Pre sleeve stomach size

applesauce wrote:

T
I say the best thing about the sleeve is how easy it is to make yourself full. There is a HUGE difference between not being hungry and being full, at least for me. when full I have zero intest in food I will not pick or hunt for food where I can do that when not hungry with ease. I have found now I just grab a tub of low fat yoghurt or a glass of skim milk or my new fav watermelon and pig out to my hearts content, that being a cup *LOL* I am then full as full and stop hunting for things to pick at :)

applesauce

Wow! You just hit the bulls eye for me!!! Thank you.

When I diet, and I have taken appetite suppressants, I am NOT HUNGRY but I am empty. Even when I eat a meal, it's a small meal and it does not fill me up. This single post has helped me so much to understand the difference between the sensation of watching my diet before and after being sleeved. I kept feeling like there was a missing piece of the puzzle and realizing that for me there is a huge difference between being FULL and not being hungry...that is key.

I still worry that 1 cup won't "be enough". That I will eat that one cup and then actually feel robbed because I can't go on and have a second cup. But I understand now that a big part of the problem is that I can't imagine being "full" from that one cup. NOT HUNGRY, yes,....but FULL? I can't yet imagine that. When people talk about being satisfied with just a tiny bit, I've never understood. Now I think I get it.

Thank you applesauce. This was a big help. It may have been said before but your wording finally got it into my brain!

The rate you empty clear liquids out of your stomach on an empty stomach doesnt change with surgery. I you could drink a heap before you still will be able to after surgery as long as your stomach is empty. Diegestion of food is VERY slow straight after surgery and takes a good year to get back into closer to what it was before.

I say the best thing about the sleeve is how easy it is to make yourself full. There is a HUGE difference between not being hungry and being full, at least for me. when full I have zero intest in food I will not pick or hunt for food where I can do that when not hungry with ease. I have found now I just grab a tub of low fat yoghurt or a glass of skim milk or my new fav watermelon and pig out to my hearts content, that being a cup *LOL* I am then full as full and stop hunting for things to pick at :)

applesauce

Interesting! I don't think I even want to know how fast my stomach sends things on down the line!

The rate your somach empties at is more important than the size of it from everything the docs have told me. If you have a gastric emptying study you can find out how long it takes your stomach to digest the most complex low gi high fibre meal. Mine took about 1/3 of the average persons time... No wonder I'm always hungry! Having a sleeve does not change this, it only means I have to eat less to fill it each time, still need to eat more often than regular people from severe hunger pains.

Yeah.

They're the implications of the "selfish brain" theory. If it were true, altering the stomach wouldn't necessarily change the inefficiency of the energy exchange across the blood/brain barrier, and wouldn't change the signals the brain was sending out, unless altering the endocrine system by means of stomach surgery has that as a by-product (eg if there's a ghrelin feedback loop that would tell the brain to shut up and sit down). The number of posters who say that their compulsive eating behaviours stopped with sleeving is encouraging in this regard.

I'm kind of interested in "selfish brain" theory, though, because (as regular readers know), I have bipolar disorder, which is sometimes explained as a problem with energy exchange regulation within the brain. (Think of glucose-fuelled electrical storms in the brain, not unlike epilepsy, but milder. In fact, my meds are anti-epilepsy meds in low doses). Bipolar and obesity have a strong correlation, and I seem to have inherited both from my Dad, who also developed type 2 diabetes (thanks, Dad!). If bipolar and obesity proved to be linked conditions related to faulty energy exchange wiring, that could be interesting for me down the track... but it's likely to be decades before they sort that out. I'm too old to wait for that, so I'm considering WLS anyway.

As for the "massive" comment, I'd be delighted. It would vindicate my choice by making me feel it wasn't just a moral failing on my part that led to obesity, but a physical quirk I was born with. If the surgeon comes out of my abdomen saying "not big enough to sleeve," I'll be devastated. Mind you, I've never heard of that happening...

Best,

Dark

Dark:
That selfish brain idea is interesting but I wonder how having any sort of WLS would impact that, assuming it has credibility. I'd think your brain would go into a 2 year old's tantrum level and never stop if it suddenly could not have all the carbs it needed. Maybe, in theory, the brain adjusts after a short while? But I would think WLS folks would be a great good to study to see how much validity this has if they are saying it's about the brain and what it needs, not necessarily about what the stomach is sending the single of what it think it needs.

Interesting anyway.

One more thing on that documentary I saw. They filmed the surgeon walking out after one specific surgery and he looked into the camera and said "massive. compared to average she was hauling around a huge stomach." (Not exact quote but very close.) I remember cringing for the woman. I so hoped she approved of that comment being aired. Now I would..but at an earlier age it would have been humiliating.

Hi all,

further speculation on the stomach size issue, from a position of no scientific or medical knowledge....

I'm all for believing that the stomach's elastic, and elasticity helps explain a person's capacity to eat, but elasticity wouldn't necessarily explain hunger.

