Texas Lap Band Surgeons Talk With You

What does a Lap Band really do? Sometimes I think there are a lot of rumors and mis-conceptions about how the band really works and what an ideal fill ought to  feel like.

The band is not (not not not not) supposed to induce surgical bulemia.  What does this mean?  This means that a good band fill should not be causing you to have PB’s (food regurgitations or “productive burps”) more than once every few weeks at most, and in a perfect world, never.  Sometimes our patients will come in concerned that their weight loss is “slow” and they think this might be because they never have a PB.  Inevitably, they have a friend who has lost a lot of weight who throws up almost every day, and they’re worried that they need to be like that, too, in order to lose weight.  This is sooooooo not right.  We ask about restriction during your visit to get a sense of how tight the band is and whether or not we need to unfill you, or if we need to educate about chewing food better or making better food choices.  Our goal is not to tighten you up to the point where you yack up your toenails if you eat a second McNugget.

The band works by decreasing your hunger.  When it is appropriately adjusted, it will activate the nerves along the side of your stomach causing you to feel full with small portions of food.  This is the “green zone” you see on the posters in the office and on the post of the home page of this blog.  We adjust the band to try to control hunger – hunger after eating meals that are appropriately small or hunger that returns too soon after eating a proper meal.  We do not tighten because you “can” eat too much – you should see if you can eat a good portion (good meaning the size of your fist for protein and the size of your fist for veggies/fruits as shown by Betty in the office) and not feel hungry afterwards.  It doesn’t matter if y0u can physically stuff another bite into your stomach – what matters is how you feel after eating what you’re supposed to.  If you’re not hungry- even if you could have eaten a lot more – then your band is well adjusted.

What is an ideal weight loss per week? 1-2 pounds. Not 5, not 20, but 1-2 lbs/week.  This may seem slow, but it’s (a) about the rate at which it came on and (b) is a weight that is safe from a health standpoint and will cause the least amount of skin laxity over time.  You may look at your scale and think the weight is coming off at a glacially slow pace, but losing 60 pounds in the first year is nothing to sneeze at.  If you want instant gratification, get your jaw wired shut.  You’ll lose a ton of weight…. of course it’ll come right back.  Lose it correctly – slow and steady – and you’ll be much more likely to keep it off.