What Should You Expect After Gastric Bypass Surgery?
Posted by: HealthyGirl / Category: Weight Loss
Weight loss surgery has been around for well over fifty years now and, although it does carry risks most patients are very happy with the results and enjoy a a vastly improved standard of living. However, there is a price to to be paid and you will need to follow a very different lifestyle following 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 significantly reduce the size of your stomach and to restrict the amount of food which you can eat. This means that the days of enjoying a big meal are gone.
But some of the other consequences of weight loss surgery are less obvious.
As an example, the days of eating foods which are high in sugar or fat even in small quantities are also over. The results of eating foods of this nature can be very unpleasant as rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can lead to very unpleasant feelings of faintness.
You will also find that the change in your eating pattern leaves you very short of water so that you have to get used to drinking small quantities of water during the day if you are to avoid dehydration.
This is all very well but just what should you expect from obesity surgery in terms of weight loss?
Weight loss will vary from one person to the next but it is important to start by understanding just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.
Here you need to start 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 instance, 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 here a women’s ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height in inches minus 60.
Therefore, if we take the example of the man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds before surgery then he is carrying 200 pounds in excess weight. We would then measure weight loss in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. Thus, if after 6 months he has dropped 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In the majority of cases you should expect to lose approximately 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery rising to about 70 percent after one year and to possibly 80 percent after 2 years. For the majority of patients however weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and some long-term weight gain will be evident. Longer term weight re-gain is generally around 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.
Once again, in general, if you are very overweight you will drop a greater percentage of your excess weight (perhaps as much as 90 to 95 percent) while if you are less overweight you may drop as little as 60 percent in the 2 years following surgery.
You will rarely shed all of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight through surgery. For this reason, it is sometimes said that weight loss surgery is not completely successful. Nevertheless the vast majority of patients would not agree with this statement and would say that the change in their quality of life is simply inconceivable. Something that is clearly evident to anyone who has seen the many gastric bypass pictures posted online these days.
Tags: gastric bypass surgery, health, obesity surgery, overweight, surgery, Weight Loss, weight loss surgery
