Effects of a Gastric Bypass on your partner listentoyourdreams.com/2017/10/15/effects-gastric-bypass/ Davy
October 15, 2017
After years of working and living together, you easily fall into the bad habit of “no time”. Freshly cooked meals are easily replaced by takeaway during the week. In weekends you like to enjoy life and leave the stress of work behind, so you go out for dinner or hang out with friends and family with foods and drinks. By taking time for enjoying life, we forget to take care of our body and condition. We take too little time for sports and don’t have enough sleep. Slowly but surely we give our bodies too much of all the good stuff and it doesn’t know what to do with it all, it’s too much to handle for that poor body. So it is very logical that we start gaining weight and we need to switch our clothes since everything starts to be tight. Some people feel this difference quickly and start changing their lives again. Others don’t feel this or don’t want to do anything about it and they let themselves go. Eventually, you become obese and your body, muscles and joints are having a hard time carrying all this weight around. This obesity also results in being short of breath, move less and sleep more. At this point in time, lots of people go look for a solution to fix this problem. They go on a diet, go to the gym, have walks on regular basis. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of willpower to keep up on a long-term basis and a lot of people give up after a while. This could be a moment where a doctor proposes to have a Gastric Bypass. A Gastric Bypass is a surgical procedure in which the stomach is reduced in size and your digestive system is rearranged. Because of this, you can eat less and don’t have a feeling of being hungry. After the procedure, you will lose weight drastically and you will have ups 1
and downs. Your complete eating pattern is being shaken all around and it is very likely that your tastes will change. You are going to love things you didn’t like before and you will dislike things you loved. From this moment on, this will also change for the partner. To keep it easy I will refer to the partner as “him” and the person with the gastric bypass will be “her”. The first couple of days (weeks) she can only eat pudding (all food needs to be fluid) and he can eat his standard dishes. He would like to help her but there isn’t anything he can do because he doesn’t know how she feels. He cannot know when she had enough or when she already had too much. The not enough part isn’t that bad, but when she has too much she will get a dumping. When she had a dumping, she goes through hell (she can get it from eating too much, too fast or wrong ingredients) and he can’t do anything at all to ease the pain. He will feel uncomfortable because he can eat as usual and enjoy his meal while she has to struggle to learn what she can or cannot eat (this is different for everyone who had a gastric bypass). After a while, she will start to try solid foods. At first, the portions are really small because her stomach needs to get used again to digest everything. Eating some things, like sugar and cheese, have hard consequences for her (dumping) and she will start avoiding these things. At the same time, his dishes change as well because he doesn’t like to have a nice big steak on his plate while she can only eat a salad. Or he won’t eat a dessert, even though he really would like one, but that would mean that she would have to sit there and watch him enjoy a dessert while she can’t even try a bite. Besides the food, there are also other extra costs that are a consequence of losing all that weight. All clothes become too big and need to be replaced. And with all I mean ALL: from underwear to even shoes who become a size or more to big! This enormous price tag can cause some serious arguments within the family. In these big discussions not only the price tag of these new clothes will come up, but also the green beast “jealousy” will pop up. She starts looking better and better and she will notice this herself and she will start to have more self-confidence. She will have more fun in life and won’t be ashamed of her weight anymore. More and more men will notice her and try to get her attention and this can lead to jealousy. Once everything is stabilized, again the large extra costs come up again. Because of the enormous weight loss, she has a lot of loose skin. Every part of her body will feel the strong call of gravity and will get “flappy”. This loose skin at her legs, belly, arms, boobs, .. can be corrected. These correcting surgeries can only take place when your body is completely recovered and stabilized from the gastric bypass, which can take 2 to 3 years. These corrective surgeries are esthetic and aren’t covered by social health. The price tags again are really spicy, but the results are equally impressive. Both for her body and self-esteem.
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I recognize myself in a lot of these points. My wife had a gastric bypass several years ago. We are one of the happy couples who can talk really good with each other and our relationship hasn’t changed because of this. On the contrary, our relationship even got better because of all the talks and discussions we had. We became more active and lively as before on more than one point. I am very proud of my wife that she endured all these changes and difficulties that she encountered. Even more, because she did it all for herself and not because of me. It was her journey to take so it had to be her decision. But for a lot of couples the story ends in another way, if you don’t talk with each other and don’t listen to each other, you don’t survive it as a couple. If this blog triggered your curiosity about Gastric Bypass, you can find more information on https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gastric_bypass But remember! It changes more in your life than you expect it to do. Go back to the top of the page.
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