Weight Regain With Gastric Bypass

     An essay on the topic of weight regain used an example of a patient; who after undergoing gastric bypass regained 80% of the weight she had lost. Keeping in mind that such a surgical intervention leads to weight loss as much as 60% of your initial body weight, this is some serious weight regain.

Just to give you the numbers, if the lady weighed 350 pounds with the gastric bypass she could have weighed 140 pounds having lost 210 pounds. But with the regain she would weigh about 308 pounds having regained over 160 pounds.

The question then that comes to mind is how in heavens name do you gain all that weight back on 5% of your stomachs capacity, that restricts food intake and re-routed intestines which minimally absorb calories?

Weight regain after gastric bypass is a frustration many surgeons have to deal with, unfortunately the surgery only affects your digestive system. The surgeon does not operate on your mind. And if the patient chooses not to stick with a lifestyle consistent with managing a healthy weight, regain is inevitable.

In the case of the said female patients she regained all this weight by having a sleeve of crackers on her desk. She ate a cracker every 10 minutes throughout the day for months.

With gastric bypass, the restrictive end of the procedure reduces the stomach into a small pouch the size of a golf or tennis ball. You just cannot have a lot of food in one sitting. Even further, since the intestines are so close to the esophagus (the food pathway from your mouth to stomach) it is easy to develop dumping syndrome when you eat high sugar foods like crackers.

This is because the food attracts a lot of water that tend to "flush backward" making you nauseous and can make you vomit. Though not a desirable experience it is a good thing as it teaches an individual to eat little and avoid sugary foods by force.

However the said lady managed to beat the "system" by eating small amounts of crackers all day long, a phenomenon known as grazing.

Another method of regaining weight even with gastric bypass is retraining your stomach. By the sixth to ninth month the small pouch of stomach is completely healed. It usually has restored it ability to stretch. And with slow but sure training you can stretch it to carry more and more amounts of food.

Combine an expanding stomach pouch with a high glycemic index diet that gets you hungry just hours after eating and your bathroom scale will start that clockwise movement again. Studies show that one can regain some substantial weight in 5 years from surgery if they are not careful.

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