What is gastric band surgery?

The adjustable gastric band (Lap Band) causes weight loss by restricting the amount of food that the stomach can hold at one time. The surgeon places an inflatable band around the top of the stomach. The band sections off a small pouch toward the top of the stomach, which restricts the amount of food the person can eat in one meal.

Studies have shown that patients lost 60% of excess body weight after five years, with a very low mortality rate of 0.1%.

Gastric banding is a form of restrictive weight loss surgery in which the surgeon places a belt-like band around the stomach—up high on the stomach. When the belt is tightened, it constricts the stomach to form an hourglass-like shape—leaving a very small pouch at the top of the stomach for food to get stored, as it enters from the esophagus.

The band creates a one-lane road that needs to accommodate dozens of lanes of traffic, a bottleneck that slows the movement of food through your GI system, so there's no way you can physically get more traffic into the bottom half of your stomach.

When your food has to travel through that belt-tightened hourglass to the intestine, it means that you stay full for a long time, and you literally can only eat a small meal (which also forces you to eat slowly and chew thoroughly). Thus, gastric banding helps you lose weight limiting your food intake so you can't eat (and store) excess calories.

Doctors can tighten or loosen that band depending on how much you're able to get down, which means it's a procedure that has some flexibility to it. (Think of it as when Popeye squeezes Brutus's neck. When he squeezes, Brutus's head gets bigger. When the band gets tightened, it creates more of a bulge in the stomach and tighter hole in the middle of the hourglass.)

The pluses: Like an intramural-team T-shirt, it's reversible, and it has the lowest risk of all surgical weight-loss options. The downside is that because your stomach shrinks, you have to cut food down to the size of the nail on your pinkie, which means you may be more likely to feast on junkier foods, than bulky foods (like spinach).