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What Can You Expect After Gastric Bypass Surgery?
By Robert | September 16, 2008
Gastric bypass has been performed for more than fifty years now and, although there are of course risks the majority of patients are more than satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a an enormously improved standard of living. But there is a price to to be paid and you will have to follow a very different lifestyle following surgery which could be very difficult unless you are prepared for the change.
Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the principle behind obesity surgery is to drastically reduce the volume of your stomach and restrict the amount of food that you can eat. This simply means that your days of enjoying a big meal are gone forever.
However some of the other consequences of obesity 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 now shortened digestive tract can produce very nasty feelings of faintness.
You will also find 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 throughout the day in order to avoid becoming dehydrated.
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 one person to the next but it is important to start 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. Using pounds, for a man this will be 106 plus 6 times your height in inches less 60. For example, for a man 5ft 10ins tall the ideal weight will be 106 + 6 x (70 – 60) which works out at 166 pounds. For a woman the principle is exactly the same but here a women’s ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height in inches minus 60.
Therefore, if we take the example of the man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds before surgery 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. Thus, if after 6 months his weight has fallen by 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In the majority of cases you should expect to lose around 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery climbing to about 70 percent one year after surgery and to perhaps 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients weight loss will stop after 2 years and indeed some long-term weight gain will appear. Long-term weight gain is generally about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.
Once more, in general, if you are very overweight you will lose 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 in the 2 years following surgery.
You will almost certainly not shed all of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight as a result of surgery. As a consequence, it is sometimes said that gastric bypass 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 improvement in their quality of life is simply indescribable. Something that is clearly evident to anyone who has seen the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted online nowadays.
Topics: Fat Loss Tips, Low carbohydrates and Ketosis, Obesity and fast weight loss, Very Low Calorie Diets, Weight loss tips, exercise and weight loss | No Comments »
