anyone that might be able to answer this question.

What is the difference in a person who has had weightloss surgery and a person of the same weight who eats very little. I.e a 200lb person who has had a gastric bypass cannot eat very much, so when a 200lb person who has not had surgery eats very little and they have people saying their body will go into starvation mode. Well why doesnt that happen to the person who has had surgery. Hunger is only a feeling after all isnt it. And surgery is taking away that, and also preventing the person from eating cause they can't.

Please help a puzzled me

Not sure how much I can help but...

In addition to not eating very much, the WLS patient also has (depending on the type of surgery) verying degrees of malobsorbtion. So even though they both eat the exact same thing, the WLS person doesn't obsorb as many nutrients/fat etc. In addoition to the eating part, a WLS patient is more apt to exercise as part of a whole program than the non-surgical person. This doesn't take into account consistance, long-term compliance and many other issues. Not to mention that by this point most WLS people have realized "dieting" just isn't going to work for one of many reasons.

Hope this is helpful. I'm sure someone else will be along to give a more accurate explanation.

Hi TG,
I had LapBand Surgery and for us it works a little differently. We don't have the malabsorption that bypassers do, but we do have the little stomach pouch created by the band. I was also curious about the starvation mode thing and asked the very same question. The answer I got for us Bandsters was that when the new small pouch is full, the stomach sends signals to the brain indicating fullness even though there's less food involved. The surgeon told me that those signals will prevent the body from going into starvation mode, basically fooling the old brain. For me so far, so good, so I'm thinking that he was correct.

Chickadee