Weight Loss Surgery vs. Diet and Exercise

Everyone knows how difficult it is to find a routine when you are trying to lose weight. The road to a healthy life is long and arduous and there will be many pitfalls along the way. While weight loss surgery may seem like a big step, sometimes, it is the right one for you to achieve your dreams, but there's more to being healthy than simply being skinny. It's time to discuss the ways you can use diet and exercise to prepare yourself for weight loss surgery to achieve your long-term health goals.

Why Diet and Exercise?

Everyone knows the key to a healthy life is a healthy lifestyle. If you want to lose weight, the best place to start is by making small incremental changes toward your end goals. 

Building a regular routine that cuts down on your daily calorie intake and ups your physical exertion is going to contribute over time to weight loss and other health benefits such as:

• High blood pressure
• Heart disease
• High cholesterol

Of course, there are other things you can consider on top of diet and exercise to achieve a healthy weight and improve your lifestyle going forward including:

• Quitting smoking and all nicotine products
• Drinking more water every day
• Cut back or quit your alcohol intake
• Consider your emotional relationship with food and consider therapy if you are struggling to handle the changes on your own.

But what happens when you've adopted a healthy diet and exercise routine, but on their own they aren't enough to get you where you need to be? If you've already made lifestyle changes and are practicing a healthy diet and exercise routine, yet your BMI is still over 35, it may be time to consider adding weight loss surgery to the mix.

Which Bariatric Weight Loss Surgery is Right for Me?

When you think of weight loss surgery, you may not realize that there are options for you to consider, but they all fall under what is known as bariatric surgery.

Here are two common surgeries performed for people struggling with weight loss:

• Sleeves—A sleeve gastrectomy is a surgical procedure to promote weight loss which involves removing around 3/4 of your stomach, replacing it with an attached 'sleeve-like' tube. This stomach-reduction procedure is designed to limit how much you can eat.
  
  
• Gastric Bypass—One of the most commonly performed weight-loss surgeries, a gastric bypass is a type of bariatric surgery where a small pouch is connected directly to the small intestine. This allows swallowed food to pass directly through the pouch and into the small intestine, bypassing the stomach. This again reduces how much food you can eat by making you feel full with less food.

How Does Diet and Exercise Support Weight Loss Surgery?

Weight loss surgery isn't a magic bullet.

Simply undergoing the surgery will not result in you losing weight unless you accompany it with healthy new routines. Remember, you're considering weight loss surgery because you're struggling to lose weight with diet and exercise alone. Weight loss surgery without a strong lifestyle to back it up will not net the results that you are hoping for.

If you're looking to lose weight, contact us for a consultation to see if weight loss surgery is the right choice for you.