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What Should You Expect After Obesity Surgery?

Sunday, September 28th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Gastric bypass surgery has been around for more than fifty years now and, although there are of course risks the majority of patients are more than satisfied with the results and enjoy a a dramatically improved standard of living. However, there is a price to to be paid and you will have to follow a very different lifestyle following surgery which can be very difficult unless you are prepared for the change.

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

However other consequences of surgery are not quite so obvious.

For instance, even in small quantities your days of eating foods which are high in fat or sugar are also over. The consequences of eating such foods can be most unpleasant as rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can produce very nasty feelings of faintness.

You will also find that the change in your pattern of eating leaves you extremely short of water so that you must adjust to drinking small amounts of water throughout the day to avoid becoming dehydrated.

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

Weight loss will of course vary from one individual to the next but it is important to start by looking at just how post-operative weight loss is measured.

Here you have to begin by assessing how much excess weight you are carrying and this means working out your ideal weight. Measured in pounds, for a man this is 106 plus 6 times your height in inches less 60. As an 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 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, 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 weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. Therefore, 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 about 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery climbing to around 70 percent after one year and to perhaps 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For the majority of patients weight loss will stop after 2 years and some long-term weight gain will appear. Long-term weight gain is generally about 10 to 15 percent of your excess weight.

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

You will almost certainly not shed 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to reach your ideal weight through surgery. As a result, it is occasionally said that obesity surgery is not completely successful. In spite of this the vast majority of patients would not agree with this and will tell you that the change in their quality of life is simply unbelievable. Something which is clearly evident to anyone who has seen the many gastric bypass pictures posted on the internet these days.

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