Changing your eating habits with the Lap Band

Every Lap Band surgeon will tell you that to best lose weight after your Lap Band surgery, you need to change your eating habits.
You’ve developed habits over the course of your life that have led to poor eating behavior and the gastric band procedure will help you change those habits, but you have to make a conscious effort to change things.
We tell patients you that they need to work with the Band to change the following:

How much you eat.

What you eat

How you eat

1) How much you eat with your gastric band.

Remember that the gastric band is meant to help you slow down your food and your eating. It is not meant to stop your from eating. This subtle point may take some time to to learn. Don’t test the Band. This isn’t about how much you can eat. It’s about how little you can eat. The Lap Band will help you with your hunger. You want to stop eating when you are not hungry. Don’t keep eating until you are feeling overstuffed and really full.

2) How you eat after your gastric band surgery.

You are going to to have to learn how to eat much more slowly than you are used to. Here’s a few tips to get yourself to slow down your eating:

Chew your food 30 times with each bite of food.

Put down your fork or your spoon after each bite. That will make you consciously slow down before the next bite.

Think about your Lap Band like an hourglass. Just like sand slowly goes through an hourglass, visualize food slowly going through your gastric band

3) What you eat with your Lap Band in place.

Just because you had your Lap Band surgery doesn’t mean you can eat whatever you want. Remember to eat healthy food. That doesn’t mean you can never have junk food, sweets, ice cream, or something like that. But you need to really reduce the intake of unhealthy food. The band will help you with your hunger so that you aren’t driven by hunger and find yourself needing to snack often. You want to eat a fair amount of solid food that will slowly move through your Band. A good meal has about 4 ounces of a protein source such as meat, fish, or chicken and then a small amount of green vegetables. Focus on getting protein and healthy vegetables and reduce your intake of carbohydrates such as “snack” foods like chips, crackers, and processed food.

The Lap Band will help you lose your weight, but remember to work with it!