For more and more very obese individuals weight loss surgery is the answer to shedding excess pounds when a program of exercise and diet has not succeeded, although it is definitely not an easy option and produces a wide range of outcomes in different patients.
There are various different surgical weight loss options offered nowadays from gastric bypass surgery involving the reduction of the volume of the stomach and the bypassing of a section of the intestine to restrict the amount of food that can be eaten and the ability to absorb calories from that food to gastric banding which simply decreases the volume of the stomach to once more restrict the amount of food that can be consumed.
Whichever form of surgery is performed the underlying principle is to force the body to burn off more calories than can be absorbed and so reduce weight by using up the body's fat reserves.
The real problem with obesity surgery however is not to be found in the surgery itself but reveals itself in the weeks and months following the operation when patients discover that their lifestyle has to change dramatically and that they need to adjust to a totally new method of eating. For nearly all patients this is hard but for a few it can result in severe difficulties that are simply too much to cope with.
There are several reasons for obesity but two common problems illustrate this point.
The first is the problem of those individuals whose obesity has resulted from, or been aggravated by, emotional eating. Here individuals turn to eating when they find themselves stressed or whenever their emotions are particularly low. Emotional or comfort eating can become a very strong habit that is hard to break and the psychological pressures that usually follow obesity surgery are precisely the type of pressures that can trigger the desire for comfort eating in individuals who suffer from this particular problem.
The second is the problem of those individuals who are prone to binge-eating and the uncontrollable guilt, depression and disgust that often follow binge-eating bouts. It is only too easy to imagine the great difficulty that such individuals will find themselves with in attempting to cope with the major lifestyle changes following obesity surgery.
Taking all of these factors into consideration it is possibly not too surprising to learn that approximately twenty percent of those being considered for obesity surgery are not suitable, or more accurately not prepared, for surgery which is where psychological obesity treatments come into play.
Considerable attention is paid to the requirement for patients to meet specific physical requirements for surgery (in terms of such things as their BMI and the existence of other medical conditions associated with their being severely overweight) but far too frequently only lip service is paid to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. If surgery is to have the best possible chance of success then it is vitally important to look carefully at the psychological requirements of patients and then provide them with pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most significantly, treatment.
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GastricBypassFacts.info provides information on a wide range of topics including obesity and bariatric surgery
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