Lap-Band: Gastric Banding for Weight Loss
Last night I attended a seminar for gastric banding and I’m impressed. The procedure is simple, reversible, and seems quite safe. I personally would choose this over other types of weight loss surgery, especially gastric bypass.
The process involves inserting an inflatable band around the top portion of your stomach, which they can inflate or deflate quickly using a syringe and saline solution. This constricts your stomach right where a group of nerves exists - the nerves that signal your brain that your stomach is full. Also, it limits your intake of food, forcing you to eat slower, and eat less.
The surgery itself is laparoscopic, which means they only cut tiny holes and do all the work via remote control with cameras, as opposed to slicing you wide open. This is much safer and allows you to recover fast.
Afterwards they put you on a specific diet, which is the part I found the most interesting. It’s nearly identical to Eating Awareness Training (EAT) developed by Molly Groger back in the 80’s. So, it’s not the Lap-Band itself that causes the weight loss — the Lap-Band forces you to stay on the diet. It leaves you no choice.
That means if you could only keep yourself within the regime of EAT, you wouldn’t need the expense of the surgery. I’ve done EAT, I lost a lot of weight, but I let myself drift off the training and I started gaining weight back. This is not good, because EAT is not really a diet, it’s philosophical and psychological life change that if followed will keep you thin and free of weight-related health problems for the rest of your life. It’s not even hard! But the problem is, EAT is designed to undo programming that causes us to eat for reasons other than being hungry, and we’ve had years and years of this programming, and it’s hard to undo.
So, in essence, I can see where having a Lap-Band installed to enforce this training is not necessarily a copout. However, I would urge anyone thinking of getting the Lap-Band installed to first track down a copy of this book:
Eating Awareness Training
by Molly Groger
…try going through the training first, try sticking with it, and you’ll lose just as much weight as you would with the Lap-Band but without the $16,000 surgery.
