Bye bye 240s - Hello 230s... have not seen you in a while

Glad to see you again 230s.... have not seen you in a couple of years :-) And when I met you last time you left way too quickly ;-) Hopefully you won't stay too long neither but this time you'll be replaced with the 220s not with the 240s! Yeah!

Guys, you have NO IDEA how thankful I am for my great restriction. My surgeon put my right back to my sweet spot and I am back in the weight-losing-mode. 2 more pounds to go and I will reach the 60 pounds mark :-)))

It feels good to have a real restriction because it not only restricts me from eating too much but it also removes craving for certain foods. Food is the last thing on my mind, yesterday I realized at 3 pm that I did not eat anything all day... not good and will not happen again, I promise! At 3 pm I ate some high-fiber Kashi Cereal with low fat greek yoghurt (actually breakfast) and for Dinner I had filet of sole and some spinach. I am drinking a lot of water and also had a bottle of Isopure to make sure I get enough protein and of course took my vitamins. I take 1000mg of Vitamin C (normally take 500mg), a Multi Vitamin, B-100s and Omega Gummy Bears.

On a different note;
Today my seeds arrived and I cannot wait to get my vegetable garden started. I've decided I want to try out gardening and to harvest my own veggies (hopefully). I ordered organic seeds from an online store and will try my luck with tomatoes, eggplants, peppers (hot and sweet), zucchini, broccoli, melons, potatoes and all kinds of herbs and mint. Not so sure if I have a green thumb... but time will tell ;-) To be on the save side I also ordered a book about square foot gardening and a book that explains everything in detail. Cannot wait to get it started.  Will keep you updated on my little gardening project.

Thanks for your warm welcome-back messages. I am soooo glad to be back and really need my blog and you guys through this journey.

***Hugs****

Yeah, the scale is moving again :-) - Thanksgiving Challenge?

Finally the scale is moving again. I am beginning to like the liquid diet, not because of all the "delicious" choices I have but my scale really likes it. Today was my weekly weigh-in and the scale spoiled me with 267 lbs and this brings it to a total loss of 28 pounds!

Last night something weird happened,  I could feel that my body was eating itself from within. Does that make sense? Have you ever felt anything like that?

The second fill really helped, not sure about the restriction yet since I have not had any solid foods. At any rate, I am glad that the scale is finally moving again and that I do not have to look at the 269 any longer.

250s I am coming :-)

Thanksgiving Challenge... Maybe you did not get a chance to read my last entry and I want to ask again if you may be interested in setting a Thanksgiving goal?

This is what I wrote yesterday (Original Post)

My first mini goal is 255 pounds. According to my height (5'7) I would not be considered morbidly obese any longer and is a major milestone in my lap-band journey. Reaching 255 pounds would bring my total weight loss to exactly 40 pounds and I am "only" 13 12 pounds away from reaching it.

I was debating with myself all day and could not decide between Thanksgiving and Christmas... but in the end Thanksgiving won! Losing 13 12 pounds until Christmas would not be a real challenge. I am all for aggressive goals and even if I am short a pound or two I know that it will lift my spirit for the next 4 weeks and will make me give it my all. It will put a huge amount of pressure on me and I will have to work hard to reach it within 4 weeks...

Fellow Bandsters... who else is in on it to set a Thanksgiving goal and willing to work hard for it? I wish some of you would join me with a Thanksgiving weight loss goal... I really think we can shred a good amount of weight before the holidays and celebrate our loss with a delicious (but tiny) portion of a Thanksgiving Dinner without feeling guilty about it.

Let me know what you think!

@ Southern Belle: I do not know what to make of "Bandster Hell" because I was still losing 14 lbs  between surgery and my first fill. But it is up to you. You won't need to set an aggressive goal... let me know what you think! Hope you have fully recovered from surgery already.

@ Nicole: Great!!! Will check it out on your Blog!

Restriction - so confused! Help!

Until yesterday I felt that I had a perfect level of restriction but now I am confused.

