If you’re considering lap band surgery or just beginning to think about lap band surgery as a solution to your weight problems and wondering how much weigh you can lose, I will try to answer this in this short article. This is one of the questions I’m most often asked along with the cost.

If you’re just considering the lap band system because you’re just a little overweight then the lap band procedure is not for you. Candidates for lap band surgery have serious obesity issues and this is called being “morbidly obese.” There is a way to determine that through the body mass index scale – the BMI as it is called and you’re probably familiar with it.

Thirteen-year-old Jesse Miller returns home today after having a gastric lap band surgery done in Tijuana, Mexico. By doing this, he becomes one of the very rare American teenagers who have undergone lap band surgery.

In the U.S., no one under 16 has had a gastric lap band. But this didn’t bother Jesse’s mother much about visiting Mexico for the procedure: “Most parents don’t realize what their obese children go through. I was obese as a child and I know what it means. I did not want my son to suffer the same tribulations of being overweight,” she says.

“Jesse weighed 320 pounds and would have gained 50 to 75 additional pounds in the next six months, and that would have affected his health a lot.

A recent study investigating the relationship between complications of body contouring surgery and body mass index has confirmed an increase in the occurrence of such complications with worsening degree of obesity. Findings from the study are published in the July/August 2008 issue of the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, the peer-reviewed publication of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS).

In order to determine the degree of risk associated with obesity when undergoing body contouring surgery, a retrospective review was conducted of 129 patients who underwent a single body contouring procedure from 1993 and 2002. Patients were categorized based on their body mass index (BMI), clinical degree of being overweight, into groups including ideal (BMI <25), overweight (BMI 25-30), obese (BMI 31-35), morbidly obese (BMI 36-40), and severely morbidly obese (BMI >41).