I love Thai food!  After becoming a bandster however I discovered that for the most part I can still eat this food.  Our favorite restaurant in Hamilton is a little place called BT which is on Cannon Street.  The cool thing now is that when I order food I can bring some home with me and eat it later.  On Thursday before my husband left for Munich we went out to BT for dinner and I ordered Chicken Pad Thai.  I had this for lunch with him, then I brought my left over portion home.  Since my last fill, I can only eat about a half cup of food, so this portion made four more meals for me.  I just finished my last yummy portion! This means that an eight dollar meal lasts me for about two days and a half at about $1.60/portion.  Of course eating in a restaurant is more expensive than eating at home where I typically eat a banana or a tofu dessert for breakfast and also have something like fruit once a day.  What I am trying to say is that I think it costs me about $3.00 for food per day or $100/month after having my surgery.  This does not include however my daily expresso and water consumption which has not changed and would be about $50/month.  I also have to take vitamins every day now too so this has another cost of about 20-30/month. My husband and I also go out for dessert about weekly and now we share a piece of cheesecake, so overall it costs me $200 per month to keep me sustained.

I was budgeting $600/ month for groceries for myself before my lap band surgery so this means that I save around $400/month on food! This also means, that in 40 months, the operation will have paid for itself since I paid $16K for my lap band.  What I am saying is that the cost of the lap-banding operation seems initially high but still there is a lot of long term payoffs which I got that I had not anticipated!  Pretty cool eh?