I just read the most thought provoking article on why Americans (and most of the rest of the world) are so much heavier than they were before 1950.  Neighborhoods built back then were geared for people who walked.  They have tree lined streets and shops close by for the everyday necessities — so people walk.  They walk for enjoyment, to shop and to visit each other.  They wouldn’t consider getting in a car to get to a shop 1/2 mile away.

Is it that simple?  I think so!  Quite a few years go I went to Melbourne, Australia to meet the man who would become my husband.  He lived in an apartment in the city and while he was at work, I went shopping.  Every day I would walk to the supermarket to get what we needed for dinner and then I’d walk to a park or some other place for sightseeing.  Not only didn’t I diet, but you could say that I ate my way through Melbourne for those 4 weeks.  We didn’t have any scales so I kept moaning about how much weight I must be putting on.  I had dessert every night and sometimes I’d have a snack earlier in the day.

When I got back to Orlando I timidly got on the scales and I’d lost TWENTY POUNDS. I had convinced myself that I had brought “big clothes” that masked how much weight I was gaining.

So, if I put my experience back then into this argument, Ken Smith, the man who did the study for the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, was right.

When we decided to make our arrangment permanent we moved to a sprawling neighborhood where there was noplace to walk to and I put those 20 pounds right back on.

Perhaps governments around the world could address the obesity issue just by redefining how our communities are built.  Insist that neighborhoods are designed as small communities where walking is encouraged by making it pleasant.

I think if I move again, I’ll keep this in mind! I never want to be fat again.

I’ve decided that once I have the gall bladder out next week, I’m going to find someone here in New Zealand to give me my first fill in my gastric band.  When I was first banded I was never hungry and lost weight very quickly.  Then I got sick with gallstones and other problems and dieting was off the list of things I should do.

Now that I’m pretty well sorted out, I’ve begun getting hungrier.  I think it’s probably emotional hunger from all that’s going on in my life but I’m not happy about it.  When I was first banded I ate next to nothing and was never hungry.  I want to go back to that.

The final realization that I could put it all back on came tonight when hubby opened a Cadbury Fruit and Nut© bar.  I wanted some.  I wanted a lot of some.  I didn’t eat heaps but I think I’d have gone to bed wishing I’d had some chocolate if I hadn’t had some.  I didn’t eat the whole thing; there’s still more than half the bar left after both of us ate some.  But still…  I worry that I’m going backward instead of forward.

My good friend Cheryl tells me to get the fill.  “Let the band work for you because what you’re doing is dieting,” she says.  She might be right.  I went through all the bother of having this thing put on my stomach, why not let it help me not feel hungry all the time.  Then all I need to do is work on the emotional eating issues.

I weigh less than 150 pounds now and I want to weigh 120 (or less) so I don’t have a million miles to go but I want to see some progress.  Maybe I should make a deal with myself.  Lose 10 pounds and I get.. something.  It might have to be pretty good to get me really motivated.

I’m celebrating today that’s for sure.  I got a call from the hospital this morning and the lady asked me if I was still interested in having my gall bladder taken out.  Umm..  yeah.  I’ve been suffering gallstone attacks at the rate of 2-3 a week for 3 months.  Only an idiot would want to live like this I told her.

So..  drum roll please…   Friday, August 1st I’ll be going under the knife.

I go in at 8am and I’ll be home the following day unless they screw it up and I have complications.  I have to tell every man and his dog that I have a gastric band and cannot be intubated without dire consequences.  I also have to say that I’m allergic to morphine so I don’t have to spend the following 4 days scratching the invisible bugs that crawl all over my body after getting morphine.

All in all, I’m a happy woman today.  Heck, I even won $21 in the lottery last night.  I bought a ticket on a whim..  it WAS $50 million dollars after all, and sure enough.. I won.  I won $21, not the $50 million.  I have to tell you though, getting a surgery date was better than winning the lottery to me.

I’ll once again be able to go out to dinner and not have to drink water because there’s nothing on the menu that’s fat free.  I’ll be able to go to parties and have friends over without people feeling sorry for me.  Yay !!

