Obesity surgery has been around for well over fifty years now and, while it does carry risks most patients are very satisfied with the results and enjoy a an enormously improved standard of living. There is however a price to to be paid and you will need to follow a very different lifestyle after surgery which could be very difficult if you are not prepared for the change.
Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the principle behind weight loss surgery is to markedly reduce the size of your stomach and restrict the quantity of food which you can eat. This means that the days of sitting down to a big meal are gone forever.
However other consequences of obesity surgery are not quite so obvious.
As an example, your days of eating foods which are high in sugar or fat even in small quantities are also over. The consequences of eating foods of this nature can be most unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your now shortened digestive tract can produce very disagreeable feelings of faintness.
You will also find that the change in your eating pattern leaves you very short of water so that you need to get used to drinking small quantities of water during the day if you are 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?
Results will vary from one person to the next but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.
The starting point is to calculate just 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 minus 60. For 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. For women the principle is exactly the same but this time a women’s ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches less 60.
Thus, if we take the example of our 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 percentage of excess weight lost over time. Accordingly, if at the end of 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In the majority of cases you should expect to drop around 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery rising to around 70 percent one year after surgery and to in the region of 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and indeed some long-term weight gain will be evident. Longer 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 (possibly as much as 90 to 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 drop 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight as a result of surgery. For this reason, it is sometimes said that obesity surgery is not completely successful. Nevertheless the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this and would say that the improvement in their quality of life is simply incredible. Something which is also clearly evident to anybody who has looked at the many gastric bypass pictures posted on the internet nowadays.
