Gastric bypass has been performed for more than fifty years now and, although there are of course risks the majority of patients are more than satisfied 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-operative changes are obvious as the principle behind obesity surgery is to vastly reduce the size of your stomach and to restrict the amount of food which you can eat. This means that the days of sitting down to a big meal are over.
But other consequences of surgery are less obvious.
For example, your days of eating foods that are high in sugar or fat even in small quantities are also over. The results of eating such foods can be very unpleasant as rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.
You will also discover that the change in your pattern of eating leaves you very short of water so that you need to adjust to drinking small quantities of water during the day if you are to avoid dehydration.
This is all very well but just what can you expect from weight loss surgery in terms of weight loss?
Results will of course vary from one person to the next but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-surgical 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 will be 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 a woman the principle is the same but here a women’s ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches less 60.
Therefore, if we take the example of our man and give him a weight of 366 pounds then his excess weight is 200 pounds. From this starting point we will measure weight loss in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. So, if after 6 months he has dropped 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.
In general you could expect to drop about 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery increasing to around 70 percent one year after surgery and to in the region of 80 percent after 2 years. For most patients however weight loss will cease after 2 years and some long-term weight gain will appear. Long-term weight gain is generally around 10 to 15 percent of your excess weight.
Once more, in general, if you are excessively overweight you will shed a greater percentage of your excess weight (possibly as much as 90 or 95 percent) while if you are not so heavily overweight you may drop as little as 60 percent within 2 years of surgery.
You will almost certainly not drop 100 percent of your excess weight and are not going to reach your ideal weight as a result of surgery. For this reason, it is sometimes said that weight loss surgery is not a complete success. Nevertheless the vast majority of patients would not agree with this and would say that the improvement in their quality of life is simply indescribable. Something that is clearly evident to anybody who has seen the many gastric bypass pictures posted on the internet these days.