What Should You Expect After Gastric Bypass Surgery?

Gastric bypass has been around for more than fifty years now and, despite the fact that it does carry risks most patients are more than satisfied with the results and enjoy a a dramatically improved standard of living. But there is a price to to be paid and you will need to lead a very different lifestyle after surgery which could be very hard if you are not prepared for the change.

Some of the post-operative changes are obvious as the principle behind weight loss surgery is to markedly reduce the volume of your stomach and to restrict the amount of food that you can eat. This simply means that your days of sitting down to a big meal are gone.

However other consequences of gastric bypass surgery are less obvious.

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

You will also find that the dramatic change in your eating pattern leaves you very short of water so that you must adjust to drinking small quantities of water during the day in order to avoid dehydration.

This is all well and good but just what should 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-surgical weight loss is measured.

Here you have to start by calculating just how much excess weight you are carrying and this means working out your ideal weight. Working in 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 the same but here a women's ideal weight is 100 plus 5 times her height measured in inches less 60.

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

As a general guide you should expect to lose about 50 percent of your excess weight within 6 months of surgery rising to around 70 percent one year after surgery and to possibly 80 percent after 2 years. For most patients however weight loss will not continue beyond 2 years and some long-term weight gain will be seen. Longer term weight gain is generally about 10 to 15 percent of your initial excess weight.

Once again, generally speaking, if you are excessively overweight you will lose a greater percentage of your excess weight (perhaps as much as 90 or 95 percent) while if you are not so heavily overweight you may shed as little as 60 percent within 2 years of surgery.

You will rarely drop all of your excess weight and are not going to achieve your ideal weight as a result of surgery. As a consequence, it is sometimes said that gastric bypass surgery is not completely successful. Nevertheless the vast majority of patients would not agree with this and will tell you that the change in their quality of life is simply indescribable. Something which is also clearly evident to anyone who has looked at the many gastric bypass before and after pictures posted online these days.