What Should You Expect After Obesity Surgery?
Gastric bypass has been performed for well over fifty years now and, although it does carry risks most patients are very satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a a dramatically improved standard of living. However, there is a price to to be paid and you will need to follow a very different lifestyle after surgery which may be very hard 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 markedly reduce the volume of your stomach and to restrict the amount of food that you can eat. This simply means that your days of sitting down to a big meal are over.
However other consequences of obesity surgery are not quite so obvious.
As an example, even in small quantities your days of eating foods which are high in sugar or fat 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 produce 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 adjust to drinking small amounts of water during the day in order to avoid dehydration.
This is all well and good but just what can you expect from weight loss surgery in terms of weight loss?
Weight loss will of course vary from person to person but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.
The starting point is to calculate 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 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 the same but this time a women’s ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches less 60.
So, 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 weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. Accordingly, if at the end of 6 months he has dropped 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In general you could expect to lose approximately 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery rising to approximately 70 percent one year after surgery and to possibly 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients however weight loss will cease after 2 years and indeed some long-term weight gain will appear. Long-term weight gain is typically about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.
Once again, generally speaking, 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 lose as little as 60 percent in the 2 years following surgery.
You will rarely lose 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to reach your ideal weight as a result of surgery. For this reason, it is occasionally said that weight loss surgery is not a complete success. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this statement and would say that the improvement in their quality of life is simply unbelievable. Something that is clearly evident to anybody who has looked at the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted on the internet these days.
