What Can You Expect After Weight Loss Surgery?

Weight loss surgery has been around for more than fifty years now and, while there are of course risks the majority of patients are more than satisfied with the outcome and enjoy a an enormously improved standard of living. But there is a price to pay and you will need to follow a very different lifestyle following surgery which may be very difficult if you are not prepared for the change.

Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the basic principle behind obesity surgery is to significantly reduce the volume of your stomach and 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 some of the other consequences of surgery are less obvious.

For instance, the days of eating foods which are high in fat or sugar even in small quantities are also over. The consequences of eating foods of this nature can be very unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your newly shortened digestive tract can produce very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

You will also find that the change in your pattern of eating leaves you extremely short of water so that you must adjust 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 vary from person to person but it is important to begin by understanding just how post-operative weight loss is measured.

Here you have to begin by calculating just how much excess weight you are carrying and this means working out your ideal weight. Using pounds, for a man this is 106 plus 6 times your height in inches less 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. For women the principle is exactly the same but this time a women's ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches minus 60.

So, if we take the example of the man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds before surgery then he is carrying 200 pounds in excess weight. We would then measure weight loss in terms of the weight loss as a percentage of excess weight over time. So, if at the end of 6 months he has dropped 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

In most cases you can expect to shed approximately 50 percent of your excess weight within the 6 months following surgery increasing to approximately 70 percent after one year and to possibly 80 percent after 2 years. For the majority of patients however weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and some long-term weight gain will appear. Longer term weight re-gain is usually about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Once more, as a general rule, if you are very overweight you will shed a greater percentage of your excess weight (perhaps as much as 90 to 95 percent) while if you are not so heavily overweight you may lose 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. Consequently, it is sometimes said that weight loss surgery is not a complete success. In spite of this the overwhelming majority of patients would not agree with this and will tell you that the improvement in their quality of life is simply indescribable. Something which is clearly evident to anyone who has seen the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted online nowadays.