I came back to Australia a couple of days ago to see my surgeon and get another fill in my lapband.  I’ve now got 6 cc’s in a 10 cc band.  I don’t think I can hold any more, although by the numbers I should be able to get 4 more in there.  Fat chance!

After she injected the saline into the port under the skin up and to the right of my belly button,  she asked me to drink some water – slowly without talking so I didn’t swallow any air.

“Maybe that’s too much, I can hear you gurgling from over here,” she said.

Like I want to go around gurgling!

The water went down ok and no pain so I said I wanted to keep it in the band and I’d just eat even more slowly than I have been.  I’m determined to get this weight off over the next 6 months.  That’s my goal.  All off in 6 months.

I’m not that far off my goal so if I get in gear and do the walking, the weight training with the dumbells and eat to my plan, my commitment to myself will all be worth it.

Now, about this EFT.  I told my surgeon about it and told her I felt really foolish doing it with my shrink but I still have no cravings for sweets and I haven’t looked for something to put in my mouth for a week.  I know it’s not a sure thing but I haven’t gone a week without eating for emotional or anxiety reasons for more than 30 years.  Who knows, maybe it’s 40 years.  It’s certainly been a long time.

I found out that an acquaintance of mine is an EFT counselor in town I used to live in back in Australia (errr..  where I am right now) so I’m seeing her tomorrow just to see what she has to say about it.  My shrink didn’t give me tons of details.  When he told me what we were going to do I rolled my eyes and he said, “You’ve done it your way for 40 years and it hasn’t worked, at least TRY it.”  I couldn’t argue with that logic.

I’ll post more photos in a few weeks.

Oh..  according to the surgeon I lost 3 kilos over the past month.  Not enough.  Better than gaining though!  Any loss is better than gaining.

I went to the nutritional psychologist for another appointment.  The amount I’m spending on this journey of mine keeps going higher and higher but I feel like I’m getting closer to the reasons I look for comfort in food. Today we talked about anxiety being the reason I need to have something in my mouth.  Chocolate is ok but when I’m really stressing it could be anything, as long as I’m chewing.

I expected the shrink to tut tut when I told him that but he said I wasn’t alone.  Most everyone who eats for an emotional reason does the same thing.  Some crave salty foods, some crave chocolate and then there are people like Oprah and me who visit the pantry door or the open fridge and wait for something new to magically appear.

So today he asked me if I was familiar with EFT or tapping.  I remember reading something about tapping a few years ago but I pooh poohed it thinking it was pretty nutty.  Well, that’s where we’re delving now.  We spent much of the hour today talking about E=motional F=reedom T=echnique.  The theory behind it is that it’s similar to acupuncture in that it works on the connection of your body’s subtle connections.  It’s been called emotional acupuncture.

The tapping comes in when you identify something you want to get rid of in your life, like a memory of your mother saying something really awful to you when you were 7 and you always remember it with a negative emotion.

According to my doctor, while tapping on acupressure points along meridians, or pathways of energy throughout the body, and being tuned in to a specific problem or issue, the mind/body energy system is “straightened out,” and the energy becomes available so we can heal.  That’s why it’s called EFT – emotional freedom technique.

You make a statement and then tap on the end points of the body’s meridians or energy pathways thinking about whatever it is that you want to work on.   I have no idea how it works or IF it works but since we did it in his office I haven’t stood in the kitchen looking for something to eat.  One day isn’t a cure, so we’ll see how it goes.

If you have had success with EFT, can you let me know?

Sonja’s Sojourns is the title of a series of online dating articles written for us by a good friend in San Diego.  She’s around my age-ish (nobody is as old as me, sadly) and we quickly became good friends.  She met her sweetie on our site and we’ve remained close ever since she stopped writing.  She had a decidedly quirky approach to dating and dating on the internet in particular.  That’s how she found her man – he made a comment on one of her articles and once they got together, her dating topic ideas just dried up.

We’ve been writing back and forth for years and when I told her I was getting the lapband put on back in 2007 she wanted one.  Remember when I said I had a friend that went to Mexico and got one?  That’s her!  Because of all the research she did and the great experience that she had, my son went to the same hospital for his lapband.

The three of us have lost nearly 200 pounds!  (not each.. that’s taking all the flab and piling it together on the scales)

So..  today I was strolling the net and what did I find?  She has a blog!  Not just any blog but a wonderfully funny blog.  She’s one of the funniest writers whether she’s telling about being unemployed and training to be a census worker, visiting her stepmother who’s lost touch with reality or her daily travels through life.  If you’ve got a few minutes, check out But Ciriously – you’ll be glad you did! Tell her I sent you.

No, not my accident.  We had guests visiting from Auckland this weekend and they brought along their 16 year old daughter.  On Sunday morning she asked if she could take the car for a drive just to have something to do.  Her mother wanted to say no but feared an argument that would embarrass her so she said yes.  All the warnings were given – don’t drive too fast, be careful, don’t be gone long.  All the things that anyone would say to a kid going for a drive in unfamiliar territory.

About 45 minutes later, in she comes, sobbing and wailing with a woman who’d been kind enough to pick her up after she went around a corner twice as fast as the printed speed limit.  She hit soft gravel and spun around a few times and smashed her car into a dirt bank.  The car was a total wreck and had to be towed to our house where it remains.  Family had to drive up from Auckland to pick them up and take them back home.  Their entire family was concerned about the accident and what the loss of the car would mean to their daughter / granddaughter.

Initially my husband was not popular when he said it was the best accident she could have.

“Any accident that a 16 year old can walk away from is a good lesson to learn,” he said.

I have to agree with him.  Once she was a bit calmer and we’d driven over an hour to the hospital (we’re pretty remote here) to ensure that she wasn’t hurt, she accepted that she drove too fast and while devastated that she no longer had a car of her own, it was a lesson she’d never forget.

