Weight Loss Surgery: The Pros and Cons
Is Weight Loss Surgery for You?
Severe obesity is a chronic condition that is very difficult to treat. For some people, weight loss surgery helps by restricting food intake or interrupting digestive processes. But keep in mind that weight loss surgery is a serious undertaking. You should clearly understand the pros and cons associated with the procedures before making a decision.
In order to understand how weight loss works, you need to first understand how the normal digestive process functions.
Normally, as food moves along the digestive tract, appropriate digestive juices and enzymes arrive at the right place and at the right time to digest and absorb calories and nutrients. After we chew and swallow our food, it moves down the esophagus to the stomach, where a strong acid continues the digestive process. The stomach can hold about 3 pints of food at one time. When the stomach contents move to the duodenum, the first segment of the small intestine, bile and pancreatic juices speed up digestion. Most of the iron and calcium in the foods we eat is absorbed in the duodenum. The jejunum and ileum, the remaining two segments of the nearly 20 feet of small intestine, complete the absorption of almost all calories and nutrients. The food particles that cannot be digested in the small intestine are stored in the large intestine (made up of the ascending colon, transverse colon, descending colon, sigmoid colon and rectum) until eliminated.
Obesity surgery involves making changes to the stomach and/or small intestine.
How Does Weight Loss Surgery Work?
The concept of gastric surgery to control obesity grew out of results of operations for cancer or severe ulcers that removed large portions of the stomach or small intestine.
Because patients undergoing these procedures tended to lose weight after surgery, some doctors began to use such operations to treat severe obesity. The first operation that was widely used for severe obesity was a type of intestinal bypass. This operation, first used 40 years ago, caused weight loss through malabsorption (decreased ability to absorb nutrients from food because the intestines were removed or bypassed).
The idea was that patients could eat large amounts of food, which would be poorly digested or passed along too fast for the body to absorb many calories. The problem with this surgery was that it caused a loss of essential nutrients (malnutrition) and its side effects were unpredictable and sometimes fatal. The original form of the intestinal bypass operation is no longer used.
Surgeons now use other techniques that produce weight loss primarily by limiting how much the stomach can hold. Two types of surgical procedures used to promote weight loss are:
- Restrictive surgery: During these procedures the stomach is made smaller. A section of your stomach is removed or closed which limits the amount of food it can hold and causes you to feel full.
- Malabsorptive surgery: Most of digestion and absorption takes place in the small intestine. Surgery to this area shortens the length of the small intestine and/or changes where it connects to the stomach, limiting the amount of food that is completely digested or absorbed (causing malabsorption). These surgeries are now performed along with restrictive surgery.
Through food intake restriction, malabsorption, or a combination of both, you can lose weight since less food either goes into your stomach or stays in your small intestine long enough to be digested and absorbed.
Benefits and Risks of Weight Loss Surgery
Weight loss surgery is a serious undertaking. Before making a decision, talk to your doctor about the following benefits and risks.
Benefits
- Weight loss: Immediately following surgery, most patients lose weight rapidly and continue to do so until 18 to 24 months after the procedure. Although most patients then start to regain some of their lost weight, few regain it all.
- Obesity-related conditions improve: For example, in one study, blood sugar levels of most obese patients with diabetes returned to normal after surgery. Nearly all patients whose blood sugar levels did not return to normal were older or had diabetes for a long time.
Risks and Side Effects
- Vomiting: This is a common risk of restrictive surgery caused by the small stomach being overly stretched by food particles that have not been chewed well.
- “Dumping syndrome:” Caused by malabsorptive surgery, this is when stomach contents move too rapidly through the small intestine. Symptoms include nausea, weakness, sweating, faintness and, occasionally, diarrhea after eating, as well as the inability to eat sweets without becoming extremely weak.
- Nutritional deficiencies: Patients who have weight-loss surgery may develop nutritional deficiencies such as anemia, osteoporosis, and metabolic bone disease. These deficiencies can be avoided if vitamin and mineral intakes are maintained.
- Complications: Some patients who have weight-loss operations require follow-up operations to correct complications. Complications can include abdominal hernias, infections, breakdown of the staple line (used to make the stomach smaller), and stretched stomach outlets (when the stomach returns to its normal size).
- Gallstones: More than one-third of obese patients who have gastric surgery develop gallstones. Gallstones are clumps of cholesterol and other matter that form in the gallbladder. During rapid or substantial weight loss a person’s risk of developing gallstones increases. They can be prevented with supplemental bile salts taken for the first six months after surgery.
- Need to temporarily avoid pregnancy: Women of childbearing age should avoid pregnancy until their weight becomes stable because rapid weight loss and nutritional deficiencies can harm a developing fetus.
- Side effects: These include nausea, vomiting, bloating, diarrhea, excessive sweating, increased gas and dizziness.
- Lifestyle changes: Patients with extensive bypasses of the normal digestive process require not only close monitoring, but also life-long diet and exercise modifications and vitamin and mineral supplementation.
SOURCES: WebMD & Department of Nutrition Therapy at The Cleveland Clinic. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease.
Weight Loss = Better Sex
Four times in two years. That’s not a lot of sex for a couple married just a year and a half. Psychologists from Duke University presented a paper recently on this very topic. People who are overweight or obese may often find their weight gets in the way of sex, the psychologists say.
But the scientists found reason for hope. When people lose weight, their sex lives often improve. Researchers from Duke say even moderate weight loss of about 10 percent can make people feel much better about their bodies. That can lead to more sex. This is one of the few studies to examine the mental and emotional problems obesity can cause for intimacy, not just the physical troubles such as “hormone imbalances or impotence,” according to a Duke University press release.
The Study
The Duke study involved 161 women and 26 men with an average body mass index of 41 (30 or above is considered obese) and average age of 45. They were enrolled in a diet program at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis and had lost 17.5 percent of their body weight after one year and 13 percent after two years. The study subjects were asked about the quality of their sex lives when the study began and every three months thereafter. The most striking improvement in attitudes was seen at three months, when they had lost about 12 percent of their initial weight.
At the beginning, 68 percent of women said they felt sexually unattractive. One year into the diet, only 26 percent did. Initially, 21 percent of women said they were not enjoying sex; only 11 percent said so after one year.
A Man’s Point of View
Ron, who’s trying to lose about 100 pounds, said he’s definitely reluctant to have sex because of his excess weight. He won’t get undressed in front of his partner and won’t have sex with the lights on. “I don’t look sexy. I certainly don’t feel sexy,” Ron said. “If I have any chance of having sex, it is best I don’t do anything to spoil the mood like show my fat butt.”
Accepting Yourself Matters Most
It all depends on how you feel about being overweight, or short, tall or skinny, says eDiets’ sex columnist Michele Hickford. If you like the way you look, however that may be, you’ll feel you can be attractive to someone else, she says.
Being overweight brings with it certain issues that may or may not affect sexual prowess, such as physical stamina or flexibility. But the most important sex organ is the brain, Hickford says. “How you view yourself, how comfortable you are with your body has an enormous impact on your sexual attitude. Until you’re comfortable with yourself and your appearance, whether you’re overweight, underweight, tall, short, black, white or pink, a truly satisfying, fulfilling and, most importantly, comfortable sexual life will be elusive.”
By Che Odom, eDiets.com, January 2005
