Some people need more fill than others. Some need less fill than more.
Jan (not her real name!) was nervous about eating out. What if she couldn't find anything on the menu that would go down easily? She was now in the habit of choosing soft foods because everything else seemed to get stuck. Her weight loss had slowed from a sizzling 5 kg per month, to a reprehensible 1 kg in 7 weeks. She was getting more and more tired from eating 'the wrong foods' and was no longer motivated to exercise.
Not happy Jan.
She now understood something she read about on the internet before having the band: bad food goes down easily and good food gets stuck. They had rung her to come back in. But she did not want to go. Feeling like a failure, she did not want to front up to the skinny Dietitian. What would she know anyway. B*)=h!
She would just go to another band fill instead.
In the waiting room, she overheard someone bragging about their weight loss and what a difference it had made to their life. Jan felt sad and more than a little jealous. She told the happy-camper what she was experiencing - sitting with her husband each night, she would eat 3 mouthfuls of what she had prepared for dinner, when the food got stuck, she would clear the blockage unceremoniously and default to yogurt and chocolate.
Tom laughed and said he went through the same thing after his third fill. He kept thinking he did not have enough fill ,yet after a point, the more fill he had, the less weight he lost, the worse he felt and more difficult eating became. Not to mention the tiredness.
Tom said he turned to chocolate for a sense of satisfaction from food as he could not longer eat the food he enjoyed. He was not a chocolate eater before the band - he left that to his wife who always seemed to be 'hormonal' and so ate a lot of it. When the Doc said he could have no more fills, due to the risk of erosion he was terrified. When was he going to feel restricted? He had 9.75mls of fill out of a 10ml possibility.
Then he saw the light. It was a glowing fluro pointing to a poster in the waiting room with the following words that changed his life:
Go slowly. Halve mouthful, double chewing after each fill. Check texture on roof of mouth before swallowing. This process adds 5 minutes onto each meal until it takes 25-30 minutes to eat a modest amount of food.
Focus on eating solid, ordinary foods .When you are eating 25-50% of what you used to eat, this is the right level of fill for you. The rest is exercise.
DOH! He had assumed the more fill, the better with the goal of eating the least he could for weight reduction - rather than just a comfortable less.
Mandy Turton - Dietitian