If hunger is partially driven by secretions from the stomach lining, those secretions might not be affected by stretching. If the stomach behaves like other organs, the degree of hunger might be fixed by the number of ghrelin producing cells in the stomach lining. That's actually the basis for the argument that sleeve gastrectomy reduces hunger by cutting away ghrelin (sp?) producing cells.

I known that in other areas of the gut, it's the number / type / structure of cells on the interior surface of the gut that matter, not the absolute size of the organ.

The number of hunger-hormone producing cells on the interior surface area of the stomach may remain contstant in any state of elasticity. While the surface area of the interior of the stomach might change if it were stretched, I'm not sure you'd grow new hormone-producing cells as the stomach stretched -- at least not after adolescence. That means your capacity to put food away might alter, but your hunger might not.

That certainly might explain how yo-yo dieters like me can restrict ourselves temporarily, and shrink our stomachs for a while, but the number of hunger-hormone producing cells doesn't change, meaning that hunger just keeps on coming back, prompting us to stock up again and restretch the stomach.

And then there's the metabolism issue, as well.

Meanwhile, I just read a very new, and highly speculative theory called "selfish brain theory," which speculates that the brain throws all kinds of tantrums if it doesn't get quite a lot of carbs (like the equivalent of 100g of glucose or 1/2 an average person's daily quota or carbs) every day on demand. The theorists link this to obesity by speculating that some people are very efficient at supplying energy to their brains, and that some people aren't. If you aren't efficient at getting energy to the brain when it wants it, the brain controls endocrine systems (hormone systems) to drive you to eat more and more, leading to pressure on other systems (eg insulin regulation). I'm not hanging my hat on that theory, though, as it seems to me that's it's a long way from producing a pharmacological fix for obesity.

Oh well. We all know obesity's a complex issue...

Best,

Dark

Not a silly question at all. Interesting question.

Years ago I watched a documentary about gastric bypass. It was just becoming sort of common
and I was considering it. I taped the show and let it play through several times while I did other things (housework). The surgeon said stomachs vary greatly from human to human in terms of percent. And that while you can make things worse by overeating, you can really only stretch things so far. The starting size is a "what God gave me" situation. It's like people who believe that your stomach will shrink if you diet. Well, there is some truth to that. It will shrink down to it's smallest natural size but if your smallest natural size is 20% larger than normal, you are still going to experience more hunger than someone with a smaller stomach.

I know my issue is more metabolism than size of stomach. I've been tested and my resting metabolism is something like 1600 calories NOW. So at almost 300 pounds, my resting metabolism is what should support a 160 pound person. That's why I know I have to have some sort of surgical help. I can starve it off but I can't keep it off. As my body weight goes lower, even with increased activity, the math just isn't in my favor for long term success. But I do believe that being truly obese, rather than just overweight, is rarely a one issue problem for anyone.

Hi folks,

if large stomach capacity's an issue in obesity, that might not just caused by stretching. I'm from an obese family, so I reckon there's a genetics issue there. I'll wait for the gastroscopy to confirm, but it could be that we just all have the "massive stomach" gene...

Why it couldn't be the "Pharlap heart" gene, I don't know. Rats!

Dark

i was told by my dr that my capacity went from about 1.2Lt to 250ml

A friend of a friend was told, after having the sleeve operation, that she had a HUGE stomach and it was no wonder that she always felt hungry.

thanks for that..since Im such a google person you have thought I would have looked into that..lol... surprising that I will say heh Ill cut most of my tummy off but dont know anything about it..lol...

I found this bit of info..............NOTE THE MAXIMUM HOLDING CAPACITY.........ITS HUGE!!

The stomach is a temporary storage organ for large quantities of food. It can easily hold 1.5 litres, with a maximum holding capacity of about 4 litres. Its three main compartments are called the fundus, the body and the antrum. The stomach is also an important site for mechanical and chemical breakdown of the food which enters it. Digestive juices are secreted from glands covering the entire stomach wall. When food is present, approximately every 20 seconds mixing waves combine the food with gastric juices to form chyme - a creamy, semi-fluid mass. This is gradually emptied into the small intestine through a narrowed region surrounded by a thick ring of muscle at the lower end of the stomach - the pyloric sphincter. Liquids empty from the stomach faster than solids, taking about 20 minutes. A mixed meal takes about 1.5 hours to be emptied.

Maybe a silly question but have you ever...asked your doctor what size your pre sleeve tummy was?

Im thinking that if a baby has a little tummy, a child has a certain size etc and someone needing the VSG has another size and you make it a TNT....

so that was a bit confusing but if a skinny person can eat a certain amount of food is it because they have an "unstretched" tummy and we overate and have a massive tummy.. hmm still coming out wrong... but say for me it takes A LOT to be full so is my tummy bigger than a slim persons and that is why they get fuller quicker or do we just eat way past the full zone.... and have forgotten what full means..

so in a nutshell they say an adults tummy is 1000ml.. maybe ours are 1500mls?