What is a Fill?

Your first adjustment

When the LAP-BAND is implanted, it is usually empty or only partially inflated. The goal is not to lose weight at this point, but to get you familiar with your band and promote healing.

Your first few weeks are important. Take every precaution to avoid vomiting and putting pressure on your “new” small stomach.

About 4 to 6 weeks following the surgery, you will most likely have your first band adjustment. The timing varies according to the individual. You and your surgeon will determine the appropriate time, based on your:

• weight loss
• food intake
• exercise level
• band’s fluid level

One of your LAP-BAND’s greatest advantages is the ability to adjust it. This ensures you and your surgeon can determine the appropriate level of restriction for your health, comfort and weight-loss success.

 

How the band adjustments work

To adjust your LAP-BAND, you surgeon or clinical professional injects or removes saline fluid through the band’s access port under your skin. The saline is added or removed using a special needle. While you may feel a small prickling sensation, most patients describe the process as painless. Do not ever attempt to adjust your own band, nor allow anyone but your surgeon or a properly trained medical professional to adjust your band. Self adjustments or adjustments performed by untrained medical professionals without proper equipment can damage your band or cause adverse reactions.

 

Go Green

For success, patients should work with the LAP-BAND to achieve a point of prolonged satiety and healthy weight loss or maintenance.  This comes from finding the ideal “fill” volume of their band. And this only comes through routine visits with your surgeon and ongoing adjustments.

This ideal zone is often referred to as the Green Zone:  the point at which the LAP-BAND is most effective for a particular patient. But there is a range outside the Green Zone where the patient may be too tight or too lose.

The Yellow Zone: If the band is too loose, the patient is hungry, meals are bigger and small meals do not satisfy. Saline needs to be added to the band.

The Red Zone: If the band is too tight the patient will have difficulty eating, swallowing may be difficult and painful, and food regurgitation occurs. It may cause obstruction so that even saliva or fluid cannot pass the band.

The Green Zone: The optimal fill volume where a patient feels full after eating small meals and experiences prolonged satisfaction after these meals. Patients are losing 1-2 pounds a week or are able to maintain weight loss after goal weight has been reached.

 

Get into the LAP-BAND Green Zone

 

How many adjustments are necessary?

The goal is to create the right physiological response so that patients are generally not hungry and are satisfied by small meals. The Green Zone is best achieved by small incremental adjustments and by listening carefully to the patient. Some important questions to keep in mind are:

• What are you eating?
• How is your appetite?
• How many times a day are you hungry?
• How fast are you eating?

It’s likely you will need more than one band adjustment. Think of it as tightening the belt to your pants as you lose weight. The adjustments help provide restriction and satiety—the feeling of fullness after eating a small meal. This is healthy and expected, but the number of adjustments varies from individual to individual. There is no pre-set number of adjustments to achieve your weight loss results.

The prospect of losing weight is exciting, but it’s important not to hurry adjustments. Your success relies on open communication and a solid partnership with your medical team.

 

New eating habits

Once you resume eating solid foods, it’s important to monitor your diet. Liquids will not be filling, because they pass into your digestive system quickly. Therefore, it’s best to steer clear of high-calorie drinks and sweets. Instead, choose water, broth, tea or coffee (without sugar).

Chewing food carefully is important. It helps you to feel full sooner. It prevents blocking the stomach pouch outlet with large chunks of food.

It’s best to eat three small meals a day. Try to keep meals balanced by including meat, vegetables, fruit, bread, and/or dairy products.

 

Incorporating Exercise

It’s no secret that exercise is good for you, although it can be difficult and painful when you’re carrying excess weight. But as you begin losing weight with the LAP-BAND, you’ll find this task easier and even enjoyable.

The goal is to find 30 minutes a day several days a week to exercise. Although this may seem daunting, every little bit helps, so get started even if it’s just a few minutes of stretching. At the beginning, you may want to start with simply parking your car farther away from a store or using some water bottles as weights to do some bicep curls, even cleaning the house. You’d be surprised at the number of low impact activities you can do to burn calories. In time, you will be able to include exercise such as aerobics, jogging or cycling.

Be sure to check with your doctor about the exercise program you are planning, and update the program together.