You can see that it doesn’t take too much to make me happy.

I was in a forum discussion the other day and we were all talking about how much food costs now and what foods we really should have in the house all the time.  We shared how much we were spending on our weekly food shop and comparing prices from area to area.

One young woman surprised us all when she told us she spent at least half what the rest of us were spending weekly.  Curious, I asked her what sorts of things she buys every week.  She buys a lot of rice, beans, and vegetables in season and that didn’t seem out of line at all, but then the rest of us had those things in our shopping basket too.

She asked what I buy and I gave a quick rundown on the types of food I buy every week.  Nuts, fresh fruit, fresh veggies, meat, etc.  In New Zealand we don’t have aisle after aisle of frozen food in our supermarkets so the temptation to eat highly processed foods isn’t as great as it is in the states.

“Oh,” the young woman said, “I don’t buy any nuts at all, maybe that’s why my cost is less.”

I probably spend $10 a week on nuts so that’s not a big issue I don’t think.

“How much do you spend on fresh fruit?” I asked.

She was quick to reply, “I don’t buy fruit because we don’t have kids yet.”

Huh??  It was like she’d stepped off the planet Uranus.  I couldn’t believe that in 2008, here was a woman who didn’t think she and her husband should eat any fruit.  Sure, I could understand not eating the high GI fruits if diabetes is a problem, but we all need fruit in our diet.  I’d be lost without it, to be honest.

Is fruit important to  you?

Now I just have to lose another kilo and I’m back on track.  Thanks to those who gave me encouragement.  It means a lot.  I started walking again and really trying to keep my food intake to one cup per meal.  I’m not quite there but obviously what I’m doing is working.

Whenever I am tempted to eat something just to feel good I try to remind myself that I’m not hungry and I should do something to make myself feel better rather than eat something to do it.  It’s really hard.  I’m determined to change my attitude toward food and keep losing the last 15 kilograms and finally get to my goal.

I can’t have a tummy tuck and boob job til I get all the weight off, and that’s what I really want to do.  I’m hoping to find someone who’s already had a breast reduction and abdominoplasty to give me advice.  I can’t wait.

I must have.  I’m not sure how but I’ve gained 1 1/2 kilograms over the past couple of weeks.  To say that I’m disappointed in myself is mild.  I’m angry that I can’t seem to sort out the health problems without gaining weight.  The surgeon says I can’t lose weight because my liver isn’t happy from losing so much weight so fast.  The other doctor says I must eat a full meal before taking the antibiotics for another little problem or my stomach will be irritated around the gastric band.  It’s so frustrating. So I eat to feel better.

Starting right this minute I’m going to really watch what and how much I eat.  No more than one cup of veggies and a very small portion of  protein.  I start the day out well.  I have a high fibre cereal with half a banana and some skim milk.  Then I go downhill.

With the gastric band I’m rarely physically hungry.  It’s always the emotional eating.  I know I’m not alone and lots of people eat because it feels good or we remember being given food as a reward when we were kids.  So if I eat treats, then subconsciously I know I must be good, right?

Wish me luck!

There’s a woman in the state of Victoria in Australia who’s in my gastric banding group on Yahoo!.  She was featured on a tabloid news show in Australia last night because she’s lost 160kilograms.  That’s more than 350 pounds LOST with the aid of a gastric band.  Note that I said aid of a gastric band and not because of it.

Everyone who has a band, including Kat, will tell you that the band helps but it doesn’t do all the work.  We still have to watch what we eat, even though we’re eating less.  If we fill up on cake we’re going to get sick.

When she was first banded she weighed 239 kilos (over 500 pounds) and rarely went outside the house.  When she turned 30 she decided that she needed to do something to get back into life.  Since being banded she’s started walking and now has a job – something she only dreamed about when she was morbidly obese.

Next month she’s going to have surgery to trim all the excess skin off and doctors tell her that she’ll go from a size 12 to a size 10 just by removing the skin.  How cool is that?

