After you have gastric bypass, you do experience looking fatigued and a little ragged for about a year. (Of course, some of us are raggedy all the time LOL.) At any rate, one of the drawbacks of bypass is that your hair falls out. You look like a chemo patient for a while. There are a number of theories/schools of thought on this. One is that the nutritional shock to your body just causes you to lose hair. Another theory is that with the rapid weight loss, you lose a number of fat cells very quickly from throughout your body. Your hairs are held in by follicles which are fed by/surrounded with fat cells, even in your scalp. When those fat cells are gone, the hair follicles become loose and fall out.
If you follow doctors' orders and continue to eat a high-protein diet postbypass, your hair comes back, oftentimes thicker and fuller than before your surgery.
At about 4-5 months postop, approximately 1/3 of my hair fell out. I looked pretty crummy for a while. Many people get wigs--my sister wears them, but she's 2 years postop & has trouble maintaining her diet, so her hair has not grown back.
I am 3 years postop and have gone from a size 24 to a size 6. I've been at a size 6 for 2 years. I am at the point now where I am having to maintain the post gastric bypass diet more strictly, as at this point I am starting to absorb fats again.
BTW, in response to a previous poster... yes, the lap band is a tool. So's the bypass. So is Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, or any program/tool you use. They're all tools for success and are only as successful as the level of work you put into them. We ALL know people who've had gastric bypass and gained their weight back. That's because they stopped using their tool.
Having gastric bypass and having it be successful is a lot of work. It's not a quick fix, though many people in the general population mistakenly think so and see having gastric bypass as a sign of weakness. I can tell you this... my sister was dying. I don't think she would be alive today if she had not had it. She has had type 2 diabetes for years, and sometimes she can't even feel her feet. She would walk from her front door to get in her car and go to work and be so exhausted from the 40-foot walk from her front door to her car that she would have to sit there a moment and catch her breath and wipe the sweat from her brow just to get going. She had high blood pressure and every condition imaginable that is associated with obesity. I am very happy to report that this last weekend, we met up for lunch (we live about 2-1/2 to 3 hours' drive apart, so we meet in between) and went walking up and down the streets of an old mountain gold mining town. We musta walked 10 or 15 blocks total, and neither of us even broke a sweat until the temps got up to around 90! I can guarantee you that two years ago, she could NOT have done that.
For me (I had my surgery a year before my sister), I didn't have the # of health problems she did, but I was well on my way. I had high blood pressure that we hadn't been able to bring down to normal in nearly a year, could barely walk at all due to bad knees (was on my way to needing every-day crutches just to walk and had been using a walking stick for about 6 months when my doctor referred me... and I was only 44 years old at the time). Like my sister, the extra fat within my chest cavity was compressing my lungs, and I could not breathe. While I didn't have diabetes, I was pre-diabetic & the doctors were telling me that if I didn't get the weight down, it was only a matter of time before the diabetes showed up (I was the only one in my family who hadn't gotten it). I haven't used a walking stick in 3-1/2 years now and followed my doctors orders. I can scoop chicken poo and dig gardens and walk for miles and miles before my knees start giving me fits.
I regretted my surgical decision for about 15 seconds when I woke up in the recovery room and thought, "What have I done to myself?" That was the anesthetic talkin'. Other than that, I've never for one second regretted my decision. True, there's some pain, there's some inconvenience, but it's been alllll worth it for me. I've been lucky and didn't have any vomiting or anything like that after surgery, BUT... I did everything my doctors told me to do. Better than 50% of the people who have problems afterward are either: A) Eating/drinking something they shouldn't be because they think they can get away with it; or B) they have a crappy surgeon who is one of those docs that'll do the bypass on anyone that walks into his office with the cash instead of putting the patient through a thorough preoperative lifestyle change educational process which includes dietary counseling for a lifetime of healthy eating and didn't tell them they could develop certain conditions.
The hardest part for me, seriously, has been that in the last 2 months, I've suddenly become lactose intolerant which is *very* common in post gastric bypass patients. In fact, I belong to a couple of support groups & everyone I know who's had the surgery becomes lactose intolerant, some right after surgery, others it takes a while as it did with me.
As far as the lap band... here are the FACTS on the lap band that your doctor should tell you (I know our doctors made it very clear to us). With traditional gastric bypass, medically speaking, you can expect that if you follow the program and do what your doctors tell you, you will have permanent weight loss of approximately 70% of your excess weight within 2 years. With the lap band, at MOST you can expect to lose 40%-50% of your excess weight in 2 years. I have a friend who had the band 6 months after I had my gastric bypass in 2008, and to date, she's still only lost about 45 pounds of the 120 she needs to lose. The program we were in required us to lose SOME weight preoperatively to demonstrate that we'd made the lifestyle changes necessary, and 45 of those pounds includes the 20 she lost preop. So in 2-1/2 years with the lap band, she's only lost 25 pounds. And she practically lives in the gym. Several people in our support group have had the lap band in the last 4 years, and I can tell you EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM is at least STILL 50 pounds or more overweight. It's really a colossal waste of time and money, and when you talk to large groups of people who have had it done, you will find about 2 in 10 that are glad they did it and had long-term success with it. The long-term success rate with the lap band is very low. The procedure takes about the same amount of time as the gastric bypass, and there's only a couple of thousand dollars difference in the cost. Then you have to pay for fills and drainages over the ensuing years. Also, it's only been on the market about 10-15 years, so they don't REALLY know the long-term effects of having that device in your abdomen. Gastric bypass in its various forms has been around since the 1960s, and over the years, both operative techniques and postoperative care and training for the patient have improved TREMENDOUSLY.
I would never, ever recommend anyone to get a lap band.
ETA: To greeneggsandham: No, the lap band is NOT less invasive. Who told you that gastric bypass patients have a long incision down their "stomach"? The lap band procedure itself is EQUALLY invasive (as a medical transcriptionist, I also type the operative reports on a daily basis). They just do not have to cut your stomach, but the procedure takes about the same amount of time, the same number of small incisions (I have small incisions, too... 5 of them... now thankfully very invisible). Over the long haul, it ends up becoming more invasive because of having to go to an interventional radiology department and have your skin anesthetized to get your port filled.... which can also be REALLY expensive...and if you find yourself without health insurance for any reason & your lap band fails you, you're SCREWED).
I go to groups with LOTS of people who have had a variety of bariatric surgeries. I have personally met and talked to a couple dozen who have had the lap band done and very, very few are glad they did it. Conversely, I don't know a single gastric bypass patient who regretted it. Not one.
Also, more and more lap band patients are returning to the OR for a traditional roux-en-Y gastric bypass within 5 years.
