kay was an ultra-high risk patient. Just over 5 feet tall, she weighed 325 pounds. Her physician had warned her that she didn’t have another year left. Her diabetes was completely out of control (120 units of insulin a day), she was losing her vision and had congestive heart failure. Her physician wanted to perform a gastric bypass. Her surgeon refused to because he didn’t think she’d survive the surgery - although he did think she could get through a Lap Band. Her physician rejected the Lap Band because he didn’t think she’d lose weight fast enough to extend her life. Eventually, her surgeon won out. There was a four hour delay to make sure the crash cart was available, but she came though it just fine. I’ll let Lorraine tell her story from here on out.
This is the first of the videos that I’ve shot and I will be upping the resolution. I’m having a bit of a YouTube learning curve.
BiBi is a YouTube blogger who had a Lap Band procedure a number of weeks ago. She’s got five videos up on YouTube documenting her progress. She went in for her first fill this week and talks about that process. She says she’s going well, but we haven’t seen photos yet. Anyway, here’s BiBi!
I just received this press release from New Jersey’s Bariatric Center’s Dr. Ajay Goyal on bariatric surgery and pregnancy. He says that pregnancy is safe for a Lap Band patient six months after surgery, though there may not have been enough weight loss in that time frame to prevent obesity related complications. Lastly, he says nutritional supplements are a necessity since you will be eating such small amounts of food.
New Jersey Bariatric Center’s Ten Guidelines to Follow for a Safe Pregnancy Post-Surgery:
1. Avoid pregnancy for one year after weight loss surgery
2. Take multivitamins (Vitamin A, B1, B12, Iron, Folic Acid)
3. Make regular appointments with your bariatric surgeon and obstetrician
4. Obtain regular blood test to check for vitamin deficiency
5. Eat multiple small meals a day (at least four meals per day) and spend 30 minutes to eat each meal
6. Eat high-protein, low-carbohydrates and a low fat diet
7. Take 30 grams of proteins in supplements
8. Drink plenty of water (40 – 60 ounces per day)
9. Continue regular low impact exercise for both body and mind
10. For lap band or realize band patients, one can remove the restriction by an adjustment if patients develop pregnancy related nausea.
The National Institute of Health maintains a website that links to thousands of open medical studies that are looking for participants. I thought I’d post the link and maybe someone will find a study that helps pay for part of their surgery, or provides the surgery entirely. Wouldn’t that be nice? I’d search “Lap Bands”, gastric banding, laparoscopic gastric banding and bariatric surgery.
Quick link here - this is a promotional video from the Detroit Medical Center interviewing Dr. Mohamed Gazayerli. The woman who is in the first part of the video looks so dramatically different, it’s hard to imagine. She looks like a little bird afterwards! Very fine boned. Dr. Gazayerli has had a lap band procedure himself. Always nice to hear.
I hope you enjoy it. I love the before and after images.
Since it’s a holiday in much of the western world, I thought I’d link to this fantastic Word Press Blog post on why we eat what we eat and as much as we eat. This is one more in my series of why excess weight is so insidiously difficult to get off.
This morning one of my coworkers (Rich) laughed at me when I told him I was covering up the stack of cookies he brought in because seeing them made me want to eat them. I defended my actions by informing him that there have been studies documenting the phenomenon of food visibility increasing consumption, but I still didn’t get the impression he believed me. So I of course decided to do some digging and prove to him that my snickerdoodle concealing behavior was not absurd.
So, this is what I learned in this post - that food that is convenient to us gets eaten - pretty much even if we don’t like it. I’ve done that - I’ve eaten an entire meal I didn’t like. I’ve snacked on snacks I didn’t enjoy. I don’t do a lot of it, but I have done it.
Mallory goes on to quote a CDC study on the subject:
People served larger portions simply eat more food, regardless of their body weight and regardless of the food item, meal setting, or timing of other meals; and the temptation to eat food at hand is so strong that human beings eat more even if the food tastes bad.
The amount of food consumed increases as the effort to eat it decreases, even if the differences in effort are tiny (the example they gave of this was a bowl of candy within reach, rather than a few feet away)
The mere sight of food can stimulate people to eat (Take that Rich!)
The longer the meal, the more people eat. The amount of food people eat is directly and strongly related to the number of people sharing the meal, with food consumption increasing by 28% when one other person is present and increasing steadily to 71% when the number of companions is six or more.
And this is what I find most germane to the essential topic of regaining weight after it’s been lost:
In general, human self-control over automatic behaviors is limited. Self-control tires like a muscle and taxes our ability to perform other tasks. And just as refusing food depletes a person’s mental reserves, tasks requiring mental effort can reduce the ability to resist the temptation of food. (this explains why I eat like crazy when I’m stressed out)
Because people are unaware of automatic behaviors, they are also unaware that the behaviors are not under control; people tend to fabricate reasons to explain their behaviors, typically choosing the most plausible, culturally acceptable theories.
Yes, I’ve experienced being too stressed to resist food that I didn’t want to eat. Eating didn’t require any mental gymnastics at all while refusing it seemed like the most ingracious ordeal imaginable.
Happy Easter to everyone. I’m editing my interviews with Lorraine finally today. I’m doing this post in the middle of a render. I’ll have them up later this evening for your viewing pleasure.
