What Can You Expect Following Gastric Bypass Surgery?

Gastric bypass surgery has been around for well over fifty years now and, despite the fact that there are of course risks the majority of patients are very satisfied with the results and enjoy a an enormously improved standard of living. But there is a price to pay and you will have to follow a very different lifestyle after surgery which may be very difficult unless you are prepared for the change.

Some of the post-surgical changes are obvious as the basic principle behind weight loss surgery is to significantly reduce the size of your stomach and physically restrict the amount of food that you can eat. This means that the days of enjoying a big meal are gone.

But other consequences of gastric bypass surgery are not quite so obvious.

For example, even in small quantities your days of eating foods which are high in sugar or fat are also over. The consequences of eating such foods can be extremely unpleasant as their rapid absorption in your now shortened digestive tract can lead to very disagreeable feelings of faintness.

You will also find that the dramatic change in your eating pattern leaves you extremely 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 gastric bypass surgery in terms of weight loss?

Weight loss will of course vary from one individual to the next but it is important to start by understanding just how post-surgical weight loss is measured.

Here you need to begin by assessing just how much excess weight you are carrying and this is done by working out your ideal weight. Working in pounds, for a man this is 106 plus 6 times your height in inches minus 60. For example, for a man who is 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 exactly the same but here a women's ideal weight is calculated as 100 plus 5 times her height in inches less 60.

Thus, if we take the example of our man above and give him a weight of 366 pounds then he is carrying 200 pounds in excess weight. Weight loss is then measured in terms of the percentage of excess weight lost over time. Therefore, if at the end of 6 months he has lost 100 pounds then his weight loss will be 50 percent.

In most cases you could expect to shed about 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery rising to about 70 percent one year after surgery and to possibly 80 percent after 2 years. For most patients weight loss will stop after 2 years and some long-term weight gain will be evident. Longer term weight gain is generally about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Once more, as a general rule, if you are excessively overweight you will shed a greater percentage of your excess weight (perhaps as much as 90 to 95 percent) while if you are less overweight you may drop 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. For this reason, it is occasionally said that weight loss surgery is not completely successful. Nevertheless the vast majority of patients would not agree with this and will tell you that the improvement in their quality of life is simply incredible. Something which is clearly evident to anyone who has looked at the many gastric bypass pictures posted online these days.