Psychological Assessment Is Key To Improving Obesity Surgery Success

For more and more very obese individuals bariatric surgery is the solution to ridding themselves of excess pounds when exercise and diet have not succeeded, although it is undoubtedly not an easy option and results in a wide variety of outcomes from one patient to the next.

There are many different surgical weight loss procedures available nowadays from a full gastric bypass which involves the reduction of the size of the stomach and the bypassing of a section of the intestine to restrict the quantity of food which can be eaten and the ability to absorb calories from that food to lap band surgery which simply decreases the size of the stomach to once again restrict the quantity of food that can be consumed.

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

The true problem with obesity surgery however is not to be found in the actual surgery itself but reveals itself in the weeks after the operation when patients discover that their lifestyle has to alter radically and that they must adjust to a totally new eating regime. For almost all people this is hard but for some it can bring severe difficulties that are quite simply too much for them to cope with.

There are many different reasons for 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 are under stress or when their emotions are low. Emotional eating can develop into an extremely strong habit that is difficult to break and the psychological pressures that generally follow obesity surgery are precisely the kind of pressures that can trigger the desire for emotional eating in people who suffer from this difficulty.

The second problem is that of those individuals who are prone to binge-eating and the uncontrollable depression, guilt and disgust that often follow bouts of binge-eating. It is only too easy to see the extreme difficulty which such individuals will find themselves with in attempting to deal with the major changes in lifestyle after obesity surgery.

Taking all of these factors into consideration it is possibly not too surprising to learn that about 20% of those being considered for weight loss surgery are unsuitable, or perhaps more correctly not ready, for surgery and this is where psychological obesity treatments come into play.

A great deal of attention is paid to the need for patients to meet specific physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their body mass index and the presence of other medical conditions associated with the fact that they are severely 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 best possible chance of success then it is vitally important to look carefully at the psychological needs of patients and then provide them with pre-surgical assessment, counseling and, most importantly, treatment.

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