Well. I was not doing what I was supposed to do for my health. I was not doing what I was supposed to do for my family. I was not doing what I was supposed to do for my self. But Looking at a picture,  this picture woke up in me the fire of disgust. Alerted me to a reality that I had been ignoring behind bigger and bigger clothes. I was buying 48 inch waist pants. Size XXX Polo shirts so that I did not have to tuck them in.

And I started looking at options. Dieting. Well. I did. And I have to tell you all that in reality all of the diets work. All of them.          For a while.

I tried them all and they took some of the weight off but were unsustainable for me for any long period of time. My biggest success came while doing the Atkins Diet. Lost quite a bit of weight. Luckily for me I am not a big fan of sweets. But let me tell you something I had to change the hours I went grocery shopping. I could not go into a Fry’s Market place, Safeway or Wal-Mart  from the hours of 3:30 and 5:30 PM. Why? Because that is when they are bringing all of their French bread and baguette out to the sales floor. I could never walk away from freshly baked bread. Bread smell all over the store and I could grab a loaf and a bucket of margarine and eat the whole thing while doing my shopping. Yes., Sad but true.

Time for some perspective here. I realized that to live the kind of life I wanted to live changes were on the horizon and diet and exercise were not working. It was time for radical and extreme solutions.

And that is how I started looking at the lap band and eventually going through the procedure and getting a Relianze® Band.