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For more and more severely obese individuals weight loss surgery is the answer to losing excess pounds when exercise and diet have not been successful, despite the fact that it is undoubtedly not an easy option and results in a wide range of outcomes in different patients. There are various different surgical weight loss procedures available nowadays from a full gastric bypass which involves the reduction of the size of the stomach and the bypassing of a section of the intestine to restrict the quantity of food eaten and the ability to absorb calories from that food to gastric banding which simply reduces the size of the stomach to once more restrict the quantity of food that can be eaten. Whatever type of surgery is carried out the underlying principle is to force the body to burn off more calories than can be absorbed and thereby 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 reveals itself in the weeks and months following the operation when people find that their lifestyle has to alter significantly and that they must adjust to an entirely new eating system. For almost all patients this is difficult but for a few it can bring serious problems that are quite simply too much to cope with. There are a lot of reasons for obesity but a couple of commonly seen problems serve to illustrate this point. The first is the problem of those individuals whose obesity has been caused, or exacerbated, by emotional eating. Here individuals resort to eating when they find themselves stressed or when their emotions are low. Emotional eating can develop into an extremely strong habit that is difficult to break and the psychological pressures that often follow obesity surgery are just the sort of pressures that will spark the desire for emotional eating in individuals who suffer from this particular problem. The second is the problem of those individuals who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable guilt, depression and disgust that usually follow episodes of binge-eating. It is very easy to see the extreme difficulty which such individuals will experience in trying to deal with the major changes in lifestyle following obesity surgery. When these and other factors are taken into account it is possibly not too surprising to discover that about 20% of those being considered for bariatric surgery are not suitable, or more accurately not ready, for surgery which is when psychological obesity treatments come into their own. A great deal of attention is paid to the need for people to meet specific physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their body mass index and the existence of other medical problems which are linked to their being severely overweight) but far too frequently only lip service is paid to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. For surgery to have the very best possible chance of success then it is critically important to look carefully at the psychological needs of people and to provide them with pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most important of all, treatment. Author: Donald Saunders GastricBypassFacts.info provides information on a wide variety of topics including obese people and weight loss surgery View Count: 518
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