2011 Haiku Winners Announced

Our voting is complete and I'm pleased to present
to you the winners of our
2011 Neighborhood Haiku Contest:

First Place:

A beacon of hope
guiding us in, safe haven
together we stand
--Florabelle

First Place Prize: Bookworm Bundle and Seasoning Collection in Decorator Jars

 ($100 Value!) + Deluxe Goody Bag

Second Place:

No longer alone
Our Safe Haven Circle of Friends
Fast becomes family
--shavilyn

Second Place Prize: Best Seller Book Bundle & Seasoning Collection in Decorator Jars

 ($75 Value!) + Deluxe Goody Bag

Third Place:

Neighborhood saved me
This is where I need to be
My future lives here.
--BEluvr

Third Place Prize: 5 Day Pouch Test Bargain Bundle

 ($45 Value!) + Deluxe Goody Bag

 Go to the Neighborhood & Download the .pdf document to enjoy all of the entries. Go Here

Q&A: What is so bad about fried food?

This question comes up frequently. Many new weight loss surgery patients are of the impression that they can eat whatever they want -- just less of it. But many of us learn the hard way that some foods just don't work for us after weight loss surgery. Here is the question and my answer about fried food that we originally published in the April 13, 2011 LivingAfterWLS Weekly Digest. You can enjoy the full free ezine newsletter online in our archive: LivingAfterWLS Newsletters.

Q&A:

What's so bad about fried food?

Link to Newsletter

Here's an interesting discussion from the Neighborhood about fried food after Weight Loss surgery - take a look and link to the Neighborhood to add your thoughts and ideas!

Question from deb728: "Now I know fried food is bad for you in general. But is there a specific reason that we as weight loss people can't eat it? I would never eat a cheesteak or anything super greasy again, but sometimes I'm like holy cow I want chicken nuggets. So I was just wondering why can't it be like everything else-a couple french fries or chicken nuggets like once every two months?"

Kaye's Answer: "Hi Deb -- Thanks for asking this question! As you mentioned, in general fried food is bad for us from a general health standpoint. A 6-piece serving of fried chicken tenders contains 401 Calories; 16g Protein; 8g Fat; 57g Carbohydrate. The FDA calculates this at 3 1/2 starch/bread servings and 1 lean meat serving -- clearly not something fitting a "Protein First" meal. Its easy to figure out how we have become "obese nation" when you consider many children are weened from the bottle right to the fast food fried chicken pieces.

Now, since you had RNY you are dealing with not just the nutritional facts above, but a malabsorptive procedure. That means you no longer have an abundant supply of gastric enzymes needed to digest foods high in fat. Because fried chicken pieces are high in fat and carbohydrate you are at risk of dumping syndrome when eating them. In fact, many people are baffled when they experience classic dumping symptoms after eating fried fatty food. So that's the second reason to avoid fried foods, including fried chicken pieces or my personal favorite, fried cheese! Yeah, I've tried that and not had good results.

But there is a rainbow here in this cloud of bad news!!

You can cook at home a reasonable "mock" chicken nugget and be quite happy in your pouch, your mouth, and your brain (no guilt!) Take this recipe for Parmesan Crusted Chicken and make a great meal. Once you get familiar with the method you can experiment with herbs or coatings to keep things fresh. Instead of serving it with the classic fries or onion rings add some salad or fresh fruit and berries. I think you will be quite happy with your effort!"

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Dumping, Dehydration & Other Summer Dangers

Did you know that weight loss surgery patients report more episodes of dumping in the warm summer months than any other time of year? Take a look at today's LivingAfterWLS Digest to learn more and avoid the things that cause dumping. Tons of good information for you today. enjoy!

Over the last several years in working with my fellow weight loss surgery patients I have observed an increase of reported incidence of dumping syndrome and dehydration in the warm summer months. While my study is not scientific, I have observed some common factors that lead to the dumping. In sharing some of what I have learned today from  so many of you I hope we can continue to build our collective knowledge and understanding of dumping syndrome. 

Most people believe that dumping is the exclusive fate of gastric bypass patients. However, adjustable gastric banding (lap-band) and gastric sleeve patients who follow a strict Protein First diet and then suddenly deviate by eating sweets or fried food have reported symptoms of dumping syndrome. I believe all patients of bariatric surgery, regardless of the procedure, should be familiar with the causes and symptoms of dumping syndrome. Today's Digest addresses dumping syndrome and dehydration. Please take a look at the information and arm yourself with knowledge!

