Will I be left with a lot of excess skin after bariatric surgery?
This is a complex issue and it’s specific to every individual. The bigger you are and the more weight you lose, the more excess skin you’ll have. But most patients find they have less excess skin than they expected.
The best advice I can give to avoid excess skin is to maintain and increase muscle mass, giving the skin lean tissue to contract over. I’m not saying you need to become a body builder or look like a star athlete. But developing a fitness routine that promotes healthy muscle tone will help reduce excess skin.
If you do have sagging skin that bothers you, you can explore body contouring, which is an umbrella term for procedures, such as tummy tucks and lifts to the upper arms, midsection, back, thighs, buttocks and hips.
Will I just regain the weight after weight loss surgery?
Everyone seems to knows someone who had bariatric surgery and gained all the weight back. But in reality, that’s pretty rare. A 2016 study found that only 3 percent of study participants who had gastric bypass regained most or all of the weight they lost after 10 years.
Weight loss after bariatric surgery occurs on a curve. Weight drops rapidly right after surgery and continues for 18 months to two years. A little weight gain is expected after that, but then it should plateau. This is normal, and we’re talking about a few pounds, not a massive amount of weight (usually about 5 percent).
When a patient does regain a considerable amount of weight, we first try to determine whether there was a problem with the surgery. For example, in gastric bypass, the surgeon reduces the size of the stomach and reconnects the small intestine to the new stomach, bypassing the original stomach and several feet of the small intestine. One rare complication of this surgery is gastrogastric fistula, in which food goes into the old stomach instead of the new stomach pouch, causing weight gain.
Most weight gain can be traced back to dietary habits. People don’t come back for after-care appointments or follow diet recommendations, or they simply fall back into old habits. And while someone might go through all the pre-surgery education, their psychological relationship with food may not change post-surgery.
Regaining all the weight can happen, but it’s rare. We’ll work with you and a dietitian to help you get back on track before you regain too much of the weight you worked so hard to lose.
Is having weight loss surgery the easy way out?
I’m amazed that in this day and age some people still think of surgery as the easy way out. There is nothing easy about bariatric surgery. People who have these procedures prepare for six months on average and then must change their lifestyle and diet after surgery. It’s a lot of work.
