Perform Your Own Gastric Bypass!

In the last few years, Gastric Bypass surgery has become all the rage.  Magazines love to put stars who have lost weight on their covers, and this applies even to those who arrived there via stomach surgery.  To see some stars who've undergone this operation check out this link.  The surgery is actually pretty simple.  The doctors open you up, snip your small intestine, and attach the intestine just BEFORE the tube that enters your main stomach organ.  The stomach is bypassed completely, and your new stomach is just the little pouch where food normally gathers just before entering the digestive tract.  This graphic illustrates it well.  That little empty tube on the bottom left?  Yeah, that's where your intestine USED to attach.  Cool/gross factor here.

The average person loses 100-150 pounds after gastric bypass.  This is not done through willpower or a special diet, it simply happens because, with a stomach the size of an egg, patients can't physically eat enough to keep putting on the pounds.

There is something to be learned here for the rest of us who are simply trying to maintain healthy weights:  

When your stomach is full, food loses its power over you.

We all know this process.  Go to an all you can eat Chinese buffet.  The first trip up, the food looks and smells so wonderful.  So you load up your plate and chow down.  The second trip up, the exact same food starts to look a bit heavy, a bit sickly under the lights. But you go for it anyway.  The third trip, what just 30 mins earlier looked delicious is starting to seem repulsive.  I've been to a few Thanksgivings where I've been so full that I literally couldn't look at food anymore.  Indeed, one of the universal signs of "I'm stuffed" is holding up the hand, closing the eyes, and looking away.  That's how gastric bypass patients feel after a small serving.  Cravings and willpower just aren't an issue anymore.

I got onto this line of thinking last week when I had a busy day where I didn't have a chance to eat lunch.  That afternoon I had to go to the department store.  In Japan the basements of department stores are where fine foods are sold and served.  So I was passing all these counters filled with pastries, cakes, delicately fried dishes, and glistening juicy morsels at every turn.  It was hard to ignore it all, and I soon broke down and bought my favorite sweet red bean pancake sandwich, Obanyaki.  Yum!  But a bunch of empty calories that won't make me any healthier.  It wasn't the particular quality of the food that tempted me, it was the state of my stomach as I passed the food.  A little lightbulb went off above my head.

1. Leverage the power of a full stomach.  If you physically fill up your stomach, even a chocolate swirl cheesecake with whipped cream and blueberries won't have the slightest pull over you.  You will be invincible.  The trick is, of course, to fill up your stomach with good stuff.  Fruit is your go to food here.  Eating a whole apple will add negligible calories to your diet, but will leave you feeling full for a few hours.  Also, as we've discussed at length, switching to a 6 small meals a day approach to eating will keep you topped up and craving free.  You can also use water or tea to fill out your stomach if there's nothing else available.

2. Shrink your stomach organ.  No surgeons required.  Just as we can stretch out our stomach organ if we consistently overeat, we can allow it to shrink back to a more natural size.  Most people eat far more than their caloric needs.  If you can just start to cut the amount of food you eat, the stomach will protest a bit (i.e, will tell you it's hungry), but will eventually become smaller in response.  Suddenly what a few weeks ago would have left you feeling unsatisfied now fills you up.  Portion control!

Why spend energy fighting cravings, when we can largely bypass them entirely just by thinking a bit ahead and always keeping our smaller sized stomachs full of good stuff?  Who's in?