Summer begins tomorrow and with it comes warmer weather and hopefully a more relaxed pace of living. And while it is a great time to enjoy our improved health with weight loss surgery it is exactly this relaxation of compliance to the Four Rules that gets us in trouble with dehydration or dumping. I am committed this summer to getting in an extra glass of water and enjoying my protein first so my summer fun is not disrupted by an inconvenient dumping episode or bout with dehydration. Will you join me in making the Summer of 2011 a "Dump-Free Zone"?  Remember - We are all in this together!  Newsletter Refresher Series: Four Rules

Best Wishes!
Kaye Bailey

Read the June 20, 2011 LivingAfterWLS Weekly Digest

Vote Now for your Favorite Neighborhood Haiku

Link here for the entries in random order for the Neighborhood Haiku Contest 2011!
Please select 3 favorites from the 17 entries. The entry thread has been hidden for now to conceal the author of each Haiku.  Some clever authors submitted more than one entry. If an entry has a letter and number (ie: Z1, Z2, Z3) you may only select one Z entry.

A 1-page PDF file of the entries is attached for you to open and print. This made it easier for me to read and think about each entry. Plus, I think this is a really cool collection of thoughts to keep on hand. After the contest we will release the same page as the blind author page, but with Authors and also winners.

Voting begins as soon as this posts and ends June 20 at 12:00 Midnight! Tell everyone you know to get over here and vote!! There are fabulous prizes and the fame of winning the 2011 Neighborhood Haiku Contest!!!

Thanks to everyone for participating as a contestant or a voter!

Go Here to Vote
*must be a registered member of the LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood 

Cooking With Kaye: Taste Sensations

This week in Cooking with Kaye we talked about the role of grains in the weight loss surgery diet and the new USDA Food Plate. This feature article discusses the importance of addressing the five taste sensations with each meal to avoid post-meal cravings.

A Healthy Plate: Include the Five Sensations of Taste
by Kaye Bailey

At right is a dinner I prepared for our family last week modeled after the new USDA Food Plate. Clockwise from the top you see oven roasted broccoli with yellow peppers, orange slices, our featured recipe Scallops (and shrimp) with Chipotle-Orange Sauce and Yellow Pepper Rice. Not only are the colors vibrant, in fruits and vegetables they indicate foods rich in vitamins and nutrients. My WLS plate was sparse with each element being served in half-portion size. Yet I still left food on the plate --a few bites of grain and a floret or two of broccoli-- happily satisfied but not stuffed.

Scientifically speaking from the point of view of taste this plate provides all five sensations of taste that humans can detect:
sweetness, bitterness, sourness, saltiness, and umami (popularly referred to as savoriness). When a meal provides all five sensations of taste it is believed post-meal taste cravings are eliminated. Think about a snack or meal that is overly sweet or salty. After eating it a craving will soon follow for one of the other basic tastes: sweet is followed by salty. As you look at recipes or menu selections try to find how many of the five tastes will be met in that meal. The more tastes we satisfy the less desire we will have later for just a little something extra.

This plate comes from one of my favorite books: Cooking Light: The Essential Dinner Tonight Cookbook. I have made this meal from page 200 many times using lean chicken or pork in place of the scallops. The chipotle-orange sauce is a perfect balance of sweetness, saltiness and savoriness that can be heated up with more chipotle or cooled down with less. The meal comes together quickly and is lovely to serve your close family members or those who are lucky enough to be guests at your table. I hope you enjoy!

Link to the Newsletter for the recipe: Scallops with Chipotle-Orange Sauce

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10,000 Neighbors! Time for Celebration

Our newest Neighbor, Lorri is our official 10,000th member of the LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood -- Welcome to the Neighborhood Lorri - You Have Arrived!!
Celebrate with Us

This is a wonderful milestone for the Neighborhood and a true reflection of the community we have here that is now 5 years old with a strong population of people from around the world doing our best with weight loss surgery! From the beginning we have stayed true to our community mission of providing and sustaining a safe and supportive environment where we actively promote and celebrate one another. The Neighborhood is truly a Safe Haven Circle of Friends!

Be sure to take a minute to celebrate what the Neighborhood means to you and share your thoughts here in how it has made a difference to your weight loss surgery experience and your life as a whole and truly unique person. And let's keep the gates open and welcome 10,000 more to our community!


Thanks everyone, I wish you all the very best!
Kaye



PS -- We have one day left for accepting entries in the Neighborhood Haiku Contest -- Go Here -- Enter for the chance to win fabulous prizes & Neighborhood Noteriety! Today is last day for entries....

