Whether quality of life issues or serious health concerns are prompting you to undergo weight loss surgery, you feel good about taking this important step. With that decision made, it’s time to look at your options when it comes to bariatric surgery.
At Rockwall Surgical Specialists, our expert providers offer two excellent weight loss surgeries — the gastric band and the gastric sleeve. Each leads to excellent weight loss results, but how they get there differs.
To explain the difference, we take a closer look at both the gastric band and the gastric sleeve procedures here.
Gastric sleeve, or sleeve gastrectomy, is the leading weight loss surgery performed in the United States. Of the more than 256,000 procedures performed in 2019, the gastric sleeve accounted for a little more than 152,000. (Please note that we’re using numbers from 2019 rather than 2020 and 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic skewed surgical numbers during these years.)
With a gastric sleeve, we remove about 75%-80% of your existing stomach, shrinking its size considerably. Not only does this smaller stomach make you feel full faster, we also remove the portion of your stomach that produces hunger hormones, which means you don’t feel as hungry.
A gastric sleeve surgery is irreversible — once we remove a large majority of your stomach, the sleeve that’s left is permanent.
We perform a gastric sleeve using laparoscopic surgical techniques. This minimally invasive approach means your recovery and risks are greatly reduced.
If you’re hesitant about removing a large portion of your stomach, you may want to opt for a gastric band, also called lap band. With this bariatric technique, we place an inflatable band around the top part of your stomach.
This creates a much smaller “stomach” above the band, which helps you feel full more quickly. The food then passes through the opening of the band and into the bottom part of your stomach and then to your small intestine.
Unlike the gastric sleeve, the area of your stomach that produces hunger hormones remains intact, so you won’t benefit from reduced food cravings as you do with the gastric sleeve.
With a gastric band, we can adjust the size of the band to let more or less food through, and we can also remove the band entirely once you’ve reached your weight goal.
As with the gastric sleeve, we use minimally invasive surgical techniques to both place and remove the band.
This is a question we can’t answer for you. Our goal is to provide you with the information you need so you can make an informed decision, and we’re here to help you with any questions you may have. We may make a recommendation if we see any issues that would favor one procedure over the other.
To learn more about our weight loss surgery options, please contact us at one of our locations in Rowlett, Rockwall, Greenville, Terrell, and Forney, Texas, to set up a consultation.
