If you are a significantly obese person who has lost large amounts of weight, only to regain all of it on perhaps more than one occasion, famed bariatric surgeon Dr. Michael Feiz is offering a ray of hope. It all boils down to one question: “What is ghrelin?” This formerly little known hormone may be the key to the mystery of why we gain and re-gain large amounts of weight.

Ghrelin carries the chemical signal to the brain from the stomach that more food is needed – or at least, that’s what it should do. However, largely thanks to thousands of year of human history when food was scarce, a section of the stomach known as the fundus has becoming extremely good at manufacturing the hormone -- to the point where your stomach is essentially lying to your brain. Moreover, the body actually tends to produce more and more hunger hormone when we lose weight due to lowered calorie diets and exercise.

The answer to the question of how to decrease ghrelin is obviously a vital one for seriously obese people. The good news is that Dr. Feiz has found that such bariatric procedures as a sleeve gastrectomy, also called the gastric sleeve, actually achieves that goal by removing the fundus along with 75 to 85 percent of the entire stomach. Thus, he is able to actually reduce the number of difficult-to-resist brain signals that cause us to overeat.

Dr. Feiz is one of the nations’ most renowned bariatric surgeons and free consultations at his office are available. For details, please call his office at 310-855-8058 or contact us at the doctor’s website.