WLS is a bandaid for deeper issues and mostly a waste of money IMO... if you're really truly dedicated to losing the weight, you can do it without getting surgery. A really good therapist who can work through the food issues and bad habits from within would serve most fat people much better. Don't most WLS surgeons require candidates to lose some weight via diet and exercise before they'll even perform it in the first place? It just seems so redundant and unpleasant.
What an ignorant comment. Modern WLS works to change hunger and satiety hormone levels and to also reduce the body's "set point". Sure, many people will regain some of the weight they lose, and some will regain all of it. Successful weightloss requires lifestyle change, and many WLS patients simply won't do that. That's why Bariatric Centres of Excellence incorporate both psychological and dietary counselling along with exercise physiologists. The most recent statistics I saw from the Australian Bariatric Register showed regain post-op at only around 10%. Sure, it's flawed because many who regain don't keep regular followup appointments due to embarrassment, but the register tracks patients progress through general medical data held by doctors and ERs as well, plus it tracks when revisional surgeries take place.
Stella's hairloss fits absolutely within the expected parameters for someone that has had gastric bypass surgery. Many bariatric surgeons require 3-6 months dietary counselling prior to surgery, insurance companies nearly all do. Stella opted for a quickie Mexican surgery because it was cheaper than her insurance co-pay. From memory of her earlier Q&A bypass vlogs, her only pre-surgery dietary requirement was the short two week liver shrinking liquid diet. They do this because fat deposits first in the liver, but also is removed from the liver first. Modern laprascopic surgery requires the liver to be lifted by retractors to gain access to the stomach, and a fatty liver easily breaks up. Gastric bypass surgery has been around for over 50 years now, having started out as a cancer surgery, but early in it's history was seen to be a successful weightloss strategy. If it didn't work there is no way insurance companies would cover it, and in turn the bariatric surgery industry couldn't have survived...let alone thrived. It's easy to sit back and say it doesn't work because we all know of folk that fail their surgery because they don't make the necessary lifestyle changes to complement the procedure. It's a lot harder to find successful patients that will advocate it because they mostly just want to put the morbidly obese part of their lives behind them and move on with their lives.
From what I've seen so far of Stella's post-op approach, she's definitely saying all the right things to suggest she might succeed, Alex Rodriguez on the other hand, is showing every indicator of failure...watch this thread!!!
Edited to add: Gastric bypass is considered a "metabolic surgery"... It changes the metabolism. It can also put type 2 Diabetes into permanent remission, and significantly improve the management and treatment costs of type 1 diabetes. Gastric bypass (as opposed to VSG) is favoured by surgeons for those patients already struggling with diabetes for that reason. Some even advocate it is the cure for type 2 Diabetes, and as such is a cheaper more viable alternative to traditional life long expensive medication and treatment options. Many diabetic patients are discharged from hospital post gastric bypass surgery already off the majority of (if not all) their diabetes medications. Dietary and exercise changes can't do that as effectively as a relatively simple and very low mortality (in the right surgical hands that is) surgery can. Of course there are downsides to changing how the gut works, but in a cost vs reward equation is very hard to argue against the benefits of gastric bypass surgery especially for those patients already struggling with diabetes and other metabolic illnesses. It makes both medical and financial sense for many patients.