I’m overwhelmed by the courage it must have taken to make that first step.  She’s an inspiration to me.  If she can keep on keeping on to lose more than 350 pounds, surely I can lose 30 more.

I know there has always been a high end of the food market.  Those people who can afford truffles and caviar but this post isn’t about these people.  I’m talking about the difference between eating healthy foods and those who would love to eat healthy but can’t afford to.

A friend of mine would love to serve only organic foods to her family.  She’d love to buy free range chickens that have no residual antibiotics or hormones and she’d feel better about eating eggs from chickens not kept in battery cages.  Sadly, for her, buying food like this isn’t in her budget.

She shops at the discount stores where you bag your own groceries and everything in the store has a preservative filled shelf life similar to that of a Hostess Twinkie – pretty much forever.  The other day I stopped by to visit just as she was getting home with sacks full of food for this week.  I have to say from my perspective, it didn’t look all that bad, although much of what she bought had black and white labels and there were lots of pretty unhealthy looking snacks for the kids.  I asked her where the fruit was and she said she just can’t afford it any more so the only fruit she buys is in a tin can.

I worry that her situation and that of many others is just the beginning of two tiers of food quality.  For those who don’t have lots of money to spend on food, they’ll end up eating all the trans fat filled foods.  I know, she could make her own cakes and cookies and crackers and everything else, but as a single mother of 3 kids who has a physically tiring job, she doesn’t have the time.  As she says, “I can mow the lawn, do the laundry, help the kids with their homework, clean the house and cook dinner or I can bake.”

It’s not that I want the farmers and bakers to earn less because I know that’s a tough job too, but where will it all end?  Will we end up with a large proportion of the population not able to afford healthy food?  Is that the world we want to live in?  It’s all too easy to say “let them eat cake” or get a better job because we all know it’s not possible for most of them to get a much higher paying job.

One doctor says don’t lose any more weight because you’ve lost too much weight too fast.  The next doctor says you’ve got gallstones and he doesn’t want you to eat any fat, no milk, cheese or butter and if you get a flare-up of symptoms, drink water for a couple of days.  Sound confusing?  It is.

There is no way I can not lose weight if I can’t eat.  I have to be really careful not to alert my gall bladder so it doesn’t toss the stones in the duct and that means eating very little bland food throughout the day.  No regular meals.  Not even regular sized lapband meals which is about a cup or cup and a half of food.

I did think that maybe I should find some fat free cake or fat free ice cream or maybe even some fat free brownie.  Only to keep from losing too much weight, of course..  not for any other reason.  Then I realized that maybe my sweet tooth was talking for me and decided that I’d just keep losing a bit at a time.  I’m not losing 5 pounds a week like I was.  Less than a pound a week is probably ok, right?

I have no idea what life will be like once I have the gall bladder out.  I have about 4 3/4 months to wait, never knowing what day the surgery might be.  Apparently the way it works is that I’ll get a letter telling me to arrive at the hospital on a specific date and then it will happen.  Fingers crossed.  The law in New Zealand is that I cannot be on the waiting list for surgery for more than  6 months.  I keep ticking the days off on my calendar.

I was reading the news today about different ways people and organizations celebrate the 4th of July weekend and came across the most ridiculous and stupid meal at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pennsylvania.  It wasn’t bad enough that so many Americans are overweight that it’s turning into a huge national crisis that’s going to cost billions in unnecessary medical expenses, Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub has decided that people aren’t quite fat enough yet.

Yep, introducing the “Beer Barrel Belly Buster Burger.”  A full FIFTEEN POUNDS of burger, bun, salad and condiments!  I looked at the photo and then showed it to my husband who said, “who could eat that?”  At first I agreed with him but then after reflecting for a moment I realized that of course people are buying it and eating it.  If the restaurant sells it then obviously it’s not too much to eat, right?

I don’t know what it’s going to take to change peoples’ thinking about portion size but the Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub certainly isn’t helping vulnerable overeaters in any way at all!  That one burger would feed me for an entire week if I ate nothing else at all.

Happy 4th of July and I hope you’re eating smart.  If not eating smart, I hope you’re not being stupid.