Why Should You Choose Weight Loss Surgery?
Why should you choose weight loss surgery? The answer is simple and straightforward: because for many significantly overweight individuals, it represents one of the only truly effective ways to lose weight, reset your body’s metabolism, and restore your overall health and well-being. For individuals who have been stigmatized for their inability to lose weight through diet and lifestyle changes, it is important to recognize two critical facts:
- Dieting often leads to long-term weight gain, not weight loss, and
- Dieting often cannot address long-term health concerns caused by obesity
At The Center for Metabolic and Obesity Surgery in Maitland, Florida, Board certified bariatric surgeon Dr. Wiljon Beltre’s goal is to help people recognize that metabolic surgery offers a better option for individuals who are ready to make the long-term commitment to their health and their happiness.
Dieting Leads to Long-Term Weight Gain
Over thousands of years of human evolution, the human body has developed complex defense mechanisms against famine and starvation, all-too-common problems for our early ancestors. Unfortunately, these defense mechanisms make it extremely difficult to lose a significant amount of weight through traditional “dieting”. How do these defense mechanisms work?
- Dieting creates hunger! Dieting causes the body to increase its production of hormones that promote hunger while suppressing production of hormones that promote fullness, so you actually want to eat more, not less.
- Dieting causes the body to burn less fat! Losing weight improves the body’s ability to process glucose, which causes the body to burn less fat and more quickly convert excess glucose into long-term fat storage.
- Dieting requires a lifetime of increasingly-restrictive eating! As your body’s metabolism adjusts to your changing weight, it becomes more efficient at processing food energy, meaning that less calories are required to maintain a lower weight. So the more weight you lose, the less you can eat!
Dieting Rarely Revolves Significant Obesity-Related Health Problems
Medical professionals now recognize that the range of health concerns most commonly connected with obesity—high blood pressure, glucose intolerance, and high cholesterol, for instance—are both interconnected and mutually-reinforcing. Once handled individually through medication, diet, and exercise, we now recognize that these conditions are, in fact, symptoms of “metabolic syndrome”, a condition affecting more than 34% of Americans today.
Metabolic syndrome is usually diagnosed in individuals with at least three of the following measurements:
- Abdominal obesity (waist circumference of 35+ inches for women, 40+ inches for men)
- Triglycerides greater than 150 milligrams per deciliter of blood (mg/dL)
- HDL (“good”) cholesterol of less than 50 mg/dL for women, 40 mg/dL for men
- Blood pressure greater than 130/85
- Fasting glucose levels of 100+ mg/dL
Patients with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely as the general population to have a heart attack, while other serious health risks stemming from metabolic syndrome include:
- Vascular diseases: restricted blood circulation caused by fatty blockages in the arteries
- Coronary heart disease: arterial blockages preventing blood and oxygen from reaching the heart
- Stroke: blocked or burst blood vessel depriving the brain of oxygen and nutrients
- Type 2 diabetes: an abnormal buildup of sugars in the blood due to the body’s inability to produce and/or use insulin properly
Surgery Offers a Better Solution
Today’s advanced metabolic surgery now offers a significantly more effective way to lose weight and address metabolic syndrome. Because surgery works with your biology, not against it, it physically resets your body’s hormone production and metabolic efficiency, overriding the genetic and evolutionary processes inhibiting weight loss. How does metabolic surgery do this? Metabolic surgery:
- Alters the size of your stomach to reduce the amount of food you need to feel full
- Decreases the production of appetite-controlling hormones to reduce, not increase, hunger
- Increases your desire for high-quality, healthy foods while reducing cravings for unhealthy foods
- Changes the way in which the body processes food, minimizing the intake of excess food energy
- Increases your metabolism so you burn less calories more efficiently
- Resolves underlying health problems such as type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, and high cholesterol that often undermine weight loss attempts
Modern laparoscopic techniques such as the gastric sleeve procedure radically alter how the body processes food and quickly restore the chemical and hormonal imbalances at the root of metabolic syndrome. For most patients, the result is not only rapid and significant weight loss, but the restoration of overall health. In fact, many metabolic surgery patients are instructed to check their blood sugar before taking their diabetes medications, because they often find that the medications are no longer needed within days, even hours, of their surgery!
Contact the Center for Metabolic and Obesity Surgery
Board certified surgeon Dr. Wiljon Beltre at the Center for Metabolic and Obesity Surgery in Maitland, Florida (neighboring Orlando, FL) has made it his life’s passion to help individuals like you achieve their weight loss goals safely and successfully. Whether you have come from central Florida or traveled half-way—or even all the way—across the country, our goal is offer a weight loss surgery option that is as safe, as effective, and as affordable as we can possibly make it.
Significant, long-term, successful weight loss is not easy. Even with the help of metabolic surgery, losing the weight and keeping it off requires a life-long commitment to serious lifestyle changes and hard work. But with the help of Dr. Beltre and our dedicated team of caring, experienced specialists, success is possible!
If you believe a sleeve gastrectomy is right for you, or would like to learn more about the health benefits of metabolic surgery at The Center for Metabolic and Obesity Surgery, we encourage you to contact our office to start the process today!
