I'm back :)

Hey, if anyone reads this, i'm back :)

I've been offline for some time now, that sucked... Moved house and moved office in new places I wasn't much familiar with but hopefully all settled now. My family is moving onwards and upwards :)

I have lost weight since ive last posted but not as much as I wanted to. I have also gained weight during christmas but lost it in the following week. That was inevitable I suppose and I expected it to happen.

I've eaten crap food during the time my mum and dad came to help with the new house and stayed for 3 weeks but my portions stayed small thanks to my restriction. I now have 6ml in a small 10ml band and decent restriction. I never PB'ed so far and glad so! I do get the occasional wind pain due to eating too fast which doesn't last long. I can eat pretty much everything except fresh bread (can have toast) and well done/ dry meat.

I do occasionally binge on chocolate and crisps and although I know I shouldn't, I don't worry too much as my portions are quite small.

If I don't buy it, I don't eat it. So it's a matter of keeping junk food away from the house. It doesn't help when my husband sneaks in icecream!

I pack my breakfast, lunch and snacks every day when I go to work and that helps a great deal. If you plan it, it works so well and it's sooo worth the time you spend.

Also, I decided to take the train to work now. Costs the same amount of money and time as driving but involves a lot of walking! I walk 20 min to the station, hop on the train and walk another 20 min to the office. Same on the way back and adds up to 80 min walk a day - saves me going to the gym :) I only worked 1-2 days a week in the last month or so due to the move and never ending building and unpacking work in the house so hopefully when I do this regularly it should make a bigger difference.

So that's a summary of my new life, from this week onwards I'm trying to get back on track.

I will post again later what I ate in the day.

X

What I ate today - tried chicken for the first time

Today I wanted to try being a bit more spontaneous, although the idea of not taking any food with me to work made me nervous so I packed my breakfast at least :)

I went to M&S to grab myself lunch and while there bought 2 'buy 1 get 1 half price' ready meals (count on us low cal range) for me and the husband's dinner. I do love M&S food! Before my band, on an average lunch, I would have a tub of king prawns with cocktail sauce followed by a salad (pasta or couscous salad with chicken etc) and fruit or nuts on top. Today I barely finished the king prawns. It felt weird... Good thing I only bought the prawns!

Breakfast:
20g All Bran (yuck!) with Irish diet strawberry yogurt

Mid-morning:
Atkins protein bar with peanut

Lunch:
M&S king prawns with cocktail dipping sauce (left most of the sauce)

Mid-afternoon:
New York Soup Co. Skinny chicken minestrone (1/2 tub with the chicken bits spat out as too chewy) and 1 light cheese triangle

Dinner:
Half pack of M&S chicken dinner (chicken breast strips in onion gravy + carrots + peas + potato mash) ready meal. This tasted amazing! I wasn't sure if I could eat the chicken just yet but with the encouragement from last week's chat with my dietitian I thought I'd try. I needed to chew a lot of course but no problems, had half a portion. Probably worked because the meat was really tender in the gravy. The whole pack is 320 calories by the way so it was a good ready meal :)

Dessert:
Shape Delights

Drinks:
2 cups of tea, pint of NAS squash, 1 cup of coffee, 1 cup of blueberry green tea

Exercise:
1 hour walk

TOTAL 1000 calories eaten + 315 calories burned  xxx

What I ate today - restriction kicks in

What a nice surprise when I felt stuffed halfway through my lunch! Helloooo restriction, nice to meet you :) I wasn't expecting it just yet and it's such a pleasant surprise!

I have a sore throat and a cold on its way and I do wonder if it's because of the throat or the restriction but I feel it in my chest and my throat isn't there haha.

So this is it then. Your head is hungry and wants to carry on eating but you feel stuffed in your chest as if you ate something the size of your arm and it feels like if you opened your mouth wide enough you could see the last bite sitting there, lol. Obviously if you carry on eating, you'll be sick. I didn't want to be sick so I stopped eating. Good girl :P

I did overeat at dinner though. Because the phone rang so I stopped eating for a while so everything went down, then continued and *almost* finished my plate (tea plate that is) but felt really bloated and uncomfortable afterwards. I couldn't sleep for a good few hours tossing and turning. The two cats curled up on my legs didn't help either :)

Breakfast:
Ready Break (30g) with ~200ml milk

Mid-morning:
Atkins bar, peanut & caramel (I cannot recommend Atkins bars enough - they taste AMAZING and low in carbs, acceptable in calories plus they keep you full for a good few hours and this is the small size I'm talking about)

Lunch:
2 slices of Ryvita crackerbread + 1 laughing cow cheese triangle, low fat (but not the extra low fat one, that one doesn't taste of anything for not a big save on calories) + 4 slices of wafer thin turkey ham
Salad made with crunchy stuff (cucumber, small radishes, iceberg lettuce and a bit of chives) + a couple of sprays of 1-cal a spray ceasar dressing + splash of balsamic vinegar

