Lap Band Blog

If you follow this blog, then you know that for the past couple of weeks I’ve really been trying to tweak my diet in order to make sure I’m eating a balanced diet after my lap band surgery.

I am not there yet, in fact I know I’m not getting anywhere near the variety I need, but with what I am eating right now is it good enough?
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Protecting your health is one of the most important ways to assure a good quality of life. If weight-related medical issues threaten your health, it may help to know that weight-loss surgery has been shown to be safe and highly effective for the treatment of obesity. For severely overweight people, who cannot lose weight through traditional means such as dieting, weight-loss surgery is a proven method of resolving or preventing chronic disease and enhancing one’s quality of life.

How to Get the Help You Need
Many health insurance plans will pay for some or all of the costs involved in weight-loss surgery. They do this because weight loss, no matter how it is achieved, has been shown to substantially reduce a person’s overall health care usage and expenses. When a person loses a significant amount of weight, the risk of developing chronic and expensive-to-treat illnesses declines, which saves the patient and health care provider money in the long-term.

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When I first started really counting my calories this last summer, I was eating about 900 calories per day, I soon hit a plateau. I didn’t stop losing weight completely, but it slowed down dramatically. I could also see some loss in how my clothes fit, but I wasn’t seeing the scale move.

Maybe the scale isn’t that important. But I think when it comes to emotional support it is. So I began to wonder if I was eating enough calories per day.

Calories needed per day

The amount of calories you need per day varies with your weight, height, and activity level. However, one thing I quickly learned was that 900 calories was way too low.

Everything I read in books, or came across on the web stated that anything below 1,200 is counterproductive. Such a low daily caloric intake can cause your body to go into starvation mode, therefore slowing down your metabolism, and eventually your weight loss.

How to calculate calories needed per day

You will need the following information (be honest):

• Age
• Height
• Weight
• Activity level

Then visit MyPyramid.Gov to create your own pyramid plan by inputting the information above.

The image to the right is “My Pyramid Plan.”  As a 41 year old male weighing 246 pounds, 5′6″, with a moderate activity level, 2400 calories is needed per day for “modest weight loss over time.” This creates a deficit causing your weight loss.

I personally started working on this about two weeks ago, I made sure to increase my daily caloric intake from around 900 calories per day, to a minimum of 1,200 calories per day, and since I created my weight loss milestone blog entry on the 7th. I have lost 5 more pounds in just 9 days.

My conclusion:

Cutting calories is important to lose weight. However cutting too many calories can be detrimental and not only slow down weight loss, but cause health problems associated with nutrient deficiency.

I hope this blog entry helped you. If you too had weight loss surgery or are considering weight loss surgery, I would love to hear from you.

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As I stated in my last post, I decided it was time to get off my butt and attend one of the support groups provided by the clinic that did my surgery.

I really want to be successful in my weight loss using the lap band, and this is just one of the tools provided to help ensure that success.

I was somewhat surprised at the turnout. This clinic is a weight loss surgery factory, and by all accounts that group should be full of people each week, but then there is a reason we are all fat.

Sure we like to hide behind the defenses of, “I’m big boned,” or “its genetic.” When in reality, for the most part it’s because we make poor choices in life, and one of those poor choices is not informing ourselves, educating ourselves in how to beat this problem.

Now I say that being one of those, who in almost 5 months post surgery has never attended a group.

I’m assuming my first group was a bit different than normal. Instead of having open discussion, one of the lap band graduates who is four years out from her surgery and still maintaining her goal weight, is teaching us about nutrition. She has gone back to school to become a dietician and part of her graduating requirements is a community project, and she chose teaching the group.

The class is taught focusing on how we can apply some of this knowledge to our new way of eating, which due to the small amount we can consume at each meal makes it that much more difficult to eat a diet that includes variety.

I will continue to attend, what I learned last night is already helping me to make even better choices.

Just a quick link I wanted to share regarding the new food pyramid.

Really nice website, and very informative.  You can input the amount of calories you want to consume each day, and it will break it down into how many servings of each food group you need.

It also has a food intake, and exercise diary to help you calculate your daily caloric needs vs expenditures.

I will of course be posting again soon.

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Every second Wednesday of the month they have a support group for lap band patients still in their first year.

