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Gastric Bypass Guide
Gastric Bypass And Your Post-operative Expectations
With obesity growing at an alarming rate, people are increasingly turning to gastric bypass surgery to solve their weight problem. But how successful is gastric bypass surgery in terms of weight loss and can it really make a dramatic change to your life?
Gastric bypass surgery has been performed for more than fifty years now and, although there are naturally risks as there are with any surgical procedure, in the majority of cases patients are more than happy with the results and enjoy a vastly improved standard of living. But there is a price to pay for this.
Following gastric bypass patients will need to adjust to a very different lifestyle and this can be hard if adequate preparation is not made before surgery to ease patients gently into a post-operative regime.
Of course some changes are obvious. The 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 with the result that patients obviously understand that the days of sitting down to big meals are over. But other consequences of surgery are less obvious.
The 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 the rapid absorption of these foods in the now shortened digestive tract can lead to extremely unpleasant feelings of faintness.
Patients also find that the dramatic change in their eating pattern leaves them very short of water and they have to adjust to constantly drinking small amounts of water throughout the day if they are to avoid dehydration.
This quite dramatic change in lifestyle is all well and good but what can gastric bypass achieve in terms of weight loss?
There is no simple answer to this question as results will vary from individual to individual. However, as a guide, we need to start by understanding how post-operative weight loss is measured.
The first thing to do is to assess how much excess weight the patient is carrying and this is done by calculating the patient's ideal weight. Measured in pounds, for a man this will be 106 plus 6 times his height in inches less 60. If that sounds complicated then here's an example. For a man 5ft 10ins tall his height in inches is 70. Deduct 60 from this and multiply the result of 10 by 6 to give you 60. Finally, add 106 and 60 together and the ideal weight for a man of 5ft 10ins is 166 pounds.
In the case of women the principle is the same but this time a women's ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height in inches less 60.
Using the example of our man above, if prior to surgery he weighs 366 pounds then his excess weight is 200 pounds. Weight loss is then measured in terms of the percentage of excess weight that he loses over time. So, if after 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50%. In other words, at that point he will have lost 50% of his excess weight.
In general patients can expect to lose about 50% of their excess weight within 6 months of surgery rising to 70% one year after surgery and to 80% after 2 years. For the majority of patients weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and indeed some long-term weight gain will appear after 2 years, typically between 10% and 15% of the patient's excess weight.
In addition, patients who are excessively overweight will lose a greater percentage of the excess weight (perhaps as much as 90% or 95%) while people who are less overweight may lose at little as 60% within 2 years of surgery.
It is interesting to note that patients very rarely lose 100% of their excess weight and so do not achieve their ideal weight as a result of surgery. For this reason, it is occasionally said that gastric bypass surgery is not completely success. The vast majority of patients would not however agree with this.
While they may not achieve their ideal weight and may have to condition themselves to a very different lifestyle following surgery, for the vast majority of patients the results achieved and the improvement in their quality of life is unimaginable.
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