LAP-BAND: The Noninvasive Solution to Weight and Diabetes Management

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Philadelphia Eagle Max Jean Guilles lost more than fifty pounds with LAP BAND in a desperate bid to keep his job as a professional football player as well as win a lifelong war against his weight. Guilles says he owes his NFL career to LAP BAND surgery, as he implied when he told a reporter last August, ""I'm just playing football, man," he said. "I'm not worried about the weight. I got that monkey off my back."

Guilles was nearly 400 pounds when he made the decision to have LAP-BAND surgery, driven by the realization that a host of injuries suffered over a three year period all seemed weight-related, particularly an ankle injury in 2008. As a result of the noninvasive procedure Guilles lost ~50 pounds in less than three months.

Guilles is not the first NFL professional to have weight loss surgery. Jets coach Rex Ryan also had a successful lap-band surgery in March of 2010. Both Guilles and Ryan report that they made the decision to undergo the noninvasive procedure when they realized their weight might be holding them back professionally.

In an ESPN story, Ryan blamed his weight for him not getting the head coaching job with the Atlanta Falcons after the 2007 season. He told a reporter that he thought he was a shoo-in for the job but lost it to Mike Smith. "I think I was too fat," Ryan was reported as saying.

As for Guilles he has his wife to thank for his new lease on life. "It's was all my wife's idea actually," he said. "I thank her for that. She talked about it to the team, something that would give me quick results and something that could get me back on the field ASAP."

Calling himself "the LAP BAND man" Guilles was moved by more than a desire to be injury free during the NFL season.

"I did it for now and in the future," said Jean-Gilles told reports. "I.. had to lose the weight to stay on the field. And I sure didn't want to be 400 pounds - or more - after football and then have heart problems and all kinds of health problems."

The FDA recently lowered the BMI restrictions on how overweight someone must be to qualify for LAP-BAND surgery.

"There are millions and millions of people who meet these criteria," said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of the division of nutrition at Harvard Medical School.

Currently , the required BMI for having LAP BAND surgery in the US is 40 or more, although patients suffering from comorbidites such as diabetes can have the surgery with a BMI of 35.

The sometimes grinding pace of FDA approval led Allergan to certify gastroenterologist surgeons abroad, notably in Mexico, to perform the LAP BAND procedure. As a result, some Mexican gastroenterologist surgeons are among the most experienced LAP-BAND surgeons in the world, for example Dr. Juan Lopez Corvala at the Weight Loss Surgery Center of Mexico located at state-of-the-art private Hospital Angeles. In fact, Dr. Lopez Corvala (called in bariatric surgical circles "The Little Giant of LAP BAND") proctored the first ever LAP BAND surgeries at UCLA and USC.

This has resulted in a boon for US patients, who can save thousands by opting to fly to San Diego and take the medical shuttle to the Angeles medical complex to have their procedure with Lopez-Corvala, who has performed an estimated 6,000 of the procedures, for $5,000.

It is also worth noting that Dr. Lopez Corvala is one of the few surgeons in the world offering an alternative to LAP BAND, the gastric plication, which offers patients weight loss that is faster and quicker than LAP BAND with no device. The hospital offers a free medical webcast for patients who want to learn more about the gastric plication or other weight loss surgery procedures.

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Tom of Iowa lost his parents to complications from obesity-related diabetes, so he knew firsthand how dangerous it was to reach 400 lbs. He realized he was robbing his children of their father because of his weight-enforced sedentary life.

"I was spent and my wife felt like she was a single mother." he said.

Overweight from early childhood, Morse had never been able to lose more than 40 or 50 lbs before yo-yoing back to the morbidly obese range of 300-400lbs. Having LAP-BAND helped him shed more than 100bs and released him from the prison of his weight.

Chat with someone who had LAP-BAND now: http://www.healthtravelguides.com/Weight-Loss/Lapband

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The man questioned freely admitted to prejudice against fat people.

"It's their own fault. And they take up too much room on the bus," " he said in a recent NY times story on the subject of fat stigmatization.

Maybe you recognize the attitude - in fact, it's likely you even share it, according to a study conducted by Arizona State University which found that people in 10 countries all expressed similar, negative attitudes towards the overweight.