I’ll be honest when I tell you that this has been on of my failures in goal setting.  I vowed that I would attend these meetings, and over eaters anonymous if necessary to overcome my bad eating habits.  But yet I have not been to one meeting yet.

So in keeping in line with what I stated in my first post, about making everything public my successes and failures to help keep the pressure on, I will from now on attend at least two meetings a month out of the three that are available to me.

I will report back later on in the day on how things went, and what I have learned.

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by: Karen Barrow
If you’re morbidly obese and you’ve made the decision to have obesity surgery, your journey is far from over. While this may be a step towards a much healthier life, the lifestyle changes that you will have to make after surgery must be considered or you’ll be in even worse shape than when you began.

“Gastric surgery is not magic,” says Brad Watkins, MD, FACS, co-founder of the Northwest Weightloss Center in Kirkland, Washington. “It’s not a panacea, but a very powerful tool to assist you with your weight loss efforts.”

[Full Article]

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Technically I’m only supposed to eat 4 oz per meal because of my lap band.  When you only eat 4 oz of anything, it is hard to eat enough calories to gain weight, but I don’t want to eat so little that I force my body into starvation mode, therefore causing my metabolism to slow down, which causes my weight loss to slow down.

So, I’ve been trying to eat the recommended 113 grams of protein a day, while maintaining a daily caloric intake of about 1,200.  This has caused me to make choices, and of course those choices are good.

I had an off day Sunday and bought pizza for the family, of course we had the hot wings and crazy bread too.  Well I went shopping last night, and I was thinking about buying a frozen pizza for myself which of course would take 3 meals to finish off at my pace.

I was going to buy one of the personal pizzas from California Pizza Kitchen, and I looked at the nutritional facts on the back, and it was a whopping 290 calories per serving and there were 3 servings.

Now that doesn’t sound like much  if I only eat 1/3rd of the pie.  But really taking a hard look at these things is making me truly understand how I got myself into this predicament in the first place.

In the end I decided not to get the pizza, in fact I’m heading out later on this afternoon going to Sam’s and getting the baked chicken, and a big bag of romaine lettuce.  The cost is about $2.50 more than the pizza, but in the end I get about a week’s worth of meals, along with a clear conscience going the chicken caesar salad route.

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Following E-R looks at the pros and cons of Lap Band surgery

By Shenikwa Stratford
Posted: Thursday, October 04, 2007 at 8:56 p.m.

You’ve dieted, you’ve exercised and are still morbidly obese. That was the case for one area woman who finally chose surgery as an option. But is it safe, and is it for you?

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By Amy Norton

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A form of weight-loss surgery called gastric banding appears safe and effective for severely obese teenagers, according to a study at one medical center.

The findings, published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery, suggest that gastric banding could offer teenagers an alternative to more-extensive obesity surgery.

In gastric banding, or lap band surgery as it’s often called, surgeons place a silicone band around the upper part of the stomach to create a small pouch. This substantially limits the amount of food a person can eat at a time and slows digestion.

Gastric banding is performed via laparoscopy, a minimally invasive technique that uses small incisions and slender instruments. Once the silicone band is in place, it’s adjustable from outside the body; the band is attached to a port placed just below the skin, which allows doctors to tighten or loosen the band by injecting or extracting a salt water solution through a needle.

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A new study examining the overall and gender-related effects of LAP-BAND System surgery (LAGB) on insulin resistance, body composition, and metabolic risk markers six months post-surgery has found significant improvements in insulin resistance. The improvements occurred despite continuing obesity.

The results are from the study entitled Insulin Resistance, Metabolic Risk Factors and Body Composition Six Months after LAP-BAND System Surgery. Joan F. Carroll, Department of Integrative Physiology and Susan F. Franks, Departments of Family Medicine and Psychology, University of North Texas Health Science Center; Adam B. Smith, Laparoscopy, Bariatrics, and Surgery, and David R. Phelps, Radiology Associates of Tarrant County, Fort Worth, TX conducted the investigation.

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Before my lap-band surgery, my blood sugar level was 125, I was borderline diabetic. Everything about my blood work screams normal now.

lap-band, diet, health, gastric-bypass, gastric-band, surgical-weight-loss, weight-loss, cary-darling

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