Media Archives

New Clinic at Campbelltown Private Hospital

07 Apr 2008

The Circle of Care is now open at new Campbelltown Private Hospital.

The newly constructed hospital is located at 42 Parkside Crescent Campbelltown. This new facility offers the local and wider community state of the art surgical facilities including all the latest technologies. The hospital has outstanding patient rooms including flat screen televisions and fridges in each room.

We are now operating at the hospital and our new Circle of Care Clinic will open at the beginning of April 2008. This will allow patients from south-western Sydney, the south coast of NSW and Wollongong regions a more convenient location for their follow-up care with our team of health professionals.

Please call 1300 722 224 to arrange your bookings.

Getting the right fill level

08 Aug 2007

What signals should you watch out for with your band fill level.

Fill the band instead of your body

08 Aug 2007

Before the band FOOD had control: After the band YOU have control

Each person develops a unique and personal relationship with food over time. Each individual also develops a unique relationship with their gastric band. With monitored adjustments of the band the appropriate level of control that you wish to attain over food can be achieved and maintained.

The band assists you to have control over the amount of food you eat, control over the speed at which you eat, control over feelings of hunger. The amount of control that each individual needs varies and is influenced by a variety of factors.

It's all about control:

• People who experience food addiction are unable to stop eating and are controlled by food
• People who are emotional eaters control their feelings with food
• People who are comfort eaters are drawn to food when feeling stressed, sad, bored, etc.
• People who really enjoy food are controlled by their love of food
• People pleasers accept all food offered and give control to others
• People who feel empty inside control this space by filling it with food

Learning to adapt to change and how to experience control in a healthy way takes time. In our modern society we expect things to happen quickly. It is so easy to get carried along on the super technology highway. Having control over food with the help of the band will encourage you to slow down, to function at a more relaxed and health-promoting pace.

Fill the band with fluid instead of your body with food. Fill your body with love, respect and care and experience all that you deserve to be happy and fulfilled in all aspects of your life.

Marianne Gabriel - Psychologist

To fill or not to fill, that is the question

08 Aug 2007

Some people need more fill than others. Some need less fill than more.

Jan (not her real name!) was nervous about eating out. What if she couldn't find anything on the menu that would go down easily? She was now in the habit of choosing soft foods because everything else seemed to get stuck. Her weight loss had slowed from a sizzling 5 kg per month, to a reprehensible 1 kg in 7 weeks. She was getting more and more tired from eating 'the wrong foods' and was no longer motivated to exercise.
Not happy Jan.

She now understood something she read about on the internet before having the band: bad food goes down easily and good food gets stuck. They had rung her to come back in. But she did not want to go. Feeling like a failure, she did not want to front up to the skinny Dietitian. What would she know anyway. B*)=h!
She would just go to another band fill instead.

In the waiting room, she overheard someone bragging about their weight loss and what a difference it had made to their life. Jan felt sad and more than a little jealous. She told the happy-camper what she was experiencing - sitting with her husband each night, she would eat 3 mouthfuls of what she had prepared for dinner, when the food got stuck, she would clear the blockage unceremoniously and default to yogurt and chocolate.

Tom laughed and said he went through the same thing after his third fill. He kept thinking he did not have enough fill ,yet after a point, the more fill he had, the less weight he lost, the worse he felt and more difficult eating became. Not to mention the tiredness.

Tom said he turned to chocolate for a sense of satisfaction from food as he could not longer eat the food he enjoyed. He was not a chocolate eater before the band - he left that to his wife who always seemed to be 'hormonal' and so ate a lot of it. When the Doc said he could have no more fills, due to the risk of erosion he was terrified. When was he going to feel restricted? He had 9.75mls of fill out of a 10ml possibility.
Then he saw the light. It was a glowing fluro pointing to a poster in the waiting room with the following words that changed his life:

Go slowly. Halve mouthful, double chewing after each fill. Check texture on roof of mouth before swallowing. This process adds 5 minutes onto each meal until it takes 25-30 minutes to eat a modest amount of food.
Focus on eating solid, ordinary foods .When you are eating 25-50% of what you used to eat, this is the right level of fill for you. The rest is exercise.

DOH! He had assumed the more fill, the better with the goal of eating the least he could for weight reduction - rather than just a comfortable less.

Mandy Turton - Dietitian

Your Exercise Workout

08 Aug 2007

Winter weather is a great time to exercise, to help keep you warm. 

In our education sessions, and individual consultations, we aim to inform you of a variety of safe types of exercise. It is important to remember that all exercise programs, including a walking program, need to have  3 parts:

1. Warm up phase and stretching.
2. Conditioning phase.
3. Cool down and stretching.

Often, the important phases of warm up and cool down are forgotten, yet they are very important, especially for people starting an exercise program.

Warm up:

Warm up is gentle whole body exercise to encourage a gradual increase in body temperature and heart rate. It consists of several minutes of easy pace exercise, usually walking, plus stretching.

Stretching aims to:

• Improve blood flow to muscles.
• Prevent injury by improving the range of motion around each joint.
• Improve coordination between muscle groups.
• Enhance each muscles performance.
• Improve relaxation and recovery and thus decrease the chance of soreness or tightness in a muscle.

Correct stretching is performed after warm up, so muscles are not cold. Each stretch should be performed slowly, with relaxed breathing. Hold each stretch for 10-15 seconds, and do not ‘bounce'.  In our sessions, I  will teach you the most important stretches for you.

Conditioning Phase:

This phase is variable for each person, and is discussed in consultation with you.

Cool Down:

Cool down is the gradual conclusion to your exercise session, allowing a decrease in body temperature and heart rate. Again, it consists of several minutes of gentle exercise, and stretching. 

The purpose of cool down is:

• To prevent blood pooling in the muscles post exercise, and reduce the risk of fainting.
• To prevent a rapid decrease in blood pressure
• To reduce the possibility of muscle soreness and spasm post exercise.

Even if "cool down" is brief, it  is an important way to finish your exercise!

Enjoy exercising, and I look forward to seeing you at the rooms!

Gretel Young, Physiotherapist