Surgery is not an experience to look forward to, but it is something that can end up improving your life in significant ways. This is obvious for people who need something critical and urgent, like a transplant, but can be more difficult to see when you have to make a real decision that weighs the potential benefits of going into the operating room with the risks that it naturally entails. Many patients who have had difficulty losing weight, though, have had real success with Gastric Banding Louisiana.
The concept underlying gastric banding is that weight loss is difficult partly because people tend to feel so hungry during the process. When you can only eat a very small amount of food, you can’t fill your stomach and the feeling of emptiness can be bothersome and uncomfortable to the point where it drives people to go back to eating too much. Implanting a band allows a doctor to have an adjustable system that closes in around the stomach and controls both the amount of space available and how fast food can pass through. This is intended to make it much easier to feel full on small volumes of food, which should lead to weight loss.
People who get this procedure need to go back on a regular basis afterward to have the band adjusted. A physician will generally make adjustments to it until it reaches the point where the patient is losing about 1.5 to 2 pounds per week, though there can be some variation depending on how much weight there is that needs to be lost. Seeing the doctor is also important to make sure that the weight is being lost in a healthy way. While losing it quickly sounds like a good thing, going too fast can mean losing muscle mass almost as much as fat. Taken to an extreme, this can actually be dangerous.
Most patients of Gastric Banding Louisiana end up losing between 48 and 99 pounds in the first year. The fastest loss is at the very beginning, and then as there is less to lose the process will be slower. While this surgery is slightly less effective in bringing about very rapid weight loss than gastric bypass, it is also much safer. That makes it the approach of choice in many places.
