Psychological Obesity Treatments Are Secret To Improving Gastric Bypass Success Rates - By:

For a growing number of severely obese people obesity surgery is the solution to shedding excess pounds when diet and exercise have not been successful, although it is without doubt not an easy choice and leads to a wide variety of outcomes in different patients.

There are a number of different surgical weight loss options available today from a full gastric bypass involving the decrease of the volume of the stomach and bypassing a section of the intestine to both restrict the amount of food that can be eaten and the absorption of calories from that food to lap band surgery which simply decreases the volume of the stomach to once more restrict the amount 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 absorbed and so reduce weight by using up the body's fat reserves.

The real problem with bariatric surgery however does not lie in the surgery itself but is seen in the weeks, months and years following surgery when individuals discover that their lifestyle has to change dramatically and that they must adjust to a whole new method of eating. For the majority of patients this is hard but for some it can lead to severe difficulties that are quite simply too much to cope with.

There are several causes of obesity but a couple of common problems illustrate this point.

The first problem is that of those people whose obesity has been caused, or exacerbated, by emotional eating. In this case people resort to eating when they find themselves stressed or whenever their emotions are particularly low. Emotional or comfort eating can become an extremely strong habit that is difficult to break and the psychological pressures that normally follow bariatric surgery are just the sort of pressures that can trigger the desire for emotional eating in individuals who suffer from this problem.

The second problem is that of those people who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable disgust, depression and guilt that usually follow episodes of binge-eating. It is only too easy to visualize the extreme difficulty that such people will experience in attempting to deal with the major changes in lifestyle following weight loss surgery.

Taking all of these factors into account it is perhaps not surprising to learn that in the region of 20% of those being considered for weight loss surgery are not suitable, or perhaps more accurately not ready, for surgery which is when psychological obesity treatments come into play.

Much attention is paid to the need for individuals to meet specific physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their BMI and the presence of other medical conditions associated with the fact that they are significantly overweight) but far too often little attention is given to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. For surgery to be given the very best possible chance for success then it is critically important to look carefully at the psychological requirements of individuals and then provide them with the necessary pre-operative assessment, counseling and, most significantly, treatment.

Despite the fact that a great deal of attention is given to the medical aspects of gastric bypass surgery frequently much too little notice is taken of its psychological effects.

GastricBypassFacts.info provides information on a wide range of subjects including obese children and bariatric surgery