Lap Band Blog

If you follow this blog, then you know that for the past couple of weeks I’ve really been trying to tweak my diet in order to make sure I’m eating a balanced diet after my lap band surgery.

I am not there yet, in fact I know I’m not getting anywhere near the variety I need, but with what I am eating right now is it good enough?
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Protecting your health is one of the most important ways to assure a good quality of life. If weight-related medical issues threaten your health, it may help to know that weight-loss surgery has been shown to be safe and highly effective for the treatment of obesity. For severely overweight people, who cannot lose weight through traditional means such as dieting, weight-loss surgery is a proven method of resolving or preventing chronic disease and enhancing one’s quality of life.

How to Get the Help You Need
Many health insurance plans will pay for some or all of the costs involved in weight-loss surgery. They do this because weight loss, no matter how it is achieved, has been shown to substantially reduce a person’s overall health care usage and expenses. When a person loses a significant amount of weight, the risk of developing chronic and expensive-to-treat illnesses declines, which saves the patient and health care provider money in the long-term.

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Technorati Tags: lap-band, diet, health, gastric-bypass, gastric-band, surgical-weight-loss, weight-loss, cary-darling

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When I first started really counting my calories this last summer, I was eating about 900 calories per day, I soon hit a plateau. I didn’t stop losing weight completely, but it slowed down dramatically. I could also see some loss in how my clothes fit, but I wasn’t seeing the scale move.

Maybe the scale isn’t that important. But I think when it comes to emotional support it is. So I began to wonder if I was eating enough calories per day.

Calories needed per day

The amount of calories you need per day varies with your weight, height, and activity level. However, one thing I quickly learned was that 900 calories was way too low.

Everything I read in books, or came across on the web stated that anything below 1,200 is counterproductive. Such a low daily caloric intake can cause your body to go into starvation mode, therefore slowing down your metabolism, and eventually your weight loss.

How to calculate calories needed per day

You will need the following information (be honest):

• Age
• Height
• Weight
• Activity level

Then visit MyPyramid.Gov to create your own pyramid plan by inputting the information above.

The image to the right is “My Pyramid Plan.”  As a 41 year old male weighing 246 pounds, 5′6″, with a moderate activity level, 2400 calories is needed per day for “modest weight loss over time.” This creates a deficit causing your weight loss.

I personally started working on this about two weeks ago, I made sure to increase my daily caloric intake from around 900 calories per day, to a minimum of 1,200 calories per day, and since I created my weight loss milestone blog entry on the 7th. I have lost 5 more pounds in just 9 days.

My conclusion:

Cutting calories is important to lose weight. However cutting too many calories can be detrimental and not only slow down weight loss, but cause health problems associated with nutrient deficiency.

I hope this blog entry helped you. If you too had weight loss surgery or are considering weight loss surgery, I would love to hear from you.

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As I stated in my last post, I decided it was time to get off my butt and attend one of the support groups provided by the clinic that did my surgery.

I really want to be successful in my weight loss using the lap band, and this is just one of the tools provided to help ensure that success.

I was somewhat surprised at the turnout. This clinic is a weight loss surgery factory, and by all accounts that group should be full of people each week, but then there is a reason we are all fat.

Sure we like to hide behind the defenses of, “I’m big boned,” or “its genetic.” When in reality, for the most part it’s because we make poor choices in life, and one of those poor choices is not informing ourselves, educating ourselves in how to beat this problem.

Now I say that being one of those, who in almost 5 months post surgery has never attended a group.

I’m assuming my first group was a bit different than normal. Instead of having open discussion, one of the lap band graduates who is four years out from her surgery and still maintaining her goal weight, is teaching us about nutrition. She has gone back to school to become a dietician and part of her graduating requirements is a community project, and she chose teaching the group.

The class is taught focusing on how we can apply some of this knowledge to our new way of eating, which due to the small amount we can consume at each meal makes it that much more difficult to eat a diet that includes variety.

I will continue to attend, what I learned last night is already helping me to make even better choices.

Just a quick link I wanted to share regarding the new food pyramid.

Really nice website, and very informative.  You can input the amount of calories you want to consume each day, and it will break it down into how many servings of each food group you need.

It also has a food intake, and exercise diary to help you calculate your daily caloric needs vs expenditures.

I will of course be posting again soon.

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Every second Wednesday of the month they have a support group for lap band patients still in their first year.

I’ll be honest when I tell you that this has been on of my failures in goal setting.  I vowed that I would attend these meetings, and over eaters anonymous if necessary to overcome my bad eating habits.  But yet I have not been to one meeting yet.

So in keeping in line with what I stated in my first post, about making everything public my successes and failures to help keep the pressure on, I will from now on attend at least two meetings a month out of the three that are available to me.

I will report back later on in the day on how things went, and what I have learned.

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