There is now a non-surgical alternative to gastric bypass.
It’s for people with a BMI of at least 30-40 who despite changing habits can’t lose weight.
It’s called ORBERA and it involves inflatable balloons that help you shed 20 to 80 pounds.
ORBERA balloon is inserted down throat and into stomach using an endoscope in less than 30 min.
The balloons are then filled with saline, filling up space in the stomach.
The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the dual balloon technology and NYC Gastroenterologist Dr. Prem Chattoo of Hudson River Gastroenterology is one of the first doctors to offer the procedure. His office is located in lower Manhattan.
“It’s not a long term solution like bariatric surgery. The procedure is used for a quick, six-month weight loss to get rid of 10 percent of your body weight. After six months, the balloon is removed and you should see a pretty noticeable weight loss,” Dr. Chattoo says.
The end result is weight loss and reduced hunger.
After the procedure, ORBERA has a 12-month diet and exercise program to follow.
The biggest benefits about ORBERA, according to Dr. Chattoo, are that no abdominal surgery is needed and that the procedure is completed in the same day.
The procedure is recommended to those with a body mass index (BMI) of 30-40 or those who have other risk factors for heart disease such as diabetes or high blood pressure. A BMI or 30 or higher is defined as obese. More than a third of U.S. adults fit that range.
The procedure costs 6-8K and is not covered by insurance.
One procedure will be donated for free to one person in need who meets requirements. Contact: maria.dorfner@yahoo.com Write: Orbera in Subject, include your contact information.
Additional Images for Media: https://apolloendo.box.com/s/t7ukrrujfjk4mrgjwo5l5w5obd3djmbt
For more information contact Dr. Prem Chattoo at http://www.hudsonrivergi.com
For more information about the Orbera procedure visit: http://www.orbera.com
Stay healthy!
MD
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“Always remember the benefits of daily exercise for your mind, body and spirit. If you hate or dread exercise start with walking. Break it up into 15 minutes at a time until you reach 30 minutes. Then, increase it to 45 or 60 minutes. You don’t even need a gym to do that.
Remove all junk food from your home. Load up on healthy snacks. Remove all processed foods and soda. Drink lots of water. You’ll begin to notice a difference in 6 months. In one year, it will all be a habit.
No matter what help you get surgically or non-surgically, you always want to strive to develop lifelong healthy habits. Address the underlying of ‘why’ you select unhealthy foods. Stressed? Find someone to talk to. There are lots of free counselling services where you can call and talk to someone confidentially.
Rushed? Fix meals the night before. Hate your job? Start looking for a new one. Sit at a computer all day? Get up every 15 minutes and walk around office. Take stairs. Depressed? Again, find someone to talk to and exercise daily. Make an appointment with a professional psychologist if it’s really bad. When exercising, don’t focus on the physical. Focus on the mental benefits when you start. Physical has a way of catching up when you fix your mind and thoughts first. Stay positive.
Good things take commitment, dedication and time.
Your goal should never be a quick fix, but to change habits that got you to the place where you feel tired, sluggish and unhealthy and replace them with new, better, healthy ones. You can do it. One day at a time. ” -Maria Dorfner
Interesting research shared by Melissa Robinson:
Brown Fat, Triggered by Cold or Exercise, May Yield a Key to Weight Control
By GINA KOLATA
Originally Published: January 24, 2012 117 Comments
Fat people have less than thin people. Older people have less than younger people. Men have less than younger women.
It is brown fat, actually brown in color, and its great appeal is that it burns calories like a furnace. A new study finds that one form of it, which is turned on when people get cold, sucks fat out of the rest of the body to fuel itself. Another new study finds that a second form of brown fat can be created from ordinary white fat by exercise.
Of course, researchers say, they are not blind to the implications of their work. If they could turn on brown fat in people without putting them in cold rooms or making them exercise night and day, they might have a terrific weight loss treatment. And companies are getting to work.
