Psychological Assessments Are The Key To Improving Surgical Success

For a lot of severely obese people weight loss surgery is the solution to losing excess weight when exercise and diet have not been successful, though it is undoubtedly not an easy course and leads to a wide range of outcomes in different patients.

There are several different surgical options used today from a full gastric bypass involving the decrease of the size of the stomach and the bypassing of a section of the intestine to both limit the quantity of food eaten and the absorption of calories from that food to lap band surgery which merely reduces the size of the stomach to once again limit the quantity of food that can be eaten.

Whichever form of surgery is performed the underlying 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 reserves of fat.

The real problem with weight loss surgery however is not to be found in the surgery itself but reveals itself in the weeks, months and years after surgery when individuals discover that their lifestyle has to change significantly and that they have to adjust to an entirely new way of eating. For almost all patients this is hard work but for some it can lead to serious difficulties that are simply too much for them to cope with.

There are a lot of different causes of obesity but a couple of common problems serve to 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 when they find themselves stressed or when their emotions are low. Emotional eating is an extremely strong habit that is difficult to break and the psychological pressures that generally follow weight loss surgery are precisely the kind of pressures that can trigger the desire for comfort eating in people who suffer from this particular problem.

The second is the problem of those people who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable guilt, depression and disgust that usually follow binge-eating episodes. It is only too easy to visualize the extreme difficulty that such people will find themselves faced with in trying to deal with the major lifestyle changes after gastric bypass surgery.

Taking all of these factors into consideration it is perhaps not too surprising to learn that approximately twenty percent of those being considered for obesity surgery are unsuitable, or perhaps more precisely not ready, for surgery which is where psychological obesity treatments come into play.

A lot of attention is paid to the need for individuals to meet specific physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their BMI and the existence of other medical problems which are associated with their being considerably overweight) but all too frequently little attention is given to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. For surgery to be given the very best possible chance of success then it is critically important to look carefully at the psychological requirements of individuals and then provide them with the necessary pre-surgical assessment, counseling and, most especially, treatment.

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