| Psychological Obesity Treatment Is The Secret To Improving Obesity Surgery Success |
For many very obese individuals weight loss surgery is the solution to losing excess weight when a program of diet and exercise has not been successful, but it is definitely not an easy option and leads to a wide variety of outcomes in different patients.
There are many different surgical weight loss options offered today from gastric bypass surgery involving the decrease of the size of the stomach and bypassing a section of the intestine to restrict the quantity of food eaten and the absorption of calories from that food to lap banding which merely reduces the size of the stomach to once more restrict the quantity of food that can be eaten.
Whatever type of surgery is done the basic 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 reserves of fat.
The real problem with bariatric surgery however does not lie in the surgery itself but reveals itself in the weeks following the operation when people discover that their lifestyle has to alter considerably and that they have to adjust to an entirely new eating regime. For the majority of patients this is hard work but for some it can bring serious difficulties that are quite simply too much for them to cope with.
There are a variety of causes of obesity but a couple of common problems serve to demonstrate this point.
The first is the problem of those individuals whose obesity has resulted from, or been aggravated by, emotional eating. In this case individuals resort to eating whenever they find themselves stressed or whenever their emotions are low. Emotional eating is an extremely strong habit that is difficult to break and the psychological pressures that generally follow bariatric surgery are precisely the kind of pressures that will trigger the desire for emotional eating in individuals who suffer from this problem.
The second is the problem of those individuals who are prone to binge-eating and the uncontrollable depression, guilt and disgust that commonly follow episodes of binge-eating. It is very easy to visualize the great difficulty that such individuals will find themselves faced with in trying to deal with the significant lifestyle changes following weight loss surgery.
When these and other factors are taken into consideration it is possibly not too surprising to learn that about 20% of people being considered for bariatric surgery are not suitable, or more precisely not prepared, for surgery and this is when psychological obesity treatments come into play.
A great deal of attention is given to the need for people to meet the physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their body mass index and the presence of other medical problems linked to the fact that they are significantly overweight) but all too often little attention is given to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. If surgery is to be given the best possible chance for success then it is vitally important to look carefully at the psychological requirements of people and to provide them with pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most important of all, treatment.
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