What Can You Expect Following Weight Loss Surgery?

                                                                                         

Obesity surgery has been around for well over fifty years now and, despite the fact that it does carry risks most patients are more than satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a a vastly improved standard of living. But there is a price to pay and you will have to lead a very different lifestyle after surgery which can be very hard if you are not prepared for the change.

Some of the post-surgical changes are obvious as the principle behind obesity surgery is to markedly reduce the size of your stomach and physically restrict the amount of food which you can eat. This means that those days of enjoying a big meal are gone.

But other consequences of weight loss surgery are less obvious.

As an example, your days of eating foods which are high in fat or sugar even in small quantities are also over. The results of eating such foods can be extremely unpleasant as rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

You will also find that the dramatic change in your pattern of eating leaves you very short of water so that you need to get used to drinking small amounts of water during the day in order to avoid dehydration.

This is all well and good but just what should you expect from gastric bypass surgery when it comes to weight loss?

Weight loss will vary from one person to the next but it is important to begin by looking at just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.

The starting point is to assess how much excess weight you are carrying and this is done by working out your ideal weight. Using pounds, for a man this will be 106 plus 6 times your height in inches less 60. For example, for a man 5ft 10ins tall the ideal weight will be (106 + [6 x (70 – 60)]) which works out at 166 pounds. For women the principle is exactly the same but here a women's ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches less 60.

Therefore, taking the example of our man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds before surgery then his excess weight is 200 pounds. We would then measure weight loss in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. Thus, if at the end of 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

In general you could expect to shed around 50 percent of your excess weight within in the 6 months after surgery increasing to about 70 percent after one year and to possibly 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients weight loss will cease after 2 years and indeed some long-term weight gain will be evident. Long-term weight gain is usually about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Again, as a general rule, if you are grossly overweight you will shed a greater percentage of your excess weight (possibly as much as 90 to 95 percent) while if you are not so heavily overweight you may shed as little as 60 percent within 2 years of surgery.

You will rarely shed 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight through surgery. For this reason, it is sometimes said that obesity surgery is not a completely successful. Despite this the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this statement and will tell you that the change in their quality of life is simply unimaginable.

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