The Professor Alexandra BrewisIt's of Arizona's School of Human Evolution and Social Change conducted the study; in her analysis, the tendency to stigmatize fat people is possibly a backfire effect of public health campaigns that focus on the person to the exclusion of the role of dominant factors such as environment that contribute to the obesity trend - a trend that is global, and accelerated in the US and Mexcio.

Dr. Stephen McGarvey of Brown University agreed, pointing out that public health pushing "you can do it" are tacitly interpreted as "if you don't, this is your fault". The oversimplification of the cause of obesity, and resultant stimatization of fat people, is counterproductive to change, creating a self-perpetuating cycle that not just will but *is* resulting in a downward spiral of trapping the overweight in an increasingly obesogenic environment.

The effects of more than a third of the US population being obese are more severe than low self-esteem and poor body image; the health consequences, and the resultant costs, will be severe. Obesity is the major cause of the tsunami-like rise of Type 2 diabetes, which now is appearing in children as well as adults. Diabetes has become the seventh leading cause of death in the US and one of the major causes of renal (kidney) failure. A person with diabetes can expect to live on average six years less; recently, the New England Journal of Medicine issued a report called "The Shape of Things" reporting that because of obesity, or the first time in more than 200 years, American children are on a path to have a shorter life than that of their parents.

it appears the US population is ready to do something more productive than stigmatizing the overweight -- a recent Pew Study reported that nearly 6 in 10 agreed that obesity has become a serious enough issue that the government should take steps to reduce and prevent it. As well, the latest edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans has been released by the Department of Agriculture. And the FDA recently approved lower BMI guidelines for LAP BAND surgery, enabling millions of people a chance to lose 50% or more of their excess weight while resolving diabetes, sleep apnea, and other serious health problems that tend to accompany obesity.

Maybe we'll even seen Phys Ed come back into school curriculum. Because it's not enough to get moving on obesity - we need to think about obesity prevention. And the road to obesity prevention is paved, not with stigma, but change.

Google this: Spreading Fat Stigma Around the Globe - NYTimes.com.

Dr. Lopez Corvala has performed more than 5,000 LAP-BANDS on US patients at private Hospital Angeles. The all-inclusive LAP_BAND program is just $5,000. Call toll free 866.668.9263 x121 (Laureli had her LAP-BAND with Dr. Lopez Corvala) or chat us http://www.angeleshealth.com/chat/

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Medical Review Board has formally recommended that all drivers with a body mass index of 30 or greater be tested for sleep apnea. Studies show that long haul truckers have higher incidence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep apnea and diabetes, and that there is enough evidence to suggest that health problems, and modifiable risk factors (diet and physical activity) could significantly influence accident rates.

LAP BAND, then, appears to be the trucker's friend: it results in a loss of 50% or more of excess weight and improves or resolves Type II diabetes and sleep apnea.

When discussing the innovations designed to help people lose weight - everything from devices without surgery, like the gastric pacemaker, or surgery wthout devices (which significantly lowers the risk of complication/rejection), like the gastric pleat - I often get feedback about how any solution that focuses on the result of the problem (e.g. the weight that results from overeating) instead of further upstream at the cause (the diet and exercise patterns of the overweight) can offer short-term hope but by its very definition will be ineffective in the long term.

After all the common wisdom is so clear - if people would just exert more discipline in their daily lives, ensuring their calories in do not exceed calories expended. In other words, if people would just eat right and exercise, then we'd have no obesity or, by extension, obesity-related chronic illnesses such as the Type 2 Diabetes pandemic predicted to shorten the lifespans of today's children to such an extent that, for the first time in history, doctors are predicting a generation of children who will have shorter lives than their parents.

The problem is, the common wisdom isn't. If it were, then we would probably have a different reality than 66% of Americans being overweight or obese (according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

Let's look at the common wisdom in terms of the simple math it is often presented in, a 3-step syllogism:

1. There are 3,500 calories in a pound.
2. If you subtract 100 calories per day by walking for 20 minutes,
3. Then you ought to lose a pound every 35 days.

