Band Myth #4 – TO LOSE WEIGHT, YOU HAVE TO FIND
YOUR SWEET SPOT
I used to wonder how the Sweet Spot
Myth could survive in the face of so much clinical evidence against it, but
last year I heard the “you gotta find your sweet spot” claim uttered by a
bariatric dietitian, so apparently this is a myth being validated by medical
professionals who ought to know better.
Instead of the sweet spot, Allergan
(the first to introduce the band in the USA) uses a zone chart to illustrate
band restriction, with not enough restriction in the yellow zone, good
restriction in the green zone, and too much restriction in the red zone. In
other words, restriction happens in a range
of experience, not at a single static point. That experience changes over time
as we lose weight, deal with ordinary processes such as hormonal fluctuations,
hydration changes, stress, medications, time of day, and so on. It’s also
affected by our food choices (solid vs soft/liquid food).
In my banded days, I traveled through
and around a sweet spot many times. It might last for 30 minutes, 3 days, 3
weeks, but it never stayed exactly the same, and yet I still lost weight! I don’t actually want to stay exactly the same for the rest of my life (throat
wattles notwithstanding). As any Parkinson’s disease patient will tell you (if
they’re able to speak), a body that gets stuck in time is a very big problem (and
with my luck, I’d get stuck in the worst sinus infection or case of the flu of
my life). Some people who are very sensitive to their band and its fills find
sudden or unexpected changes in restriction to be very, very frustrating, and I
wouldn’t wish that on anyone, either.
To read more about the sweet spot,
click here to go to an article, The Elusive Sweet Spot.
1 comment:
G-R-E-A-T post! Thanks for sharing. Linked it on my blog!
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