What are the reasons for regaining weight after bariatric surgery?

Good info

Thank you for the informative article!

I'd say that 90+ percent of success after bariatric surgery is psychological. In other words, the head of an individual who has undergone weight loss surgery must be in the right place to succeed.

Getting bariatric surgery with the hope that all of one's weight problems will be magically solved is unrealistic. People who have this surgery must do the real work to succeed. For some, this entails addressing psychological aspects of why they overeat (e.g., boredom, food addiction, stress, emotional eating).

Many weight loss surgery clients who don't adopt new coping mechanisms regain weight because they utilize food for purposes other than intended. Food is intended to fuel our bodies, nothing more.

On 7/11/2017 at 9:26 PM, Bariatric Surgery Nutrition said:

• Drinking liquid calories (although the stomach limits the volume of food that you eat, it doesn’t prevent you from being able to drink large amounts of calories),
• Not delaying your fluids from your solids (drinking and eating at the same time - only after surgery - appears to result in the rapid transit of the food you eat, in other words it “flushes” the food out of the stomach the same way flushing the toilet with Water empties the bowl. This results in an empty stomach and a true physical hunger leading you to eat more. This is often confused with people thinking or feeling as if they have stretched their pouch),
• Grazing/Picking and nibbling (surgery operates on the stomach, not the mind, thus the reasons that may have lead some people to overeat before surgery may remain, such as emotional eating, stress eating, using food as a coping mechanism, etc.

Some other reasons for weight regain that are less common but still possible include:

• An enlarged gastric pouch
• A fistula
• Intestinal adaptation
• New medications that may induce weight gain (i.e. anti-depressants, some forms of chemotherapy, etc)
• A poorly controlled thyroid (synthroid doses need to be adjusted after rapid weight loss).

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Bariatric Surgery Nutrition

Bariatric Surgery Nutrition

Nothing about personal responsibility or not resolving mental issues with food?

So if you can so easily gain back the weight due to falling back into old eating habits, what is the point of the surgery? It would be like any diet I've already done and lost and then gained it all back again. I was hoping this would give me a lot of help in not gaining it back. I've always known what I should do, but why not just do Nutri Sys again and hope you can keep it off this time? In other words, what is the point if the surgery if it doesn't help you change your ways?

4 hours ago, Lillyrose130 said:

In other words, what is the point if the surgery if it doesn't help you change your ways?

The entire point of the surgery is it can help you change your ways.

I was ravenously hungry prior to weight loss surgery. I could eat three bowls of Cereal and still be shaking as if I was starved. I could eat a footlong sub sandwich in one sitting, then eat another one 90 minutes later because I had hunger pangs and a headache.

Surgery addressed my insatiable hunger by removing the section of the stomach that produces the hunger hormone ghrelin. Once I awakened from surgery 2+ years ago, my fierce hunger disappeared.

Also, sleeve gastrectomy, bypass, and duodenal switch differ from "just another diet" because these surgeries initiate neurohormonal changes that drive our internal set points downward.

Prior to surgery, 200+ pounds was my body's set point. I could lose large amounts of weight, but my body fought every step of the way to get back to 200+ pounds. After the surgery, my body's setpoint was revised downward and I now have no trouble maintaining my 120-pound body weight.

As always, bariatric surgery is a tool that can be abused if people overeat junk food, just like open heart surgery is a tool that can be abused if people revert to eating habits that clog the arteries.

Thank you, I feel much better. I need something to give me a fighting chance!