For a lot of severely obese people gastric bypass surgery is the answer to shedding excess pounds when a program of diet and exercise has not succeeded, although it is without doubt not an easy course and leads to a wide range of outcomes from one patient to the next. There are many different surgical procedures available nowadays from gastric bypass surgery which involves the decrease of the volume 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 gastric banding which merely reduces the volume of the stomach to once again limit the quantity of food that can be eaten. Whichever type 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 so reduce weight by using up the body's fat reserves. The real problem with obesity surgery however is not to be found in the actual surgery itself but is seen in the weeks after surgery when people discover that their lifestyle has to change considerably and that they need to adjust to a whole new method of eating. For many people this is hard but for some it can result in serious problems that are simply too much to cope with. There are several reasons for obesity but a couple of common problems illustrate this point. The first problem is that of those people whose obesity has been caused, or aggravated, by emotional eating. In this case people resort to eating whenever they find themselves under stress or whenever their emotions are low. Emotional eating can develop into a very strong habit that is hard to break and the psychological pressures that frequently follow obesity surgery are exactly the sort of pressures that will trigger the desire for emotional eating in individuals who suffer from this problem. The second problem is that of those people who are given to binge-eating and the uncontrollable guilt, depression and disgust that frequently follow bouts of binge-eating. It is only too easy to visualize the great difficulty which such people will experience in trying to deal with the major lifestyle changes after gastric bypass surgery. When all of these factors are taken into consideration it is possibly not surprising to learn that approximately twenty percent of those being considered for bariatric surgery are unsuitable, or more correctly not prepared, for surgery and this is when psychological obesity treatments come into their own. Much attention is given to the requirement for people to meet certain physical requirements for surgery (in terms of things like their body mass index and the presence of other medical problems associated with the fact that they are significantly overweight) but far too often little attention is given to very real psychological problems that are associated with surgery. For surgery to have the best possible chance of success then it is critically important to pay close attention to the psychological needs of people and then provide them with pre-surgical assessment, counseling and, most significantly, treatment.
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