After they’d left and I’d cleaned up from the dinner I’d prepared for everyone I thought about what lessons I’d learned for myself in all of that.  For me it was a reminder that you never know when your time is up.  It could be 50 years from now or you could get hit by a bus tomorrow or there could be an earthquake or well, anything at all really.

Life is all about today.  Yesterday is history and you can’t relive or rewrite it and tomorrow might come, might not, so why worry about it?  I need to live more in the now and stop thinking about what life’s going to be like when I’m not fat any more or when I have more money or when I can finally have a vacation or when the house is clean – you get my point.  I find myself looking forward all the time rather than enjoying my here and now.  I’m going to do better.

As you know, I’ve been walking with my local diet group (a bunch of oldies like me who need to get fit) and this week we all bought fancy pedometers from the local physiotherapy clinic.  It’s very cute and sits on my waistband.  That’s really ALL it does.  I opened the pamphlet that comes with it and I can understand that I’m supposed to draw a line on the floor, place my right toe up against the line and walk 10 paces and draw a line in front of my left toe.  Then I measure the distance and divide by 10.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  It’s easy until you start pressing those little buttons.  Why don’t they have a button that says “set”?  I’ve got reset and mode.  I don’t want to mode the darned thing, I want to set my details in there.

I used it yesterday, without setting it, and I walked just under 2000 steps in 20 minutes.  Of course I don’t know how far that was because I was using the setting the pedometer arrived with.  It’s ok, I understand that some people are geekier than others.  It took me forever to learn how to record a program to disk too.

Tomorrow the group meets and there’s a big contest for the person who’s put the most mileage on the pedometer.  I’m wondering if I can trick the pedometer to think I’ve walked more than I have.  I don’t want to win the contest; I just don’t want to be last.  That makes me a very small person in a really big body, doesn’t it?

I had another visit with the nutritional psychologist today.  I really didn’t feel like going.  Someone very close to me committed suicide yesterday and I was gutted.  All the things that go through your mind at a time like that – I should have called her more often, I should have checked on her, etc., just left me feeling pretty crap.

But I kept my appointment because I figured maybe he could help me sort it out.  Dot wasn’t happy and left a suicide note saying as much.  The shrink asked me if I felt guilt over her death and I honestly don’t.  She’s 10,000 miles away in Maine but I do wish I had taken the time to tell her how much it meant to me for her to be in my life.

So then we moved on to reasons why I might eat to feel better.  We talked about my parents and especially my mother and he asked if I felt loved by her.  I said that she never told me she loved me but she did cook my favorite foods from time to time.  I knew when she cooked my favorites that she cared about me and wanted me to feel special.  So I’ve had all that baggage for years – equating eating with being loved.  Today was just the uncovering of these emotions.  I have no idea how to fix it!

Then we talked about why I tend to put myself last.  I rarely say no to anyone.  He asked why I had such a difficult time doing that and then he asked me how I felt when someone asked me to do something.  If I want to do it, I feel great because I love doing things for other people.  If I don’t want to do it, I feel bad.   Then it came to me as if a light went on over my head.  I don’t say yes for the people who are asking, I’m saying yes so I don’t feel bad.   I don’t know how to fix this either but both of these revelations made me feel terrific.

I just might find my way out of this emotional eating thing after all.

I’ll keep you posted.

I read an article today about why overweight people, even people who’ve had lapband surgery like I have, can’t seem to keep it off.  We all hear about “I have a sweet tooth” and “I always feel hungry,” but maybe it has a lot less to do with the sweet tooth and feelings of hunger than we realize.

The problem is that we SEE ourselves as overweight.  That subconscious side of us that stores our memories and emotions has an image of us that is overweight.  If our subconsious is fat, how will we ever be able to overcome that?  I’ve lost a lot of weight but I still fight the urge to overeat every single day.

I’m going to take his advice and try to reprogram how my subsconscious sees me.  I started today by taking a photo of myself today and comparing it to how I looked at the end of 2007.  Huge difference..   here, I’ll show you.

So, you can see a difference, right?  Yeah I know, I’ve still got 30 pounds of boobage to lose but it will come off.  I’m going to work on my self image and try my best to see myself as a thin person.  Apparently that will help me more than anything else I can do.

So fingers crossed!

If you’re overweight and trying to reduce, does it sometimes feel that all you think about is food?  Not just food but everything around diet and exercise?  I do.  It seems that when I’m really concentrating on losing weight it’s like it’s a full time job.  Every waking moment is filled with anxiety if I eat too much or being hungry if I eat too little or wondering how much more exercise I’d need if I ate that muffin.

So I went to the nutritional psychologist today for the first time.  It was an hour and a half ($225) and it was great.  I loved every minute of it.  The first hour or so was going over why I was there and what I wanted to accomplish by seeing him.  I told him that I wanted to find joy in every day and stop putting it off until I’m thin.  What if I’m never thin..  I’ll never have joy in my life.

I have to learn to release the guilt I was raised with and start removing myself from the bottom rung on the importance ladder of my life.   My first exercise is to sit in a comfortable chair with my feet on the floor (difficult at only 5′ tall!).  I’m to close my eyes and think about my big toe… feel it.  Then think about my right elbow… feel it. Then imagine a circle around my chest where my heart is.  Then I’m to breathe into that circle slowly – in and out.  After 5 or 6 times I am to release a positive emotion as I exhale.  Today I thought about gratitude but I can choose any emotion.  Love, joy, happiness, forgiveness – anything positive.  I can aim that thought to the world or to someone I know.  I’m to do this exercise twice a day or any time I get filled with anxiety.

Next week we’ll build on that so that I can get to a place that doesn’t need food to feel OK.