Bariatric Surgery and Realistic Expectations

You’ve come out the other side of the bariatric surgery journey, congratulations!  After months of meeting with your doctor, dietician, and therapist you got the go ahead for the surgery and it’s done. You’re on the road to recovery. It’s all down hill from there, right? Now it’s just a matter of watching that number on the scale get smaller and smaller.

Wrong, the journey is just beginning and you didn’t even know it. You’ve spent months preparing yourself for the new way you are eating now, how you drink water and when, and you’ve probably spent more time on forums than you ever thought possible. And yet your expectations are still probably a little unrealistic when it comes to post-op bariatric surgery.

At first the weight does seem to fall off, you might have lost 10 pounds before you left the hospital. That’s a great feeling, it just doesn’t last forever. By the time you start adding real food back into your diet, you’re noticing that the weight comes off more and more slowly. How can that be?  You ask yourself. You just had surgery where they removed a good portion of your stomach, or rerouted it. Certainly, you should be seeing a larger loss on the scale.

Unfortunately it doesn’t always work that way. There are so many factors when it comes to weight loss, some of which we don’t even understand, that you have to have more realistic expectations about your weight loss.

Weight loss, when graphed out, is rarely just a progression of smaller numbers. When losing weight after bariatric surgery the scale will jump all over the place. It’s best to limit the times you weigh yourself to once a week. Weigh yourself at the same time each day (preferably morning) and then ignore the scale for a week. Our weight fluctuates due to hormones, the weather, what you ate the day before, and for many other reasons. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you weigh yourself every day.

Now that you’ve recovered from the surgery and been giving the go ahead to exercise you might actually be gaining muscle. More muscle is a great thing and will help you lose weight faster over time, however, muscle weighs more than fat so you’ll probably see an increase on the scale when you first start working out. Again, don’t let it get you down. If you’re moving, eating properly and staying active you’re doing all the right things and the weight will come off – on its own schedule.

If you’ve have bariatric surgery, but aren’t seeing the dramatic changes in the first few months post op, just remember that you gained the weight slowly and it’s going to come off slowly. You’re body is also going to fight you every step of the way. Surgery is a great step to losing weight, but you still need to work to make it work for you. Keep up the good work that you’ve been doing for so many months, it will pay off sooner than you think.