Those gastric surgeries that are so well-known today which help people lose weight were inspired from cases when patients suffering from ulcer or cancer ended up with quite large parts of their stomach cut off.
Such interventions caused patients to lose weight, obviously, and that convinced surgeons that this would be an effective modality to help people get rid of obesity and undergo considerable weight loss. It has been 40 years since the first surgery of this kind was made. It was some sort of intestinal bypass and was intended to solve a serious case of obesity. In this situation, the weight loss that follows is induced by malabsorption, meaning that nutrients from food are no longer absorbed due to the fact that the intestines were bypassed or taken out.
All the food ingested could not be properly digested and processed by the body because it travelled too fast through it, thus not having time to assimilate too many calories. Unfortunately, this kind of weight loss intervention was sometimes lethal because of the side-effects following it and that convinced doctors to give up this method to lose weight.
If you have in mind such a weight loss operation, make sure to talk about it with your physician in order to be aware of all side-effects, risks, but also benefits.
Advantages
- You will definitely lose weight: Most people get to lose weight considerably in the 18-24 months following the weight loss surgery. After this period of time, there are certain patients who gain back some pounds, others, unfortunately, get back to the initial situation.
- You could get rid of certain problems related to obesity: There are studies which demonstrate that the majority of patients who underwent such weight loss surgery and had diabetes, suffered a change, the sugar level in their blood becoming normal again. The only exceptions were in the case of old people or people who had been suffering from diabetes for too long.
Disadvantages
- Vomiting: Such a situation is common after weight loss surgery because the food insufficiently chewed stretches the stomach too much.
- The so-called “dumping syndrome”: Weight loss surgery causes the food to travel too fast through the patient’s small intestine. This situation has effects such as: sweating, nausea, weakness, but also diarrhea soon after a meal and the incapability of eating sweets without feeling weak.
- Nutritional insufficiency: Patients who chose to lose weight with the help of weight loss surgery will get to develop nutritional problems like osteoporosis, metabolic bone disease as well as anemia. However, minerals and vitamins taken on a regular basis should be able to avoid such things from happening.
- Post surgical complications: There are patients who, after the weight loss surgery, need other operations which could be triggered by the initial surgery. There may be complications such as infections, stretched stomach outlets (in this case the stomach regains its initial size), abdominal hernias or problems with the staple line (staples are utilized to reduce the size of the stomach).
- Gallstones: These calculi are likely to appear in one third of the weight loss surgery cases. They are actually concretions formed of cholesterol as well as other kinds of matters growing in the gallbladder. When someone suffers serious weight loss, such gallstones could easily develop.
- No pregnancy for a while: A woman who has undergone weight loss surgery should try not to get pregnant because a fetus could be terribly harmed by the nutritional insufficiencies and the fact that the patients lose weight too rapidly. Pregnancy is possible again, after the stabilization of the patient’s weight.
- Side-effects: Weight loss surgeries may cause exaggerated sweating, bloating, diarrhea, increased gas, vomiting, vertigo, nausea.
- Changes in lifestyle: Every patient who has suffered weight loss surgery must be closely supervised. There are some changes that must be taken into consideration such as exercise modifications, an appropriate diet, regular supplementation of minerals and vitamins.
