Psychological Assessment Is The Secret To Improving Weight loss Surgery Success Rates

By Donald Saunders

Though a lot of attention is given to the medical aspects of gastric bypass surgery more often than not far too little attention is given to its psychological effects.

For more and more severely obese people bariatric surgery is the answer to shedding excess pounds when exercise and diet have not succeeded, despite the fact that it is definitely not an easy option and produces a wide variety of outcomes in different patients.

There are a number of different surgical weight loss options offered today from a full gastric bypass which involves the decrease of the size of the stomach and bypassing part of the intestine to both restrict the amount of food eaten and the ability to absorb calories from that food to lap banding which merely decreases the size of the stomach to once again restrict the amount of food that can be eaten.

Whichever form of surgery is done the basic principle is to make the body burn off a greater number of calories than can be ingested and so to reduce weight by using up the body's reserves of fat.

The problem with obesity surgery however does not lie in the surgery itself but is seen in the weeks and months after surgery when individuals discover that their lifestyle has to change significantly and that they must adjust to a whole new method of eating. For the majority of people this is hard but for some it can result in severe difficulties 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 are under stress or whenever their emotions are particularly low. Emotional or comfort eating can develop into a very strong habit that is hard to break and the psychological pressures that often follow obesity surgery are exactly the type of pressures that will spark the desire for comfort eating in individuals who suffer from this problem.

The second is the problem of those people who are prone to binge-eating and the uncontrollable guilt, disgust and depression that usually follow episodes of binge-eating. It is very easy to imagine the extreme difficulty which such people will experience in attempting to deal with the major changes in lifestyle after obesity surgery.

When these and other factors are taken into consideration it is possibly not surprising to discover that approximately twenty percent of those being considered for gastric bypass surgery are unsuitable, or more accurately not prepared, for surgery which is when psychological obesity treatments come into play.

A lot of attention is given to the need for individuals to meet certain physical requirements for surgery (in terms of such things as their BMI and the existence of other medical problems associated with the fact that they are considerably overweight) but all too often little attention is given to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. If surgery is to have the best possible chance of success then it is extremely important to pay close attention to the psychological needs of individuals and to provide them with pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most significantly, treatment.

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