NL-1 Take charge!

I'm tired of, well, being tired. So the weight has to go. Like many, I feel like I've tried every diet out there. Most recently (last year) I did WeightWatchers, lost weight then gained it back and then some. That's happened in the past, so what was I thinking? Why did I think I could try the same old thing and expect different results?

So now I'm going bolder. I'm going for bariatric surgery. Extreme weight loss. No pulling your punches, you have to totally commit to this option. You can't go off your diet for a day, a weekend, a vacation. Once you go there, you're in. There are Consequences if you fall off the wagon.

There are several kinds of bariatric surgery. Many are invasive and make major choices in your organs. Not for me. What I chose was closer to installing a medical device to assist you with your weight loss. People with hearing problems use a hearing aid. The nearsighted use glasses. I'll install a girdle around my stomach to remind me not to eat. OK, it's inside your body so it's a nuisance installing it, but no internal organs are rerouted in the process.

The process is called gastric banding (GB). The specific device is a Lap-Band (LB), a belt that is put around your upper stomach. This belt limits how much the stomach can hold at a time, giving you the 'full' signal pretty quickly. The band itself can be thought of as a bike tire with an inner tube in it. Once you get used to the band/tire, you can inflate or deflate the inner tube to make the upper stomach smaller or bigger. The way I figure it, my overeating over all these years has stretched out my stomach just like all my baggy clothes. This just shrinks it down again. In essence I'm getting another chance, by artificially reducing my stomach to that of a five-year-old.

As good as this sounds it's not a free ride. First you have the trauma of surgery. You are on a highly restricted diet for the first six weeks while the stitches holding the band in place heal. Next, when you eat, you have to eat to fill that stomach and NO MORE. There isn't room for extra. If you eat too much it will back up your esophagus and give you heart burn. Worse, you might vomit it all up, you pig. So when you get the 'stop' signal you STOP. That's what the restrictive diet is about - you have to gradually get used to the signals from your stomach. After six weeks you are back on solid, normal foods just not in adult quantities. You will never be able to overeat again - it will back up on you. On the plus side, there aren't any foods you must avoid, not like the other bariatric procedures. But if you paid this much and suffered through the restricted diet, are you going to go back to French fries? More than two, anyway?

While on the restricted diet you aren't getting enough nutrients so you have to use vitamins and protein drinks to compensate. Funny enough, the protein drinks are very similar to the Cambridge diet from the '80s. The chief difference is that, without the banding, you could drink Cambridge AND eat normal food before you got the full signal. So that was only so successful. Close, but no cigar.

My procedure is tomorrow, early.
I hear that you only feed discomfort afterwards, like cramping, and that the principal problem is the fatigue from the low-calorie diet while healing. We'll see.

I have no idea how much weight can be lost - I hear some quite frankly unbelievable tales of losses of 100 lbs or more. My personal goals are an A1C of 5, no CPAP, drop the meds for hypertension and cholesterol, and clothes from the Misses department. The numbers are secondary.

So, wish me luck!

More later.