What Can You Expect Following Obesity Surgery?

Gastric bypass has been performed for well over fifty years now and, while it does carry risks the majority of patients are more than satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a a markedly improved standard of living. However, there is a price to pay and you will have to lead a very different lifestyle following surgery which can be very hard if you are not prepared for the change.

Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the principle behind obesity surgery is to markedly reduce the size of your stomach and to restrict the amount of food which you can eat. This simply means that those days of sitting down to a big meal are gone forever.

But some of the other consequences of weight loss surgery are not quite so obvious.

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

You will also discover that the change in your eating pattern leaves you extremely short of water so that you need to adjust to drinking small amounts of water during the day if you are to avoid dehydration.

This is all very well but just what can you expect from gastric bypass surgery when it comes to weight loss?

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

Here you have to start by calculating 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 calculated as 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 the same but here a women's ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height in inches minus 60.

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

In most cases you should expect to lose approximately 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery climbing to approximately 70 percent after one year and to perhaps 80 percent after 2 years. For the majority of patients weight loss will stop after 2 years and some long-term weight gain will appear. Longer term weight re-gain is usually around 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Once again, as a general rule, if you are very overweight you will shed a greater percentage of your excess weight (possibly as much as 90 or 95 percent) while if you are less 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 achieve your ideal weight through surgery. As a consequence, it is occasionally said that obesity surgery is not completely successful. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this and will tell you that the improvement in their quality of life is simply indescribable. Something that is also clearly evident to anyone who has looked at the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted online these days.