Types of Weight Loss Surgery Options - Information for Potential Patients

If you went to the doctor to try to figure out how to deal with your obesity 20 years ago, you were likely told to eat better and exercise. Now, however, people who are struggling with obesity have many options available to them to help them shed the excess pounds. Some of the most popular options are surgical procedures. Weight loss surgery is a way to change the body so that it makes it almost impossible to gain more weight and easy to lose the weight that is already there. There are a number of weight loss surgery options available to choose from.

Most people have heard of the vertical banded gastroplasty (VBG), also known as stomach stapling. VBG is a surgical procedure where surgical staples are used to divide the stomach up into two parts. The upper part is small and limits the amount of food that can be in the body at any one point in time.

A similar weight loss surgery procedure involves a laparoscopic gastric band, or LAP- BAND. This procedure uses an inflatable band that is put in the upper stomach to create a small pouch and narrow the passage of food into the rest of the stomach. This helps create a feeling of fullness, allowing people to eat much smaller quantities of food without having to feel hungry.

A Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, or RGB, uses the stapling procedure to create a smaller upper stomach, but also connects the top of the stomach to the middle part of the small intestine, allowing food to bypass the upper part of the intestine and the stomach. This surgical procedure also limits the amount of food a person can eat, reversing the effects of obesity.

As with any surgery, all of these procedures have possible side effects associated with them. Most people, however, don’t experience any harmful side effects and instead find that they lose a great amount of weight fairly quickly, dropping the pounds because they are unable to eat the quantity of food that they did before the procedure. These surgeries are great options for someone who is mildly to super obese, and can be done through almost any licensed weight loss surgeon in the United States.