Gastric Bypass Surgery And Diabetes!

I’ve written before about the dramatic and often amazing results that extremely overweight people have see in regards to their diabetes when they undergo gastric bypass surgery.

Gastric bypass is a procedure that essentially creates a dramatically smaller stomach by stapling off the majority of the stomach and leaving just a “pouch” for the food to pass through. With this much smaller stomach a person gets full quicker, and that combined with eating the right things, a healthy diet, creates rapid weight loss and in many cases an almost instant reversal or cure of type 2 diabetes.

Such is the case in an interview posted by TuDiabetes today. The story tells about a woman whose diabetes was really poorly controlled even on medication and within a week of the bypass she was able to come off of medications completely and her glucose levels were lower than they had been in years.

The decision to have gastric bypass surgery is not to be taken lightly and has risks that need to be considered, but for many those risks pale in comparison to the risks face by continued obesity and out of control diabetes. There really is no soft way to explain how damaging the combination is and how it can lead quickly to a loss of the quality of life, if not the loss of life itself.

Life insurance underwriters view gastric bypass carefully knowing that there are risks from the surgery and the dramatic weight loss for the first year or so, but within a few years the weight loss and improved overall health often lead to much better rates than a person would have received prior to the surgery, if they were insurable at all at that point.

Bottom line. Gastric bypass has always had a stigma attached, just as obesity has. To put it bluntly, there are a lot of people who probably say under their breath that it’s just a case of a fat person taking the easy way out. But let’s be real. There isn’t anything easy about the situation they are in and when they choose the surgery there’s nothing easy about the way out…..and it saved and changed their lives.