According to obesity researcher Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, it is more difficult to to maintain this calories in-calories out balance than people realize, for several reasons:

First, imprecise calorie accounting is unavoidable, given the wide variability of meal size and composition that most people face on a weekly if not daily basis, with little in the way of nutritional informational labeling/accounting for the food we actually consume

Second, the brain has a genetically determined weight of about +/- 30 pounds that it 'defends'; drop below that natural set point and your brain will signal you to eat more and return to homeostasis, or, for uncooperative dieters, slow your metabolism to conserve energy and regain to the set point in *that* way

As Dr. Matthew W. Gillman, obesity prevention program at Harvard Medical School/Pilgrim Health Care said in a NY Times interveiw, "There are physiological mechanisms that keep us from losing weight."

You read that right: The brain has mechanisms to prevent us from losing weight. Your body's ability to maintain a set point is why a person can skip a meal, or even fast for short periods, without losing weight. It's also why burning 100 calories in a 75 minute walk every day won't lead to the slow, steady weight loss that the common wisdom math implies.

Dictated to by the brain's set-point meter monitoring, most dieters will unknowingly make up for deprivation with extra bites here and there without even realizing it, a system that operates with " 99.6 percent precision," according to Dr. Friedman.

If that weren't enough, there is more deconstructing of the common wisdom: while we often blame the lack of exercise and bad food choices dictated by a time-pressed, convenience-oriented environment for obesity, the latest obesity research suggests that the environment that most strongly influences body composition may actually be in utero.

Animal studies have shown conclusively that the mother's diet may have far more to do with the genetic set-point determined for a child's weight, a seeming correlate to the studies among humans that have demonstrated a link between mom's gestational habits and the adult weight of her children, for example, women who eat little and/or smoke during pregnancy are more likely to have fatter adult children

In short, the body, due to many factors, establishes its optimal set-point weight early- possibly even in the womb - suggesting that weight control. As a result, weight control is difficult for most people, and obesity may be almost impossible to cure.

Check out the live radio call-in show "Does LAP BAND really work?" You'll ge ta chance to talk with registered nurse Sandy Lauria, who discusses the specifics of the procedure, recovery and post-procedure diet, the process of getting the bands filled, and of course the risks and watch outs.

Sandy will also discuss alternatives to LAP-BAND, including a relatively new and innovative proceudre that requires no device, called gastric plicaiton. And why do so many people elect to have the LAP-BAND procedure in Mexico? Sandy has the lowdown, after visiting half a dozen of of that country's best and worst hospitals and clinics.

Log in http://www.blogtalkradio.com/medicaltraveltalk or call toll free 1 (877) 497-9096, direct 1 (424) 222-5215.

Joining the show will be LAP-BAND patient Laureli Srery who had her LAP-BAND more than one year ago at Hospital Angeles in Tijuana Mexico - her story was videocast in France, and she shares the story of her success with us in the show.

The problem of childhood obesity in the United States has become so widespread it has led First Lady Michelle Obama to create the 'Let's Move' program to reduce obesity in children. Estimates place obesity rates among adolescents between 16-32%. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, the next generation of children may be the first in history to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Obesity most commonly begins around adolescence, but can start as early as age 6. Studies have shown that a child who is obese at the age of 13 has an 80% chance of becoming an obese adult. If one parent is obese, there is a 50% chance that the children will also be obese; when both parents are obese, children have an 80% chance of being obese. In a study reported by the CDC, 70% of obese 5-17 year olds had at least one risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

There are many risks and complications with obesity. Physical consequences include, in addition to increased risk of heart disease, an increased likelihood of high blood pressure , diabetes , breathing problems, persistent digestive problems such as acid reflux, sleep apnea. In addition, adolescent obesity is associated with an increased risk of emotional problems, including lower self-esteem, depression, anxiety, and social isolation.

As the number of adolescents with clinically severe obesity has grown, so too have the number of adolescents seeking bariatric surgery. Parents should be sure to select a gastroenterologist surgeon who specializes in adolescent band placement, preferably a surgeon who is Allergan certified. It is strongly advisable for all teens to have their procedure at hospitals rather than clinics; while the LAP-BAND procedure is very low risk, it is nevertheless major surgery, and controlling what risk you can control for, for example the 24 hour presence of a surgeon, ER and ICU, as well as cardiac and internal medicine specialists, is just good sense.

Health magazine compiled a list of the "10 Healthiest Slimming Vacations." The judges ranked these spa and fitness escapes based on food quality, creativity of the exercise options and whether vacationers could take home their new healthy habits. The top 2 destinations are Arizona and Hawaii.....