What Should You Expect After Obesity Surgery?

Gastric bypass surgery has been performed 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. But there is a price to to be paid and you will need to follow a very different lifestyle after surgery which can be very difficult if you are not prepared for the change.

Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the basic principle behind gastric bypass surgery is to significantly reduce the size of your stomach and to restrict the amount of food that you can eat. This simply means that your days of enjoying a big meal are over.

However other consequences of gastric bypass 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 consequences of eating foods of this nature can be extremely unpleasant as rapid absorption in your now shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

You will also find that the change in your pattern of eating leaves you extremely 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 well and good but just what can you expect from weight loss surgery when it comes to weight loss?

Weight loss will vary from person to person but it is important to start by understanding just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.

Here you need to start by assessing just how much excess weight you are carrying and this means working out your ideal weight. Working in pounds, for a man this will be 106 plus 6 times your height in inches less 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 measured in inches minus 60.

Thus, if we take the example of the man and give him a weight of 366 pounds then his excess weight is 200 pounds. From this starting point we will measure weight loss in terms of the percentage of excess weight lost over time. Thus, if after 6 months he has dropped 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

As a general guide you could expect to drop about 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery increasing to approximately 70 percent after one year and to in the region of 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 appear. Longer term weight re-gain is generally about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Again, in general, if you are excessively overweight you will shed a greater percentage of your excess weight (perhaps as much as 90 or 95 percent) while if you are less overweight you may drop as little as 60 percent within 2 years of surgery.

You will almost certainly not lose all of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight as a result of surgery. As a result, it is sometimes said that obesity surgery is not completely successful. In spite of 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 unbelievable. Something which is also clearly evident to anybody who has seen the many gastric bypass pictures posted on the internet nowadays.