We offer weight loss surgery to a select group of people

Weight loss surgery (bariatric surgery) does more than change your stomach or intestines. It is a surgery that changes how various appetite hormones are regulated, decreases the volume of your stomach so you are satisfied with less, and makes it so you have less hunger. The operations have long-term success, where diets, pills, and exercise just don't work as well. 

Surgery is just the start of your new life.  After surgery, my joy is helping you rebuild your diet. Your tastes will change, and we use this time to help rebuild your diet for long-term success.

Surgery is not another diet - it is a chance to change your body so you can lose weight.

Weight Loss Starts with Admitting What You Know Is Wrong

Weight loss is not a diet. It is not a pill. It is not a hormone. It is not an operation.  Weight loss is a change in lifestyle. Surgery is the most certain way to change your lifestyle. Weight loss is a journey. The important part of the journey is not only how much you eat, but also what you eat.   Sometimes we help in the kitchen, learn to cook or take what you know, and work on choices that are not for weight loss, but for your health. The advantage of weight loss surgery is that we no longer focus on a "diet for weight loss", but on a diet for your long-term health. Weight loss comes from the changes we have made at surgery, and ongoing weight loss comes from rebuilding that weight loss. 

As a physician helping people lose weight for 20 years, I've seen many diets come and go.  Everything from the ice-cream diet, the cookie diet - and enough work-out programs that one would think America would have a problem trying to put on weight, not take off weight. People can lose weight on all those diets - but the weight always comes back, and it comes back with more weight. All those diets are gimmicks, but there is real nutrition. There is a field called Culinary Medicine, where we focus on the real data from real science about what foods provide great long-term nutrition for your long-term health. 

The advantage of weight loss surgery is that we change how your body perceives the food it eats, we change how hungry you feel, and we change when you feel satisfied. Our real work then becomes to get rid of ideas like "bad food" or "healthy food."

Here is What Doesn't Work

Fad diets won't work

Stop trying to lose weight by dieting, and start looking at what you eat and how much. Besides, calorie counting is a pain, inaccurate, and starving people in a society where cheap, abundant food is available never works. If you want to lose weight, and keep it off, you cannot be hungry. If you are unwilling to change what you eat, how you eat, where you eat, the odds are you will not lose weight. 

Lots of fad diets out there - and you can lose weight for a bit, and then it comes back - and usually with more weight.

Pills that work, injections that work, pills to avoid

The current weight loss medication is a once a week injection called Wegovy, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. It shows great promise and has been associated with weight loss of about 17 percent of body weight, less with diabetics.

Then there are medications for weight loss - and they are not a long-term solution.  First a warning: those medicines available by prescription are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.  Those medicines sold over-the-counter (without prescription) are NOT regulated. Many weight loss prescription medications have been taken off the market for safety reasons. Many over-the-counter medications should not be used at all. 

A prescription, by itself, is a temporary answer to weight loss. But with every prescription there is a caveat - meaning, you need to change what you eat and eat better. The question is what do you eat?

While new medicines come on the market for weight loss, it is a fraction of what you can do with surgery.

Food Products Won't Work

They may work as long as you buy their food. They train you to buy convenient food, and keep buying from them. If you don't, you will regain weight, because you have not learned to cook, but have learned to buy more convenient (and often tasteless and expensive) food. So before you purchase Medifast or Jenny Craig, consider this: do they have a program to wean you away from those foods, or are they a place to keep coming back for more?

Do you want to spend your life drinking one protein shake after another?

Exercise alone won't work.

The favorite of people who were once athletes. The mistake that you can exercise and eat what you want because you did when you were 19. You cannot out perform a bad diet. I want you to exercise, I want you to exercise responsibly, but without changing what you eat and cooking - it won't work. 

However, I highly recommend Yoga. I know, California and all - but it is an amazing work out.

Here is what will work

Changing how you eat - and what does work

The two best ways to eat are the Mediterranean Diet and the DASH diet. Both of them are consistently ranked the top two diets. They involve eating a lot of great foods and healthy foods, and have been the best studied longest running diets around. Remember, eating is more than weight loss. You can lose weight eating in caloric deficit from McDonald's, but long-term health is a goal. 

But with all those claims and people showing off their abs with some diet, it is confusing the information out there, isn't it? The body isn't made to lose weight, the body is made to find fuel and use it, and our society has made rapid fuel widely available. The body is efficient at storing energy. Your body is so good at that, and modern society has become so good at making food available that we have an obesity epidemic. Often the only way to change what works is not a diet, or a pill, or more exercise, but surgery to change how your body feels when you eat, changing not just your stomach, but altering many of the hormones that regulate hunger and satiety. 

So learning to cook great food, not settling for less - that is part of what we love to do in conjunction with weight loss surgery. You do not need to starve yourself, you do not need hunger, nor another weight loss diet. There is no magic food supplement to help you lose weight. 

For those patients who need this kind of help, I do weight loss surgery - but we treat it as more than an operation, it is a journey. A journey we can help you through. Our goal is to help you transform your weight loss journey into reality. But before you go there, let me help you adopt a lifestyle that sets them up for success after surgery. 

More than 50 pounds to lose?

With that amount of weight to lose, you should consider surgery.    But if you feel you need more help for your weight, visit our website: http://drsimpson.com 

Until then, start your journey by examining your lifestyle: what you eat, and where you eat. Perhaps it is time to make some great changes!

Experience

Surgery is about doing the same thing over and over again until it is routine. This is why weight loss surgery has been found to be the safest operation for someone with diabetes and obesity. Weight loss surgery is safer than taking out an appendix, or a gallbladder - why is that? Because surgeons have perfected these techniques over time. 

More Operations Tailored For You

We don't do "one operation fits all," we offer many operations, because we know that some operations work better for some people. Sometimes people were forced to get an operation, because that was the only one that the surgeon in their area did. Sometimes, we have to help people make that operation work, or revise it to another type of operation that would work better for them. Whether it is your first time considering weight loss surgery, or you are frustrated because of not losing enough weight or regaining weight, we can help you.

Terry Simpson, MD FACS