But Dr. André Carpentier, an endocrinologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec and lead author of one of the new papers, notes that much work lies ahead. It is entirely possible, for example, that people would be hungrier and eat more to make up for the calories their brown fat burns.
“We have proof that this tissue burns calories — yes, indeed it does,” Dr. Carpentier said. “But what happens over the long term is unknown.”
Until about three years ago, researchers thought brown fat was something found in rodents, which cannot shiver and use heat-generating brown fat as an alternate way to keep warm. Human infants also have it, for the same reason. But researchers expected that adults, who shiver, had no need for it and did not have it.
Then three groups, independently, reported that they had found brown fat in adults. They could see it in scans when subjects were kept in cold rooms, wearing light clothes like hospital gowns. The scans detected the fat by showing that it absorbed glucose.
There was not much brown fat, just a few ounces in the upper back, on the side of the neck, in the dip between the collarbone and the shoulder, and along the spine. Although mice and human babies have a lot more, and in different places, it seemed to be the same thing. So, generalizing from what they knew about mice, many researchers assumed the fat was burning calories.
But, notes Barbara Cannon, a researcher at Stockholm University, just because the brown fat in adults takes up glucose does not necessarily mean it burns calories.
“We did not know what the glucose actually did,” she said. “Glucose can be stored in our cells, but that does not mean that it can be combusted.”
A new paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation by Dr. Carpentier and his colleagues answers that question and more. By doing a different type of scan, which shows the metabolism of fat, the group reports that brown fat can burn ordinary fat and that glucose is not a major source of fuel for these cells. When the cells run out of their own small repositories of fat, they suck fat out of the rest of the body.
In the study, the subjects — all men — were kept chilled, but not to the point of shivering, which itself burns calories. Their metabolic rates increased by 80 percent, all from the actions of a few ounces of cells. The brown fat also kept its subjects warm. The more brown fat a man had, the colder he could get before he started to shiver.
Brown fat, Dr. Carpentier and Jan Nedergaard, Dr. Cannon’s husband, wrote in an accompanying editorial, “is on fire.”
On average, Dr. Carpentier said, the brown fat burned about 250 calories over three hours.
But there is another type of brown fat. It has been harder to study because it often is interspersed in the white fat and does not occur in large masses. Investigators discovered it in mice years ago. Now, in a recent article, Bruce Spiegelman, professor of cell biology and medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and his colleagues report that, in mice at least, exercise can make it appear, by turning ordinary white fat brown.
When mice exercise, their muscle cells release a newly discovered hormone that the researchers named irisin. Irisin, in turn, converts white fat cells into brown ones. Those brown fat cells burn extra calories.
Dr. Spiegelman said the brown fat he studies is different from the type that appears in large, distinct masses in rodents, the type Dr. Carpentier was examining in his subjects. That brown fat is derived from musclelike cells and not from white fat.
Dr. Spiegelman suspects that humans, like mice, make brown fat from white fat when they exercise, because humans also have irisin in their blood. And human irisin is identical to mouse irisin.
“What I would guess is that this is likely to be the explanation for some of the effects of exercise,” Dr. Spiegelman says. The calories burned during exercise exceed the number actually used to do the work of exercising. That may be an effect of some white fat cells turning brown.
Many questions remain. The only brown fat that can be easily seen in people is the muscle-derived fat that shows up in scans. And that brown fat, notes Dr. C. Ronald Kahn, chief academic officer at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, is visible in people only when it is turned on by making them cold.
Almost everyone of normal weight or below shows this brown fat if they are chilled, although individuals vary greatly in how much they have. But this brown fat almost never shows up in obese people. Is that one reason they are obese, or is their extra body fat keeping them so warm that there is no reason to turn on their brown fat?
There is also an intriguing relationship between the brown fat that emerges under the skin and the density of bone. Dr. Clifford Rosen, a professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, is studying mice that cannot make brown fat and was astonished by the state of their bones.
“The animals have the worst bone density we have ever seen,” Dr. Rosen said. “I see osteoporotic bones all the time,” he added, “but, oh my God, these are the extreme.”