• Portion size: I can eat 3/4-1 cup of food or less per meal (depending on the consistency of the food)
• I am satisfied for 5 hours after I ate, on Tuesday I went 7.5 hours without food (only had an oatmeal for breakfast) and was not hungry at all.
• I can drink thin liquids such as water, coffee, tea without any kind of restriction and I can drink them as fast as I like to
• I am not hungry nor do I have an appetite
• I have lost 5 pounds in one week since I got my first fill

So this sounds to me the way the band is suppose to work... but I am not sure any longer... because the info on Lapbandtalk is confusing at times.

I read on Lapbandtalk that some bandsters suggest that you should even feel a restriction when drinking water and to be able to bring it up even 20 minutes after you drank it. This sounds pretty disgusting and is not something I need to experience, do I? Others suggest that you should only be able to eat 1/4 to 1/2 of a cup of food and others even mention that you should only eat a couple of spoons per serving.

So what does restriction really mean? Does it mean that you limit your food intake to a couple of spoons per serving and to be satisfied with, lets say 4 spoons of oatmeal for 5-6 hours? Does it mean that even thin liquids sit in your pouch, or if you drink a lot in your throat and you have to feel that it goes down slowly? As written in my earlier post my "full" feeling changed. With the fill I have never felt that I stuffed myself... stuffed like after you ate a Thanksgiving Dinner for example... I have never reached that point... only when I got stuck. Am I suppose to feel that way? I put the amount of food on my plate that equals 2 decks of cards and I sometimes finish it and sometimes don't... again... depending on the consistency of the food. I stop when I am satisfied, the food just doesn't taste anymore and I get a signal that it has been enough so I stop and it satisfies me for many hours... it does not require any will-power!

My surgeon only told me that I should come in for my next fill as soon as I can eat more food than the size of 2 decks of cards. But what does "can eat" really mean...? Is there a point that you just cannot eat no more because you are too full? Do you experience this kind of "full"? I do not push myself to that limit and just stop when I had enough and do not feel any hunger... 

I am really confused and would like to hear from you how you feel restriction and what full means to you and especially if you feel restricted while drinking water or tea.

Life is beautiful!

I have no idea why I felt the way I felt yesterday... All is good, Life is beautiful.. As soon as I left the office and headed to the beach everything was fine. I had a good time with my friends and enjoyed the beach very much. I guess I needed a change of surroundings and to just enjoy myself without thinking about work, weight loss, my scale or any obligations.

My friends were a little pushy with the food, did not want to accept that I only ate a soup and declined cake and ice cream. So I said that I had some dental work done in the morning and that my teeth were extremely sensitive. I hate lying... I really do... but it is imperative that nobody knows about my surgery. For the long term I will have to come up with an excuse that will be believable and will satisfy the curious minds.

When I woke up this morning I spoiled my husband with a very nice breakfast in the backyard. I could only eat some greek style yoghurt with strawberries because my band is really tight in the morning and I am not a big eater in the morning anyway.

Have not had any real solid foods yet, but will make a solid food dinner and hope that it will satisfy my urge to chew something. Until then I will clean the house, turn on some I-love-my-life-music and if I am up to it I will rearrange my herb garden.

And from now on I will not get depressed over the scale, I will look at the positive things and those are: I have lost 17.5 lbs, that will never come back, I said my final good-byes to the 280s and know that it is just a matter of time to say good-bye to the 270s. My face is getting slimmer, my upper body is shrinking and so are my feet. I am also happy that I did not eat ice cream or cake and that it did not bother me at all that others were eating it.

In addition I removed the weight loss chart that hung above my scale until this morning and replaced it with the following:

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

~ Kahlil Gibran ~

Thank you very much for your support and your positive words and just being there :-x

My band is a male... definitely!

I was slapped by him... I have to admit, I provoked him, not in a bad way but like any woman I had to test my limits on how far I could go, stepped out of line only for a little bit and he let me know immediately that I better respect him or else... I did not expect such a harsh reaction just for eating my tuna salad a litte faster than instructed... After all I was not chewing on a Big Mac or was intentionally disrespecting him... but he did not care... He gave me a cold full-force reaction, definitely not the kind of reaction you would expect from a woman, only men can react so cold and heartless when provoked.