June Coupon Code: GRILL2011

LivingAfterWLS General Store

June Coupon Code: GRILL2011
Save $3.00 off order of $20 or more & receive free barbecue sauce recipe with a sample of You Have Arrived Grilling Blend -- You will love it! Make your summer sizzle! Shop Now & Save!! And while supplies last orders over $50 get the DELUXE Goody Bag ($13.65 Value) for FREE!

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Check out All of the You Have Arrived Seasonings

Neighborhood News: Friday June 10

Happy Fun Friday to you All!

Thank you so much for your support & patience during the unscheduled outage of the LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood beginning June 5 and resolved on June 8. This was only the second serious unscheduled outage in the 5 year history of the Neighborhood but stressful to myself and the Tech Team nonetheless. I am genuinely grateful to you, My Neighbors, for your patience and understanding. It is with joyful sincerity that I invite you to drop back to the Neighborhood which has always been and continues to be your Safe Have Circle of Friends and the best online destination for weight loss surgery support.

Great Things Coming Soon!!
We have some exciting changes scheduled in the next few weeks so please keep an eye out for these improvements to your community. I am really excited about the coming addition of a Download Database where we may work together to build an article resource and recipe collection. This will be a free feature to all registered members. Our Premier members (paid subscribers) will enjoy an exciting new feature called "Member Marketplace" where you will be able to promote and sale goods via the Neighborhood. This feature, The Neighborhood Bazaar will be a great place to pass along clothes to your WLS Neighbors as we downsize our bodies on the way to better health. In addition members will have an option to offer electronic products (think eBooks) and hand crafted items all subject to our Appropriate Content Policy (to be posted at the time of roll-out; basically a boiler plate policy of reasonable use specifying no adult content). And finally - for all members who choose to take advantage we will have more social connection options. Currently we allow Twitter and Facebook log-in using your information from those accounts and Social Network Sharing of posts - see the social buttons at the bottom of each post page. Additional Social Network features including "LIKE" and "Google +1" sharing are forthcoming.

Your Privacy is Our Business
But speaking of social networking let me take a moment to discuss you and your privacy in the LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood. The LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood offers the highest level of privacy protection possible in an online community: See Guidelines. We do not share your contact data (ie; email data) or release our lists to advertisers. For me the subject of weight loss surgery has been very personal and privacy, particularly during weight loss, has been deeply important to me. I know it is to you as well. Only this week we learned that one popular social network now uses facial recognition for pictures shared on their website. This function is automatic unless the member opts-out by making a purposeful and complicated adjustment to their rofile. If a user does not change their preferences then any picture posted is scanned and tagged with facial recognition software. In contrast our Premier (paid subscribers) Members in the Neighborhood may post pictures knowing that only registered members of the site will see the pictures: not search engines and not lurkers. In addition, it is very easy to mark a photo private and share with your select group of Neighbors rather than the entire World Wide Web. We do not make random changes to our Privacy Policy and we value you as a multi-dimensional person. We want you to feel comfortable with what you share here and how that sharing is used: You Are In Control. Like the Gallery, Premier members enjoy the same privacy options on their blogs. You set the level of sharing. By the way - our subscriptions prices are low and simply support operation of the Neighborhood so we do not have to intrude on your space with constant advertising that you see on all other sites. Pennies a day to protect your privacy. Go Here to Learn About Subscription packages.

The best place to learn about your options and settings is to click the down-arrow to the right of your Display Name in the upper right corner of the screen: Neighborhood Home Page. From there you can select the option link and review your settings making adjustments as you desire.

Also Helpful: LivingAfterWLS User Help Guide New & Up-to-Date with all the new features that make navigation & using the Neighborhood better than ever.

That is the Neighborhood News for today! We will soon have 10,000 registered Neighbors from around the world. We come from all walks of life with different backgrounds and experience: But we are united in our goal to become healthier by managing our weight and medical conditions with weight loss surgery. The Neighborhood is your Safe Haven for connecting, supporting and sharing. It will be great to see you there!

Have a great day and weekend. Take some time to play our weekly Fun Friday Game and be sure to enter our Neighborhood Haiku Contest -- You can win fabulous prizes! And have a good time doing it!

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Registered Users: 9972
Total Posts: 163101
Busiest Time: 1080 users were online on Oct 06 2010 11:36 PM

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Neighborhood Down - Other Destinations are Good!

