Psychological Obesity Treatments Are The Secret To Improving Gastric Bypass Surgery Success Rates

For more and more very obese individuals weight loss surgery is the answer to losing excess pounds when exercise and diet have not been successful, although it is certainly not an easy option and produces a wide range of outcomes in different patients.

There are several different surgical weight loss options used nowadays from gastric bypass surgery which involves the reduction of the size of the stomach and bypassing part of the intestine to both limit the quantity of food eaten and the absorption of calories from that food to lap banding which merely decreases the size of the stomach to once more limit the quantity of food which can be eaten.

Whatever form of surgery is done the basic principle is to make the body burn off more calories than can be absorbed and so reduce weight by using up the body's fat reserves.

The problem with gastric bypass surgery however is not to be found in the surgery itself but is seen in the weeks, months and years following surgery when individuals find that their lifestyle has to alter dramatically and that they need to adjust to an entirely new eating system. For nearly all people this is difficult but for a few it can bring severe problems which are quite simply too much to cope with.

There are a variety of causes of obesity but a couple of common problems serve to illustrate this point.

The first is the problem of those individuals whose obesity has been caused, or exacerbated, by emotional eating. Here individuals resort to eating whenever they are stressed or when their emotions are low. Emotional eating can develop into an extremely strong habit which is difficult to break and the psychological pressures which often follow gastric bypass surgery are exactly the sort of pressures which can spark the desire for emotional eating in individuals who suffer from this particular problem.

The second is the problem of those individuals who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable depression, disgust and guilt which commonly follow episodes of binge-eating. It is only too easy to visualize the great difficulty which such individuals will find themselves faced with in attempting to cope with the significant lifestyle changes following obesity surgery.

Taking all of these factors into consideration it is perhaps not too surprising to discover that in the region of twenty percent of those being considered for weight loss surgery are not suitable, or perhaps more precisely not prepared, for surgery and this is where psychological obesity treatments come into their own.

A lot of attention is given to the need for individuals to meet the physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their BMI and the presence of other medical conditions which are associated with the fact that they are significantly overweight) but far too often little attention is given to very real psychological problems which are associated with surgery. If surgery is to be given the best possible chance of success then it is crucially important to pay close attention to the psychological needs of individuals and then provide them with the necessary pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most significantly, treatment.

GastricBypassFacts.info provides information on a wide variety of topics including obesity surgery risks and gastric bypass surgery.