A New Year's Sleeve?

New Year's resolutions and weight loss seem to go hand in hand. Still, there is a big difference between someone with just 10 or 20 pounds to lose starting a new diet and joining a gym, and a seriously obese person committing to a gastric sleeve or another type of weight loss surgery.

The problem with many of these resolutions is that they tend to create a sense of failure when the big change a person is promising herself fails to materialize. This is especially an issue for people with very large amounts of weight to lose, who have the hardest job ahead of them. It's the case largely because hunger hormones like ghrelin, which can cause us to feel physically hungry even when we know intellectually we have consumed more than enough food, tend to go into overdrive after we begin to lose substantial weight. This is one big reason why people who insist that obese individuals can simply take up a truly healthy lifestyle, as if it was like turning on a switch, are so wrong.

The reason the kind of thoughtfully applied bariatric surgery we employ here works is that, by reducing the capacity of the stomach, we make it less comfortable to overeat and therefore easier to consume a great deal less food than before. In the case of sleeve procedures, the numbers of hunger hormones may also be dramatically reduced, since they remove a portion of the stomach that actually manufactures these chemical signals to the brain that tell us we need to keep eating.

So, if you're severely obese and are ready to make a big change in 2016, resolving to seriously explore a weight loss procedure -- perhaps by attending one of our regularly scheduled free informational seminars -- might be an excellent idea. Regardless, we're here to help all year long.