Late afternoon:
Grilled lamb liver (this was from a couple of days ago sitting in the fridge so something easy when I got home hungry from work - I had about 4-5 mouthfuls)

Dinner:
2 fish fingers (grilled) with a teaspoon of reduced fat seafood sauce + 1 artichoke cooked with lemon juice and filled with petit pois and diced onions + 1 tbsp M&S chargrilled veg pealla (nicked from husband's plate out of pure greed and definitely not hunger)

Dessert:
Home made ice cream with my Vitamix. 2 small frozen bananas + 1/2 pack (200g) of fresh melon and grape (frozen) + 1/2 container Alpro Soya single cream (125ml) + 1 tbsp runny honey makes 4 servings and 1 serving is 105 calories. Better than Ben and Jerry's when the craving comes :)

Exercise:
25-min walk

TOTAL 919 calories eaten, 131 burned with exercise

xxx

What I ate today - naughty food at a birthday party

So... Messed up a bit today...

It's my nephew's 14th birthday so I baked him a chocolate & banana cake this morning and iced it with chocolate ganache. I licked a tiny bit of the icing to test it (which is fair enough I guess). Then I baked the Christmas cakes in time so I have a month to feed them brandy until Christmas. I licked the batter to test if it's spicy enough (again, fair enough).

Then in the afternoon, we went to the birthday party and stayed there until late evening so it meant we had lunch and dinner there, picking finger food. I have chosen the best I could have from what was available (which was a lot!) as I needed to be on soft foods today as it's the day after my fill.

I then had a teeeeeeny tiny slice of the birthday cake because I'm weak and have zero willpower and I love cake :(

But I didn't drink alcohol and I didn't touch anything that isn't breakable by a fork.

Let's see the damage:

Breakfast:
Big mug of coffee made with 150ml skimmed milk + topped with water

Mid-morning:
Home-made lentil soup + Chicken cup-a-soup (lentil soup was too small a portion, wasn't enough)

Lunch & Dinner - food picked at the party:
Hummus (1tsp or so) + 1 Chicken goujon + small slice (1/8th) of cheese & onion quiche + roast chicken breast slice + small pieces of Wensleydale with cranberry, double Gloucestershire with chives and Brie

Naughty stuff:
Very thin slice of birthday cake
2 mini eclairs

Drinks:
Pint of NAS squash + 3 cups of tea with a drop of skimmed milk + sachet of Lemsip (thank you dear husband for our marital bliss where you share everything with me, including your man flu!)

Exercise: 
None...

TOTAL 1044 calories (not as bad as I thought but fat and carbs very high - ie red in MFP lol)

Oh well... What's done is done. I'll be good tomorrow onwards :) xxx

What I ate today - day I had my first fill

Today was the day of my first fill so after a normal breakfast, I wasn't allowed to eat for 4 hours before the fill and afterwards I was on liquids for 24h.

Breakfast:
Toasted WW wholemeal pitta + 4 slices wafer thin turkey ham + 15g BGTY grated mature cheese + 10g Flora extra light

Snack/Drink:
Cadbury hot choc from vending machine - Test drink after fill - they only had tea or hot choc and I didn't fancy tea ;)

Lunch:
Cafe Nero large soya latte (had my fill mid day so on liquids for 24h)

Snack/Drink:
Feed Good kids' orange, pineapple & banana drink

Dinner:
New York Soup Co Skinny chunky chicken minestrone (1/2 container) and it wasn't enough but didn't really like it so I liquidised 2 small lamb meatballs from husband's dinner in a bit of gravy but felt bloated after a couple of sips so paused for a bit... only to come back and find the cat licking it, lol. So obviously I didn't finish it :P

Had another pint of NAS squash.

3 hours of walking around - was absolutely knackered at the end of the day.

Total 795 calories eaten, 639 calories burned according to MFP although it does sound a bit too much! xxx

First fill

Here's another first in my banded adventure - the first fill!

I've been dreading it, being scared of needles, having a low pain treshold etc doesn't help, whatever more experienced banders say (that it doesn't hurt!) I still thought it would be painful. And that I'd bruise. And that I'd be sore all day. And being on liquids again will be a nightmare.

I was wrong. It was absolutely fine!

Let's get into details before I forget :)

* * * Long Post Alert * * *

Woke up early this miserable Saturday morning and had breakfast at 7:45am - this is very early for me. I usually just have a drink in the morning and don't have breakfast before 10ish. But I was told not to eat 4 hours before the fill and nil by mouth for the last hour. So I had a nice breakfast, tried pitta bread for the first time and it was lovely. Not the ordinary high calorie pitta of course, i had Weightwatcher's wholemeal pitta, which is half the thickness of the normal ones but it gets nice and crispy when toasted. Then I had a pint of squash and we left the house, hopped on a train and went to London, Hammersmith clinic. I'll go to the central London Weymouth Street clinic from the second appointment onwards, that one's busier though so they could only squeeze me in this one for the first fill.