Our long-term web hosting service --- Register.com has failed to correct an error on the hosting side which is causing an outage of the LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood. LivingAfterWLS is a long-time  paying client of Register.com and we have in good faith followed their support & technical support protocol for now three days of outage. To no avail. We are working to expedite a solution to this problem and sourcing the valuable LivingAfterWLS properties to a different hosting service. And we are heartsick over this outage because the LivingAfterWLS Neighborhood is important to us as a social life jacket. We know it serves the same purpose for thousands of you. I am heartsick.

But -- there is a rainbow in this technological storm.....  Many of our great destinations are live and functioning well to support you and empower your best experience with weight loss surgery. Please follow the links below. And stay tuned for updates about the Neighborhood -- your premier destination community for WLS Support and Safe Haven Friendship.

     

LivingAfterWLS Homepage

Library
  Free Download Tools

Recipes



General Store
Use Coupon Code GRILL2011 and save $3 off order + get free recipe & seasoning sample -- Great deal!  shop now

5 Day Pouch Test
  The Plan   ~   Recipes

Newsletter Archive

Free Downloads from LivingAfterWLS -- Tools to Use!

LivingAfterWLS is your premier online destination for learning, cooking, living, and connecting after weight loss surgery.

WELCOME! You Have Arrived!

The following PDF Downloads are provided free as support materials for the LivingAfterWLS programs and products. Please enjoy for your personal use and enrichment. Unlawful copy and distribution of these documents is prohibited.


Free Download Directory


Tools & Worksheets:
Calculate Your Goal Weight Range Worksheet and BMI Table
Personal Self Assessment Worksheet
5 Day Pouch Test Journal
Day 6 Daily Checklist
Day 6 Weekly Menu Planner - Portrait Layout
Day 6 Weekly Menu Planner - Landscape Layout*** Neighborhood Favorite!!!
Fit Is It Workout Chart

Documents We Love:
Back to Normal After WLS by Kaye Bailey
2009 Best of Cooking with Kaye

The New Food Plate & You & Your WLS

After 19 years the USDA has this week updated food guidelines in a move that makes a lot of sense: a Food Plate. The flagship icon is a color-blocked dinner plate (shown at left) with sections to represent four food groups: fruits, vegetables, grains and protein, with a side serving of dairy. According to Kathleen Zelman, RD with WebMD,  "We now have an easy-to-understand layout of what constitutes a healthy meal. Whether you are grocery shopping, packing lunches, or assembling a meal on a plate, the new food plan icon will serve as a constant reminder of the essential ingredients for a nutritious meal -- five easy pieces."

These guidelines are written for the population in general and they are a great improvement over the ambiguity of the iconic 19-year-old pyramid.

But for those of us managing our weight with bariatric surgery by following the high protein diet and Four Rules recommended by our surgeons the new simple diagram needs a few more details. I feel it is safe to say that all of us are invested in a healthier life when we undergo surgical weight loss and we know and learn (and re-learn) that a healthier way of life takes vigilance and lots and lots of hard work. The comprehensive "Choose My Plate" program that accompanies the new plate icon is a terrific addition to our health management toolbox.

At LivingAfterWLS we have spent the hours since the full program was unveiled yesterday pouring over the program and looking for ways to include the recommendations of Choose My Plate into our bariatric weight loss program as well as into the nutritional management for our entire family. We are seeking manageable ways to make the plate icon above into the real-life dinner plate at right- something delicious and healthful and appropriate for our LivingAfterWLS menu. 

Today we are sharing what we have learned so far so that you may join us and jump in with both feet to embrace a new and improved way of nutrition management for ourselves and the entire  family. You hear me say it often, that we are all in this together. And I think that means taking the best of what we learn from our regulatory governing agencies and applying it to our personal experience and knowledge. So here we go! Let me know what you think of the new food guidelines and how you plan to implement them at your table. Many of you share a goal with me -- to keep the next generation off the bariatric operating table. There has got to be a better way for the future and maybe we are onto it today!

Share your story & tips:  Send me an Email  Throughout June we will be sharing information and making sense of the new dietary guidelines and resources available to us from the USDA. 

Just in case you missed it, we published Cooking with Kaye earlier this week to address the new cooking guidelines for Pork. This is important news for us since we can now cook pork that is moist and succulent and still be within appropriate temperature as recommended by the USDA. For your convenience we have included the feature article in this newsletter or

Link Here for the full free newsletter available in our online archive. We have enjoyed hearing from so many of you already about how you love the recipes from this newsletter. Keep on cooking, Neighbors! 

  

CHEERS!
Kaye Bailey