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Gastric Bypass Guide
Gastric Band Surgery Or Diet And Exercise
It is amazing to find that after 40 years of experience with weight loss surgery and with hundreds of thousands of procedures being undertaken each year as severe obesity grows more or less out of control, we are still engaging in the age old argument of whether or not diet and exercise should continue to be the first line of attack in fighting obesity.
Surgeons are still faced with insisting that patients are put through a medically approved diet and exercise program before they can approve weight loss surgery and insurance companies also require evidence of serious attempts at dieting before they will even entertain a claim.
Diets don't work! That's not simply an opinion - it's a fact borne out by years of experience and a huge mass of evidence.
If you are a few pounds overweight and are out of shape then certainly a program of diet and exercise will bring you back to your ideal weight and fitness level and, if you keep an eye on your weight and continue to take regular exercise, then it is not too difficult to maintain this state.
But, if you are considerably overweigh, and certainly if you have reached the point of obesity or severe obesity, then you may well be able to lose considerable weight through a carefully followed diet and exercise program, but you will find it extremely difficult to maintain that weight loss. For the vast majority of very overweight people this starts a cycle of dieting which results in their weight cycling up and down and, more often than not, ending up higher than it was before they started.
To prove the point, as if further proof were needed, a team from the Center for Obesity Research and Education at the Monash University Medical School in Melborne recently recruited 80 obese patients (with an average of about 52 pounds above their healthy weight) and put half of the group onto a strict very low-calorie diet and exercise program, while the remainder of the group were given gastric band surgery.
At the end of six months both groups showed similar results and had lost about 14% to 15% of their starting weight. However, two years down the road, the results were very different.
At the two year point those patients who were on a diet and exercise program had regained much of their initial weight loss and, while they were still about 5% below their starting weight, their weight was slowly climbing again.
By contrast, the gastric band surgery patients had lost around 22% of their starting weight. More importantly, this represented more than 87% of their excess weight, or about 45 pounds.
Sooner or later we are going to have to come to grips with the problem of obesity and the sooner we realize that diet and exercise is not the answer the better.
There is of course a degree of risk associated with surgery which is not seen in diet and exercise programs. In the case of gastric band surgery however this risk is considered to be very low.
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