The clinic was fairly easy to locate (although it did have Surgicare signs, not The Hospital Group) and after a 5 min wait, I've been called in. We had a chat with the nurse, she was very friendly and easy to talk to. She said my weight loss so far is fantastic and way above average and that I've already lost 22% of my excess weight, yay! Almost 1/4 done - what a relief! Obviously the last 1/4 will be a bitch to lose but hey, will get there when I get there :)

And then she told me a few things about how the band works and that what I should and shouldn't eat. I already had my first dietitian appointment and obviously I'm reading about it non-stop, plus sharing experiences on WLSurgery.com forums but I've never heard that I could have unlimited new potatoes with skin (recommended roasting them in flora baking liquid!), porridge (not oats so simple but normal porridge oats but as runny as you like), basmati rice (just boiled) and beans, pulses etc (not baked beans)... She also said whatever I was doing was obviously working so just carry on with that, which I'm going to do but honestly, unlimited new potatoes? Really?

She said something else which kinda make sense. As I've read before, losing 50% of excess weight is considered a success. Plus, she said by the time you lose 50% of your excess weight, you'll know if you'll lose the other 50% or not. I think what she meant was, by the time you've lost that, if you've changed your bad eating habits, you'll continue to lose weight. If not, you'll stay about the same but hopefully with the band's help you won't gain any more.

I would like to lose 100% of my excess weight and I'm not planning to settle for 50% but I understand that they need to cover themselves and also not give false hope to those who expect the band to do all the work. It doesn't work that way. Hunger is in our heads and the band will not stop the hunger. That's why it is so important to recognise the way the band talks to us and not to ignore the signs and stop eating at the first sign. It's hard work. I have continued to eat several times after the signs because I wanted to eat more and my head was still hungry. This is something I need to work on...

She then made me sign the consent form, filled a card for me with my details which I'll need to bring to each fill and we proceeded to the treatment room and I started shaking a bit. I am scared of needles, is it going to hurt, how long will it take, is my port accessible, did it flip, is what I feel the port or just scar tissue...

I lied on the bed, she prepared something, I didn't see anything because I decided that if I saw the needle I may not go ahead with it, lol... So she said here we go and suddenly I felt something but it wasn't pain. She said let's see if they put any during the op and I said yes he put 1ml in, she said yes indeed he did and now you have 4ml and she said it's all done... WHAT?! I didn't even think the needle was in properly and she already sorted it all out. Much appreciated indeed :)

So I got up, followed the nurse and my husband (who was fascinated with the whole process) to the office room from the treatment room and when I walked in, my husband gave a small shriek (lol) and pointed at my tummy, I looked down and saw my light grey tshirt covered in blood, like I was stabbed or something!!! The nurse hurried me back in the treatment room, cleaned the 'hole' in my skin and put a plaster on. She said it's better to keep it open but sometimes it does bleed... well, thanks :P It's because the needle is thick, nothing to worry about, it didn't even hurt, I felt nothing. It stopped immediately anyway. I washed the front of my tshirt and dried it with paper towels and went out to the reception area for a drink - to go back for a defill if you can't swallow hehe.

I desperately tried to make a latte but they didn't have any. Didn't fancy a black coffee or tea so I had to have a hot chocolate :P Good choice, I was really thirsty and hungry so it went down well. Slowly, of course but I really didn't feel much other than a bit of bubbling as it went down. I asked if that was normal and she said it is.

24h liquids (chunky soup is ok), 24h soft food then back to normal crunchy dry stuff :)

Overall, a pleasant experience. No pain whatsoever. It was so easy I didn't even feel anything!

She said I'll probably need another 2 fills before I have proper restriction. I have another one scheduled for 15th of December so we're good :)

xxx

What I ate today - TGIF!!!

I'm grateful it's Friday - such a long and tiresome week. I have a feeling I'll catch my husband's 'man flu' aka ordinary cold... Not looking forward to that and I've been First Defense'ing myself but I don't have my hopes up - once it's in the house, you'll have to catch it, that's the rule...

Breakfast:
Alpen NAS Muesli + splash of skimmed milk
 
Mid-morning:
Atkins protein bar (the chocolate brownie one, so yummy and so filling, had to postpone lunch by 2 hours!)
 
Lunch:
6 slices Melba toast + 2 low fat cheese triangles + 30g mackerel pate + iceberg lettuce, cucumber, radishes with splash of balsamic vinegar
 
Late afternoon:
Carrot sticks

Dinner:
Grilled lamb's liver with onions caramelised in butter cooking spray lol + fat free natural yogurt

Drinks:
2 cups of coffee, pint of NAS squash, cup of tea

Exercise:
1-hour walk - see, I can actually move my butt if it's not pissing down! Lunch hour well spent :)

Total 1023 calories eaten, 319 calories burned xxx