What Should You Expect Following Obesity Surgery?

Weight loss surgery has been performed for well over fifty years now and, although it does carry risks most patients are very satisfied with the results and enjoy a an enormously improved standard of living. However, there is a price to to be paid and you will need 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 basic principle behind gastric bypass surgery is to vastly reduce the volume of your stomach and to restrict the quantity of food which you can eat. This means that your days of enjoying a big meal are gone.

But other consequences of gastric bypass surgery are less obvious.

For example, your days of eating foods that are high in sugar or fat even in small quantities are also over. The penalties for eating foods of this nature can be very unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

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

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

Results will vary from person to person but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-operative weight loss is measured.

Here you need to start by assessing just how much excess weight you are carrying and this is done by working out your ideal weight. Measured in pounds, for a man this is 106 plus 6 times your height in inches less 60. For instance, for a man 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 the same but this time a women's ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height in inches less 60.

Therefore, if we take the example of the man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds then his excess weight is 200 pounds. Weight loss is then measured in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. So, if after 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

As a general guide you can expect to shed around 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery increasing to about 70 percent one year after surgery and to perhaps 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients however weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and some long-term weight gain will be evident. Long-term weight gain is typically around 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Once more, as a general rule, if you are very 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 in the 2 years following surgery.

You will rarely shed all of your excess weight and are not going to reach your ideal weight through surgery. For this reason, it is sometimes said that gastric bypass surgery is not a complete success. In spite of this the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this statement and would say that the improvement in their quality of life is simply incredible. Something that is also clearly evident to anybody who has looked at the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted on the internet nowadays.