A range of different types of weight loss surgeries are available to help you to lose weight. Each of these procedures works in its own way, but there are two main methods through which obesity surgery helps. Some procedures use both of these methods to assist with your weight loss, while others focus on just one of them.

Restricting Your Intake

One way that weight loss surgery can help is by reducing the amount of food that you are able to eat. Procedures such as gastric bands, gastric bypasses, and sleeve gastrectomies can limit the amount of food that is able to fit into your stomach. The techniques used to do this vary a little, but they basically work by reducing the size of the portion of your stomach that the food goes into when you are eating. Once this part of your stomach has been filled, it will send signals to your brain telling you that you have had enough to eat. Since this makes you feel full after eating less food, it should help you to stick to smaller meals.

Reducing Your Appetite

Some kinds of weight loss surgery can also help you to stick to your diet by reducing your appetite. A gastric band doesn’t usually have much of an effect on your appetite, but a gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy can make you want to eat less. Your appetite can be reduced by these procedures because they block off part of your stomach. As your stomach produces hormones that make you hungry, having part of your stomach removed can reduce the amount of appetite-stimulating hormones in your system. This can make you feel less hungry, which makes sticking to your diet a lot easier. However, it will still take plenty of will power to keep eating well so that you lose weight.