The oldest form of fat surgery is the most familiar, stomach stapling. In this well-established procedure, most of the stomach is sliced and then stapled shut.
After this form of fat surgery, only a small pouch of the stomach remains connected to the esophagus. The newly resized stomach can only hold half a cup of food.
Having a smaller stomach makes it easier to feel full. In fact, most people who have fat surgery feel full after eating the amount of food that you could put on a coffee saucer. It becomes impossible to eat more than two quarter-cup servings (about 50 grams altogether) of anything at a single meal. Weight loss naturally follows.
Stomach stapling is the oldest form of fat surgery, and you can probably find a physician in your area who has a lot of experience doing it. In fact, you should only consider physicians and hospitals who have performed at least 100 operations. You don't want your doctor's training to be performed on you.
Other procedures are little harder to arrange.
The newer form of stomach reduction, the Roux-en-Y gastric bypass, also makes the stomach surgically smaller. In this procedure, however, the stomach is not dissected and stapled shut.
Instead, after the stomach's size is reduced, it is reattached to the small intestine at a lower point.
Roux-en-Y fat surgery leaves a smaller stomach that fills more quickly. It also leaves a shorter length of intestine to absorb fats (and other nutrients) from the smaller amounts of food that are eaten.
With this form of fat surgery, you don't just eat less. Your intestines absorb less of the food you do eat. Roux-en-Y bariatric surgery produces quicker and more significant weight loss than just stapling or banding the stomach.
There's also a third approach to fat surgery, the lap band.
The benefit of the lap band is that the weight loss surgery to install it can be laparoscopic. The entire fat surgery can be done through an incision as little as one inch (25 mm) wide.
Lap band surgery can even be an outpatient procedure, so you can go home the same day. After lap band surgery, many patients go back to work in three to four days and resume all normal activities (except eating) within a week. The other forms of fat surgery require a minimum of four days in the hospital and six to eight weeks before resuming an active lifestyle.
You may be asking, "Why just shrink the stomach? Wouldn't it be simpler just to surgically remove all the fat?"
This procedure, called lipectomy, actually exists. Liposuction has the same effect.
The problem with both lipectomy and liposuction is that high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high blood sugars don't go down just because fat is removed from the body. Only the process of dieting seems to have this effect.
There is no form of fat surgery that is a complete cure for obesity all by itself. Lifetime attention to diet and exercise are still necessary. But successful weight loss surgery can give you the boost you need to regain control of your life and become truly, lastingly, healthily thin.