And while exercise may induce brown fat in humans, it remains to be seen how important a source of calorie burning it is, researchers say.
As for deliberately making yourself cold if you want to lose weight, Dr. Carpentier said, “there is still a lot of research to do before this strategy can be exploited clinically and safely.”
Brown Fat Burns Ordinary Fat, Study Finds – NYTimes.com
ABOUT THIS BLOG:
MARIA DORFNER is the founder of NewsMD Communications and Healthy Within Network. This blog is a part of that. She began her career in 1983 at NBC News in NYC where she continued to work behind-the-scenes on TODAY SHOW, NIGHTLY NEWS and all programs until 1989 when she helped launch CNBC.
As a producer, she has produced talk shows, segments and series and travelled extensively. In 1993, she developed and senior produced 7 health series: Healthy Living, Healthcare Consumers, Healthcare Practitioners, Lifestyles and Longevity and Green Magazine.
She co-anchored Healthy Living and Healthcare Consumers airing on CNBC for three years before launching NewsMD Communications. Her clients include a Who’s Who in Medical/Health, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which she shot, wrote and produced weekly segments for NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and Fox. Discovery Health Channel, where she wrote, produced and directed the documentary series, 21st Century Medicine. She has helped raise multi-millions of dollars for hospitals in need and has been a part of several successful health startups. She has worked as Director of Research for Roger Ailes at Ailes Communications, his consulting and production company and again as a producer. Her articles have been published in Broadcasting & Cable Magazine and she has hosted The Secret to Success.
She has continued to be a go-to person for network heath shows, stories and content. She was awarded a health reporting scholarship from The American Medical Association (AMA), a Freddie Award for Excellence in Medical Reporting, an Outstanding Achievement Award from the March of Dimes, an Angel of a Sponsor Award from Make A Wish Foundation and an Outstanding Leadership Abilities from her alma mater, Pace University and Commitment to the Advancement of Women in Media Award.
In 2014, she published 3 books. She was also awarded a scholarship to Columbia University by NBC News. She also received Media Recognition Award from the American Heart Association for her series Heart Smart. She has been specializing in Medical/Health for 23 years, and has worked in Media for 33 years after starting as an intern during college. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, learning, writing, nature, hiking, swimming, bike riding, working out, cooking, exploring museums and travel. She is a certified scuba diver and aerobics swim instructor.
“Health has been a passion of mine since I was a kid. What I do and who I am are seamless. I come from a large Italian family. If someone is sick I’m the one they call for research. My best friend growing up in Brooklyn was my cousin Josephine, and we’re still close. We were little health nerds. She became a pediatric nurse. We loved researching everything to death and still do. Two things I love and know well. Media and Medical. Yet, I think in both, they’ve forgotten the most important person –the patient. So, I want to help put the ME back in MEdia and MEdical. Today, it’s SO hard to know who to trust in both. Fortunately, people are smart and they are now well aware of the various financial ties “experts” and physicians and media have to promoting certain medications or other large companies, products or services that absolutely do not serve our health or our best interests. The worst part is when we learn they knew and do not reveal it to consumers for decades, which contradicts the oath, “First do no harm.” So much damage has been done and no one is accountable. How do you like that. Well, ethics matter. People matter. And people want and will choose what is best for their health. People are empowered and will use their money to denounce those companies aligned with making them sick. I created this blog to be a trusted resource for people. I do it for free because I believe Virgil is right. There is no greater wealth than health and you absolutely have to trust who is telling you information and why more than any other time in your life. It’s even worse if you’re rich because then people try to sell you even more things. That may be fine when it’s a handbag, but your health is too precious and there are no returns or refunds if you end up paying a price for trusting the wrong advice. Remember, “expert” doesn’t always mean that. I feel extremely blessed to be healthy. I’ve been healthy all my life. I’ve never even had stitches. I love to help people and my career became a vocation when I was able to utilize my communication and journalism skills to do that.”
-Maria Dorfner
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