What To Expect After Gastric Bypass Surgery

At a time when obesity is growing at an alarming rate, an increasing number of people are turning to gastric bypass surgery to solve their weight problem. But before thinking of undergoing to this kind of surgery, you might want to ask first, what exactly is gastric bypass surgery and how can it radically enhance someone’s life?

Gastric bypass has been around for more than fifty years now and, while there are of course risks as there are with any surgical procedure, in the vast majority of cases patients are more than satisfied with the results and enjoy a dramatically improved quality of living. But there is a price to pay.

With gastric bypass, patients have to adopt a very different lifestyle and this is never easy, not unless there's an enough preparation done prior to the actual operation to support the patient throughout their recovery period.

Some of these changes are very noticeable. The basic principle behind gastric bypass surgery is to drastically reduce the size of the stomach and physically restrict the amount of food that the patient can eat and so patients clearly understand that the days of sitting down to a big meal are over. Aside from this, there are also other consequences that you must face from this surgery that are less obvious.

Patients who have gastric bypass will be no longer be allowed to eat foods that contain a high amount of sugar. With a shortened digestive tract, eating such foods may bring further problems because sugar can now be rapidly absorbed, which may lead to some discomforts and faintness.

Patients also find that the dramatic change in their eating pattern also leaves them very short of water and they must adjust to constantly drinking small amounts of water throughout the day to avoid dehydration.

Now we know that all these changes in patients lifestyle bring a lot of good things, but what can gastric bypass contribute in reducing weight? Of course you can never find exact answer to this question because the outcome of this surgery really depends on the capability of the patient. However, it is highly important for us to learn just how post-operative weight loss is measured so we can be guided accordingly.

The first thing that we have to consider in evaluating a patient is how much excess weight that this patient is carrying. This can be done by figuring out the ideal weight of the patient. Measured in pounds, for a man this will be 106 plus 6 times his height in inches less 60. If this example confuses you, here’s another one. If a man stands 5ft and 10ins tall, the conversion of his height in inches will be 70. To calculate for his standard weight, you have to minus 60 from his total height in inches and then multiply the answer of 10 by 6 to arrive to 60. Finally, add 106 and 60 together and the ideal weight for a man of 5ft 10ins is 166 pounds. As per women’s ideal weight, we can also follow the same principle, only this time the formula will be 100 plus 5 times her height in inches less 60 Using our above example, if a man weighs 366 pounds, this means he exceeded his expected normal weight by 200 pounds. The loss of his weight will be then computed through the percentage of his excess weight lost over the period. So if he was able to lose 100 pounds after around 180 days, then his weight loss rate will be fifty percent. Meaning, within six months, the man is expected to lose fifty percent of his excess weight.

Generally, the average patient can expect to reduce up to fifty percent of their excess weight in 6 months post surgery, which can increase to seventy percent on its first year and up to eighty percent in the second year. For most patients, the process of weight loss will not continue after 2 years as some long-term weight gain may appear after your second year post surgery, which will typically be around 10 to 15 percent of the patient's excess weight.

As expected, those patients who are terribly overweight will have the advantage of losing a greater percentage of their excess weight (could be as much as 90 to 95 percent), while for those people who weigh less may only lose as little as 60 percent of their excess weight in 2 years of surgery.

Another interesting remark about a gastric bypass operation is the truth that its very unusual for a gastric bypass patient to lose 100 percent of their excess weight. This is the reason some of gastric bypass operation cannot be considered as a total success. However, most of the patients who underwent this procedure may agree with this statement. While they may not reach their ideal weight and may have to condition themselves to a very different lifestyle following surgery, for most patients the results achieved and the improvement in their quality of life is simply unimaginable.