What Should You Expect After Gastric Bypass Surgery?
Gastric bypass surgery has been performed for more than fifty years now and, despite the fact that it does carry risks most patients are more than satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a an enormously improved standard of living. But there is a price to to be paid and you will need to lead a very different lifestyle following surgery which could be very difficult unless you are prepared for the change.
Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the basic principle behind weight loss surgery is to significantly reduce the size of your stomach and restrict the quantity of food which you can eat. This simply means that the days of sitting down to a big meal are over.
However some of the other consequences of weight loss surgery are less obvious.
For example, even in small quantities the days of eating foods that are high in fat or sugar are also over. The penalties for eating such foods can be most unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your now shortened digestive tract can lead to very nasty feelings of faintness.
You will also discover that the dramatic change in your pattern of eating leaves you very short of water so that you have to get used to drinking small amounts of water during the day to avoid becoming dehydrated.
This is all very well but just what should you expect from gastric bypass surgery when it comes to weight loss?
Weight loss will of course vary from person to person but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-operative weight loss is measured.
Here you need to begin by calculating just how much excess weight you are carrying and this means working out your ideal weight. Working in pounds, for a man this is calculated as 106 plus 6 times your height in inches minus 60. For instance, for a man 5ft 10ins tall the ideal weight will be 106 + 6 x (70 – 60) which works out at 166 pounds. In the case of women the principle is the same but this time 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 the 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. Therefore, if after 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In the majority of cases you could expect to lose around 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery climbing to around 70 percent one year after surgery and to possibly 80 percent at the end of 2 years. For most patients however weight loss will cease after 2 years and indeed some long-term weight gain will appear. Long-term weight re-gain is usually about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.
Once again, generally speaking, if you are very overweight you will shed 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 rarely 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 weight loss surgery is not completely successful. Despite this the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this statement and would say that the change in their quality of life is simply indescribable. Something which is also clearly evident to anybody who has seen the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted on the internet nowadays.
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