Angela Howard is half the woman she used to be, literally. At the worst she can remember, Howard, 37, weighed 303 pounds. Granted, that was after having six children, but she wasn’t happy with how being overweight made her look and feel. She wanted to change and she did change

-Team@CMHF

• After months of consideration and research, Howard had gastric-bypass surgery Nov. 5, 2009.
• Almost two years later, she has been able to drop to 150 pounds and keep the weight off.
• But, as strange as it sounds, the surgery was the easy part.
• It is the changes that came afterward that are defining how successful Howard will be at transforming her life.
• You learn how to eat correctly and how to diet and exercise.
• It is not a quick fix.
• You do not walk in and say, Hey I want this surgery and walk out a supermodel.
• Having gastric-bypass surgery is one piece of the weight loss
• Life after the surgery requires an immediate and long-term emotional and physical commitment to change that not everybody is willing to make.
• Medical experts try to weed out many of those people during the surgery’s screening process.
• When they aren’t, the result can be patients who have complications or who lose weight initially but regain some or all of it back a few years later.
• Weight regain is a big fear among patients considering gastric-bypass or any form of bariatric surgery, Heuts said.
• If patients know somebody who experienced this, the first thing she does is question them about the person’s habits.
• Watch what their habits are, and you tell me if that is the habits of somebody who has changed their lifestyle.
• Most of them will say, No, I see her eating potato chips and drinking soda or birthday cake. She doesn’t eat right, and she never goes to the gym.
• The majority of those types of things are induced by the patient. It is not that the surgery failed them.
• With gastric bypass, most patients have a built-in punishment when they eat too much or consume foods they shouldn’t.
• As part of the condition, food bypasses the stomach and enters the small intestine still largely undigested.
• Patients could experience symptoms immediately or within a few hours that include nausea, vomiting, bloating, cramping, diarrhoea, sweating, dizziness and fatigue.
• When one wants to get real stupid and go off the path and eat whatever they want to eat, the surgery keeps me from doing that because they will physically get sick.
• They cannot consume the amount of calories or the amount of food
• It’s not necessarily bad things that causes Dumping syndrome.
• She has a difficult time with chicken sometimes, and cannot eat steak, rice or lettuce.
• She can’t eat and drink at the same time because it flushes the food out of her stomach faster.
• She also can’t eat more than about 3 ounces at a time without becoming ill.
• Heuts wishes 100 percent of patients exhibited dumping syndrome when they ate something they shouldn’t, but it affects only about 80 percent.
• That might sound bad, but people usually don’t intentionally want to experience the condition, which helps them stay on target.
• Follow-up care is a big factor in maintaining weight loss and good health.
• When weight-loss surgeries were first being used, doctors didn’t realize how important follow-up care was to keeping the pounds off.
• Now it is considered one of the most important aspects of treatment
• The people who do best typically are the ones who follow the guidelines and use those services.

For further reading log on to:  http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/features/health/surgery-only-part-weight-loss-727227