Welcome to Ready 4A Change, I am Judy and have been banded since 3/17/00. I have always had food and weight issues but I was able to control them some of the time though I did fluctuate wildly even as a teenager from a size 16 to 8. As an adult I worked hard at keeping my weight down and spent half my life in the gym and the other half running hard and fast at raising children and working to build a career. As I got older it became harder and harder to keep my weight in check and I was eating less and exercising more. At one point I just decided to hop off the merry go round and forget about trying so hard to be perfect and then the pounds really piled on.





I am vertically challenged, under 5’ 2”. By the end of 1999 I had reached 225 pounds even though I was very physically active, and living in constant state of deprivation to control my weight. I finally decided to just throw in the towel as life doesn’t happen in a gym, at least not my life and out of sheer desperation began researching weight loss surgery. I stumbled on banding and read everything I could find and called the doctor because of his extensive banding experience. In January of 2000 I committed to eating better and was able to get down to 204 by the day I was banded, I knew then that without a band it would all come back plus more. I decided on the doctor and told DH I was heading for Mexico for WLS and I was using my own money. You can about imagine the look I received when I told him I was heading for Mexico for a weight loss surgery that was not yet approved in the US. He wasn’t thrilled to say the least but as I boarded the plane he did say he hoped I would be happy about the decision I had made.
 

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the medical facilities in Monterrey as I had traveled in Mexico previously but my travel was limited to border towns and vacation areas.  Because Monterrey has such excellent resources, I was using facilities comparable or better than the facilities I had access to in my US health network and that made me comfortable. Is banding difficult? Actually the procedure is relatively simple, but there are some concepts that did take some adjustment, more of it mental. In order to lose weight and keep it off you basically have to eat less and the band takes care of that for me.