People who are considered to be morbidly obese are fighting a life and death battle with their weight. Obesity is defined as having a body weight that exceeds the ideal body weight by more than 20%. Morbidly obese people weigh more than 100% of their ideal body weight.
Since the widespread adoption of weight loss surgery as an answer to morbid obesity, hundreds of thousands of people have gone under the knife in search of a way to quickly lose the weight and save their lives. While the thought of undergoing major surgery to have your stomach stapled in order to make losing weight easier and faster, the surgery and recovery carries inherent risks that should be considered in advance.
What is bariatric surgery?
Bariatrics is a branch of the practice of medicine that addresses obesity and its related diseases. Bariatric surgery is an umbrella term covering the various operations that make physical changes to the stomach and digestive tract in order to decrease the amount of food that you can eat.
Purpose of bariatric surgery:
• Facilitates significant and sustained weight loss in those who are morbidly obese
• Results in remission of diabetes in 86% of obese patients with diabetes
• Reduces the risk of death in the morbidly obese by nearly 30%
Weight Loss surgery options:
Surgical procedures that restrict food intake:
– Roux-en-Y gastric bypass
– Adjustable gastric banding
– Gastroplasty
– Laparoscopic Sleeve Gastrectomy
Procedures that cause food to be poorly absorbed:
• Bilopancreatic diversion
• Duodenal switch
Weight loss surgery complications:
• Gastric bypass surgery often leads to health problems from nutritional deficiencies due to the restructuring of the digestive tract.
• “Dumping syndrome,” which includes nausea, sweating, diarrhea, chest and stomach cramps can be a nasty side effect of gastroplasty.
• Anastomotic leak can be a deadly complication that occurs when the staples in the stomach begin to leak. This is a very rare complication.
Alternatives to bariatric surgery:
Losing weight is hard. There’s no denying that. People who have become morbidly obese know that they need to lose weight but they think that they are powerless to end their addiction to overeating. That is where they are mistaken. With the right counseling and support, education about good nutrition and fitness anyone can completely change their lives and experience an outer and inner transformation avoiding bariatric surgery completely.
