What Can You Expect After Weight Loss Surgery?

Gastric bypass has been around for more than fifty years now and, while it does carry risks the majority of patients are very happy with the outcome and enjoy a a vastly improved standard of living. There is however a price to pay and you will have to lead a very different lifestyle following surgery which can be very difficult unless you are prepared for the change.

Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the principle behind gastric bypass surgery is to vastly reduce the volume of your stomach and to physically restrict the amount of food which you can eat. This means that your days of sitting down to a big meal are over.

But other consequences of obesity surgery are not quite so obvious. For example, the days of eating foods which are high in sugar or fat even in small quantities are also over. The penalties for eating such foods can be most unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness. You will also discover that the dramatic change in your eating pattern leaves you very short of water so that you have to get used to drinking small amounts of water during the day to avoid dehydration.

This is all very well but just what can you expect from obesity surgery in terms of weight loss? Weight loss will of course vary from one person to the next but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-operative weight loss is measured.

Here you have to begin by calculating how much excess weight you are carrying and this is done by working out your ideal weight. Working in pounds, for a man this is 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. 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 our man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds then he is carrying 200 pounds in excess weight. From this starting point we will measure weight loss in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. Accordingly, if at the end of 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

As a general guide you could expect to shed about 50 percent of your excess weight within in the 6 months after surgery rising to approximately 70 percent after one year and to around 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For the majority of patients weight loss will cease after 2 years and some long-term weight gain will be evident. Long-term weight gain is typically about 10 to 15 percent of your excess weight.

Once again, in general, if you are grossly 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 lose as little as 60 percent within 2 years of surgery.

You will almost certainly not lose 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to get to your ideal weight as a result of surgery. Consequently, it is occasionally said that gastric bypass surgery is not a complete success. In spite of this the vast majority of patients would not agree with this statement and would say that the improvement in their quality of life is simply unbelievable.

Visit GastricBypassFacts.info for more information about obesity surgery together with a look at gastric bypass surgery cost.