What Can You Expect After Weight Loss Surgery?

Weight loss surgery has been performed for well over fifty years now and, despite the fact that it does carry risks most patients are very happy with the outcome and enjoy a a markedly improved standard of living. There is however a price to pay and you will need to lead a very different lifestyle after surgery which could be very difficult if you are not prepared for the change.

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

However some of the other consequences of surgery are less obvious.

For example, even in small quantities your days of eating foods which are high in sugar or fat are also over. The results of eating such foods can be extremely unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your now shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

You will also find that the dramatic change in your pattern of eating leaves you extremely short of water so that you need to get used to drinking small quantities of water throughout the day in order to avoid dehydration.

This is all very well 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 begin by looking at just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.

The starting point is to assess just how much excess weight you are carrying and this is done by 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 5ft 10ins tall the ideal weight will be (106 + [6 x (70 – 60)]) which works out at 166 pounds. For women the principle is the same but this time a women's ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches minus 60.

Therefore, 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 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 general you could expect to lose around 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery climbing to about 70 percent after one year and to perhaps 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 appear. Longer term weight re-gain is usually around 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Once again, generally speaking, if you are excessively overweight you will lose a greater percentage of your excess weight (possibly as much as 90 or 95 percent) while if you are less overweight you may lose as little as 60 percent in the 2 years after surgery.

You will rarely lose all of your excess weight and are not going to get to your ideal weight through surgery. Consequently, it is sometimes said that obesity surgery is not a complete success. Nevertheless the vast majority of patients would not agree with this statement and would say that the change in their quality of life is simply unbelievable.

As obesity sweeps across much of the West a growing number of people are looking to weight loss surgery as a solution and so in this article we look at what you might expect following surgery.

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

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