Psychological Obesity Treatment Is Secret To Improving Obesity Surgery Success Rates

For an increasing number of very obese individuals weight loss surgery is the answer to ridding themselves of excess weight when diet and exercise have failed to work, although it is definitely not an easy choice and produces a wide range of outcomes in different patients.

There are several different surgical weight loss procedures available today from gastric bypass surgery involving the decrease of the volume of the stomach and the bypassing of a section of the intestine to restrict the amount of food eaten and the ability to absorb calories from that food to gastric banding which merely decreases the volume of the stomach to once again restrict the amount of food that can be eaten.

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

The real problem with gastric bypass surgery however does not lie in the surgery itself but reveals itself in the months after the operation when individuals find that their lifestyle has to change radically and that they must adjust to a whole new eating system. For the majority of patients this is hard but for a few it can bring severe problems that are simply too much to cope with.

There are a variety of causes of obesity but a couple of common problems serve to demonstrate this point.

The first problem is that of those individuals whose obesity has been caused, or exacerbated, by emotional eating. Here individuals turn to eating whenever they find themselves stressed or when their emotions are low. Emotional or comfort eating can develop into an extremely strong habit that is hard to break and the psychological pressures that generally follow gastric bypass surgery are precisely the type of pressures that can trigger the need for emotional eating in people who suffer from this problem.

The second problem is that of those individuals who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable disgust, depression and guilt that frequently follow binge-eating bouts. It is only too easy to imagine the great difficulty that such individuals will experience in trying to cope with the major changes in lifestyle after gastric bypass surgery.

Taking all of these factors into consideration it is perhaps not surprising to discover that approximately 20% of those being considered for obesity surgery are unsuitable, or perhaps more correctly not prepared, for surgery and this is when psychological obesity treatments come into play.

A lot of attention is paid to the requirement for individuals to meet certain physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their BMI and the existence of other medical conditions which are linked to the fact that they are considerably overweight) but far too often only lip service is paid to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. If surgery is to have the very best possible chance for success then it is extremely important to pay close attention to the psychological requirements of individuals and to provide them with the necessary pre-surgical assessment, counseling and, most significantly, treatment.