I do not know yet how it will make me feel knowing that I have a male living inside of me but I hope for the best... one thing I know for sure... it is going to be a challenging relationship.

With this guy crying or reasoning will not work, there is nothing I can do to make him give in, all my tricks will not work, I will never be able to wrap him around my finger... no matter how hard I try.

From an emotional point of view this is rather a sad and depressing outlook and not the kind of start you expect from a life-long love affair.

This is the reason why it is pretty easy, almost common sense, to call him Your Highness. I do not think that he will accept anything less but my highest respect and devotion to his will. I have no choice but to let him rule over me and to trust in his abilities.

I sure hope that he will be loyal to me, treats me good, looks out for my interests, puts smiles on my face, butterflies in my stomach and makes me feel really good... and most of all never provokes me so bad that I have no choice but to drown him in fatty-high-calorie-ice-cream-shakes!

My band yelled at me....

I worked out on the Elliptical Trainer for an hour today and I wanted to give up after 5 minutes because it was so hard and I did not have a lot of energy today, but I pushed myself and once I completed the first 20 minutes it became easier and I completed the hour. Anyway... after I stretched and hydrated myself I became so hungry and weak that I thought I would faint. I prepared another tuna salad (the one I posted a couple of days ago) in record time... sat down and started eating. I guess that I was so hungry and weak that I ate faster than I was suppose to. What happened then really shocked me. After the 5th spoon I felt that pressure in my chest and out of a sudden I was soooo full. Really full! Full like eating Appetizers, Dinner and Dessert. I had no PB and I did not panic but felt like somebody just slapped me in the face and yelled at me THAT IS ENOUGH - STOP EATING. I was so disgusted with food that I had to get up and walk around. It did not make me feel any better so I went outside and took deep breaths... it did not help neither and it took almost an hour for that feeling to go away.

After I felt better I had to giggle because I was not hungry nor weak any longer... unbelievable... really... I worked out like an animal and was almost fainting out of hunger and weakness and I ate 5 small spoons of tuna salad and it filled me up like I inhaled a 4-course Thanksgiving Dinner.

I did not feel any restrictions before, remember, I did not get filled yet and all the other foods I ate never caused me any problems... they went down perfectly fine and so did the tuna salad for the past 2 days. No idea why it gave me problems today, but I did not mind at all.

I guess I just fell deeply in love with my band ;-)

On the water front I did pretty good today, I drank 7x 24-oz bottles of water, 2 teas, 3 cups of coffee and also one bottle of isopure because I missed a lot of protein by not eating the tuna salad.

For Dinner I made a Mediterranean eggplant dip and put it in the smalles cast iron casserole I own, sprinkled it with cheese, broiled it for 10 minutes and it was really delicious. I ate only about a quarter of it (size of 2 small scrambled eggs) but I could have eaten more.

Testing out my limits and willpower :-)

Recipe for the Eggplant Dip:

This makes 4 portions of eggplant dip, each portion has 80 calories (I ate 1/2 of a portion)

2 lbs eggplants, 2 lbs tomatoes, bunch of parsley, bunch of cilantro, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 lemon, 2 tbs olive oil, 1 tbs paprika, 1 tbs cumin, salt, pepper.

Clean and rinse eggplants, cut into cubes, boil for 20 minutes on medium heat in water with salt added. Skin the tomatoes, remove the core and cut into small pieces, Rinse and dry the parsley and cilantro and cut small, peal the garlic. Drain the eggplant. Heat up the oil in a pan and saute the tomatoes. Add herbs, garlic (use a garlic press), lemon juice, paprika and cumin... then add the eggplant and let everything simmer for about 20 minutes. It will turn into a paste with very little soft chunks. Normally this is eaten cold, but I like it hot just as much and it was something I was very much in the mood for today. I sprinkled it with approx. 1/3 cup of low fat cheese and broiled it for 10 minutes.