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Psychological Assessments Are Key To Improving Surgical Success Rates

For more and more severely obese people weight loss surgery is the solution to ridding themselves of excess weight when diet and exercise have not been successful, but it is without doubt not an easy option and leads to a wide range of outcomes in different patients.

There are a variety of different surgical weight loss options used nowadays from a full gastric bypass involving the reduction of the size of the stomach and bypassing part of the intestine to limit the quantity of food which can be eaten and the absorption of calories from that food to gastric banding which simply decreases the size of the stomach to once more limit the quantity of food that can be consumed.

Whichever form of surgery is carried out the fundamental principle is to make the body burn off more calories than can be ingested and so to reduce weight by using up the body's reserves of fat.

The problem with weight loss surgery however does not lie in the actual surgery itself but is seen in the weeks and months after the operation when people discover that their lifestyle has to alter considerably and that they need to adjust to an entirely new eating regime. For almost all people this is hard work but for a few it can bring serious problems that are quite simply too much for them to cope with.

There are a variety of causes of obesity but a couple of commonly seen problems demonstrate this point.

The first problem is that of those people whose obesity has resulted from, or been aggravated by, emotional eating. In this case people turn to eating when they find themselves stressed or when their emotions are low. Emotional eating can develop into an extremely strong habit that is hard to break and the psychological pressures that usually follow weight loss surgery are exactly the type of pressures that can spark the need for comfort eating in people who suffer from this problem.

The second problem is that of those people who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable disgust, guilt and depression that usually follow binge-eating episodes. It is very easy to see the great difficulty which such people will experience in trying to cope with the major changes in lifestyle after obesity surgery.

When these and other factors are taken into consideration it is possibly not surprising to discover that approximately 20% of those being considered for obesity surgery are unsuitable, or more precisely not prepared, for surgery which is where psychological obesity treatments come into play.

Much attention is given to the requirement for people 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 often only lip service is paid to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. If surgery is to be given the very best possible chance of success then it is vitally important to look carefully at the psychological requirements of people and to provide them with pre-surgical assessment, counseling and, most importantly, treatment.