What Should You Expect Following Gastric Bypass Surgery?

Obesity surgery has been performed for well over fifty years now and, although there are of course 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 can be very difficult unless you are prepared for the change.

Some of the post-surgical changes are obvious as the principle behind weight loss surgery is to vastly reduce the size of your stomach and to restrict the quantity of food that you can eat. This simply means that the days of sitting down to a big meal are gone.

But some of the other consequences of obesity surgery are less obvious.

As an example, your days of eating foods that are high in fat or sugar even in small quantities are also over. The consequences of eating foods of this nature can be very unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your now shortened digestive tract can produce very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

You will also discover 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 throughout the day if you are to avoid dehydration.

This is all very well but just what should you expect from weight loss surgery in terms of weight loss?

Results will of course vary from one person to the next but it is important to begin by looking at just how post-operative weight loss is measured.

Here you need to begin by assessing how much excess weight you are carrying and this means working out your ideal weight. Measured in pounds, for a man this is 106 plus 6 times your height in inches minus 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. For women the principle is exactly the same but this time a women's ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height in inches minus 60.

Thus, taking the example of the man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds then he is carrying 200 pounds in excess weight. We would then measure weight loss in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. Thus, if at the end of 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

In most cases you can expect to drop approximately 50 percent of your excess weight within in the 6 months after surgery climbing to around 70 percent after one year and to possibly 80 percent after 2 years. For most patients however weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and some long-term weight gain will appear. Long-term weight gain is normally about 10 to 15 percent of your 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 or 95 percent) while if you are less overweight you may shed as little as 60 percent in the 2 years after surgery.

You will almost certainly not drop 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight through surgery. As a result, it is occasionally said that obesity surgery is not a completely successful. Nevertheless the vast majority of patients would not agree with this and would say that the improvement in their quality of life is simply indescribable.

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