What to Expect After Weight Loss Surgery

After you decide to undergo weight loss surgery, you’re looking at a changed future, one that has the promise of improved health and vitality. Your first task will be to recover from your procedure. To help ensure success and speed healing, you’ll need to follow your post-op directions, such as getting out of bed as soon as you can and consuming a special liquid diet for several days, as your doctor directs. Depending on your doctor’s recommendations, you’ll likely remain on a pureed-food diet for a few weeks, then slowly transition to eating regular food.

Once you get past this initial adjustment period, you’ll likely begin losing weight rapidly, and that’s when the biggest changes occur—physically, emotionally and in terms of your quality of life. Here’s what you can expect:

Long-term Weight Loss After possibly a lifetime of struggling to lose weight, you can look forward to getting out of the vicious cycle of weight loss and gain. Studies have found that 90 percent of weight loss surgery patients lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off.
Improved Health Weight loss surgery has been shown to improve, or even eliminate, your risk of a whole host of obesity-linked conditions, such as type 2 diabetes. If you have been diagnosed with heart disease, weight loss surgery may help improve your condition. If you’re already on medications for any of these conditions, weight loss surgery may help reduce or eliminate them.
Greater Enjoyment of Physical Activity Before your surgery, even small amounts of exercise may have been difficult. After weight loss surgery, it’s important to become increasingly more active according to your doctor’s recommendations. And then the more you enjoy new activities, the more you’ll want to engage in them. You can spend time with family and friends, play with children and grandchildren, enjoy the outdoors… the list goes on and on! Plus, the more you exercise, the lower your stress levels will be. And the less you weigh, the less cortisol, a stress hormone, your body produces.

Why weight? Begin a journey to a new you.

Weight loss surgery is generally designed for those with a body mass index (BMI) equal to or greater than 40, or equal to or greater than 35 with serious comorbidities. Laparoscopic adjustable gastric banding with the Lap Band® is also FDA-approved for weight loss surgery in people with a BMI of 30 to 35 who have at least one obesity-related condition. Weight loss surgery is considered safe, but like many types of surgery, it does have risks. Consult with your physician about the risks and benefits of weight loss surgery.

Sources:
American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery
National Institutes of Health