Psychological Obesity Treatment Is The Secret To Improving Weight Loss Surgery Success Rates
For a lot of severely obese people bariatric surgery is the solution to losing excess weight when exercise and diet have not been successful, though it is certainly not an easy choice and results in a wide range of outcomes in different patients.
There are various different surgical options available nowadays from a full gastric bypass which involves the decrease of the volume of the stomach and the bypassing of part of the intestine to restrict the quantity of food which can be eaten and the absorption of calories from that food to lap banding which simply decreases the volume of the stomach to once again restrict the quantity of food that can be eaten.
Whichever form of surgery is carried out the fundamental principle is to force the body to burn off more calories than can be ingested and thereby reduce weight by using up the body’s fat reserves.
The real problem with bariatric surgery however does not lie in the actual surgery itself but is seen in the months following surgery when patients discover that their lifestyle has to change radically and that they have to adjust to a whole new method of eating. For the majority of people this is difficult but for some it can bring serious problems that are quite simply too much for them to cope with.
There are a variety of causes of obesity but two commonly seen problems demonstrate this point.
The first is the problem of those people whose obesity has been caused, or exacerbated, by emotional eating. In this case people turn to eating whenever they find themselves stressed or when their emotions are low. Emotional or comfort eating becomes a very strong habit that is hard to break and the psychological pressures that often follow bariatric surgery are precisely the sort of pressures that will spark the need for emotional eating in individuals who suffer from this particular problem.
The second is the problem of those people who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable depression, disgust and guilt that frequently follow binge-eating episodes. It is only too easy to visualize the extreme difficulty which such people will find themselves with in trying to deal with the major lifestyle changes following weight loss surgery.
Taking all of these and other factors into account it is perhaps not too surprising to learn that approximately 20% of people being considered for gastric bypass surgery are unsuitable, or more precisely not ready, for surgery and this is where psychological obesity treatments come into their own.
Considerable attention is given to the requirement for patients to meet the physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their body mass index and the existence of other medical conditions which are linked to their being severely overweight) but all too often only lip service is paid to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. For surgery to have the very best possible chance for success then it is crucially important to pay close attention to the psychological needs of patients and then provide them with the necessary pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most importantly, treatment.
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