What Should You Expect After Obesity Surgery?
Monday, November 3rd, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Weight loss surgery has been around for well over fifty years now and, while it does carry risks most patients are very satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a a markedly improved standard of living. There is however a price to to be paid and you will have to lead a very different lifestyle after surgery which can be very difficult if you are not prepared for the change.
Some of the post-surgical changes are obvious as the basic principle behind weight loss surgery is to drastically reduce the size of your stomach and physically restrict the amount of food which you can eat. This means that the days of sitting down to a big meal are gone forever.
But other consequences of weight loss surgery are not quite so obvious.
As an example, the days of eating foods that are high in sugar or fat even in small quantities are also over. The consequences of eating such foods can be very unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.
You will also discover that the dramatic change in your eating pattern leaves you very short of water so that you have to adjust to drinking small amounts of water throughout the day in order to avoid dehydration.
This is all well and good but just what can you expect from gastric bypass surgery in terms of weight loss?
Weight loss will of course vary from person to person but it is important to begin by looking at just how post-operative weight loss is measured.
Here you need to begin by calculating just how much excess weight you are carrying and this is done by working out your ideal weight. Working in pounds, for a man this is 106 plus 6 times your height in inches minus 60. For example, for a man who is 5ft 10ins tall the ideal weight will be 106 + 6 x (70 – 60) which works out at 166 pounds. In the case of a woman the principle is exactly the same but this time a women’s ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height in inches minus 60.
Therefore, if we take the example of our man and give him a weight of 366 pounds before surgery then he is carrying 200 pounds in excess weight. Weight loss is then measured in terms of the percentage of excess weight lost over time. Accordingly, if at the end of 6 months he has dropped 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In the majority of cases you could expect to drop approximately 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery climbing to about 70 percent after one year and to around 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients weight loss will cease after 2 years and some long-term weight gain will appear. Longer term weight re-gain is typically around 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.
Once again, generally speaking, if you are grossly overweight you will lose a greater percentage of your excess weight (perhaps as much as 90 to 95 percent) while if you are not so heavily overweight you may lose as little as 60 percent in the 2 years following surgery.
You will rarely lose all of your excess weight and are not going to reach your ideal weight through surgery. As a result, it is occasionally said that gastric bypass surgery is not a complete success. In spite of this the vast majority of patients would not agree with this statement and will tell you that the improvement in their quality of life is simply unimaginable. Something that is also clearly evident to anyone who has seen the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted on the internet nowadays.
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