SWITCHING FROM BAND TO VSG

I'm kind of scared..... i've had the band for 1 year and I totally eat around my band. That is my reason for my revision to vsg. Can you eat around the vsg and sabotage yourself?  Also do I have to worry about dumping cause I already have a sensitive stomach/bowels. Just need some info an advice

 u can defeat any surgery....ice cream, milkshakes and so on.....u just have to prepare ur mind that u are not going to fall of the wagon.....why would u go through 2 surgeries just to sabotage yourself in the end??? go into this surgery with the mindset that you will succeed this time, stay away from all the foods u use to try to get around the band.......

The risk of dumping is much, much less with VSG than gastric bypass because you keep your pyloric valve. Like the band, however, it's purely a restrictive technique; there's no malabsorptive aspect. Why do you eat around your band? Is it due to hunger, or boredom? VSG removes the portion of the stomach that produces the hunger hormone ghrelin, so if you are truly eating because you're hungry now, that should be reduced quite a bit with VSG. Let us know how everything turns out!

 The posters above have offered some excellent questions/advice for helping you to determine how well you can do this. But there are a number of people here who have had revision and have found the Sleeve worked for them, much better than the band did. Hopefully, some of them will post in here to give you some of their inspiring stories, but if not, do a quick search through this forum and you should see some amazing success stories from people who shared your challenge. 

After 3 years of being banded and 2 slips plus major esophageal damage, I revised to VSG 5 months ago and it was the best thing I could have done. I never ate around my band because I threw up everything I ate, but I could definitely eat around my sleeve if I chose to.

WLS is a mind game. The first year the weight falls off easily but after that it is up to us to put in the real hard work, and it IS hard work...I maintained for a long time both before WLS and with my band, until i gave into the head hunger.

I am also one of the Sleevers who dumps. It was bad the first fews months, the first time I ate a spoon of peanut butter in my protein shake, I was sick as a dog! Now if I do a small cheat that's high in both sugar and fat, my sleeve will ***** slap me, but not as bad as it used to.

If you are revising simply because you're eating around the band, I can tell you that you will eat around your sleeve (or RNY or DS as well) I would suggest finding a therapist who deals with eating disorders, it helped me deal with why I emotionally eat.

Sorry for rambling! Good luck, PM me if you want to talk.

It really depends on what you mean by eat around the sleeve. None of the surgeries prevent someone from sucking down a 3000 calorie milkshake, or eating ice cream. You can cheat any of them. You can graze with the sleeve as well. Setting a meal plan, and a schedule kept me from doing this with the sleeve. A lot of weight loss surgery is behavioral modification, and replacing bad habits with good habits. Unfortunately, none of the surgeries make you do that. It's a choice, and it's something that you have to do.

But, with the sleeve, for me, the lack of hunger is a big contributor to my success. Dumping can happen with the sleeve, but it's rare. I get diarrhea when I overeat a lot of heavy dairy fat products like buttercream frosting or like a lobster heavy fat/cream sauce, or tons of ice cream. BUT, that's more related to the fact that I don't eat that stuff on a regular basis. Kind of like when I decide to indulge in fried foods, my body just isn't used to that type of food anymore.

They operate on our stomachs, not our brains.