Question about weight regain after RNY

About ten years ago, my cousin had the gastric bypass. Now, she is almost as heavy as she was before the surgery.

My question is: how does one regain all of his or her weight after the surgery? In the years following her surgery, my cousin has been able to "put away" the food like she did before surgery. She's been able to consume large amounts of alcohol, too. How is it physically possible to eat that way after surgery? It kind of scares me.

We can eat more the further we get out. Also it is easy to graze all day, if we want to. I can eat a ton, but make a conscious choice not to eat as much as I can. Surgery is NOT magic. My RNY was almost 8 years ago. I have maintained my weight loss but of the people I know who had surgery the same time as me, many have gained and some have indeed gained it all back.

Personally, the regain stories keep me on track. I see the sadness in their eyes and know I cannot go back to that dark place again. I must keep fighting. Maintenance is so much harder than losing.

If you do what you are supposed to do, follow your plan, figure out what works for you, take personal responsibility for your choices, forgive yourself if you mess up and get right back on track, you will be successful. If you make excuses for your mistakes and refuse to make changes when needed, you can and will gain it all back.

what Laura said,plus,alcohol is pure sugar liquid calories. It goes thru just like water quickly.

weight can be regained with any of the surgeries. Eating too much and the wrong things are partly t blame,also reverting to drinking with meals,which turns the food into" soup" which also goes thru quickly.

eating dense proteins and non Darby Vegas is the way those who maintain,do it.

When I drink alcohol that relaxes my pouch and makes it less sensitive to full signals. Plus it washes food out of my pouch. I used to drink alcohol when I had hernia and twisted gut. That allowed me to eat without major pain.  And eat more. At one time I gain 25 lbs more than a wated to gain.  It took me almost 2 years to slowly lose it. I lost 15 2lbs with not a problem..the last 10 I lost when I gave up drinking alcohol. 

Also not only how much I eat but what I eat makes a huge difference for me. I can gain weight on relatively low calories when I eat a more carbs. The WLS is a tool. It works if you use it properly. 

Her story does not have to be your story.  WLS has not changed the fact that my body only requires 1000-1200 cal per day.  That is not very much - I look on the bright side and say my carbon footprint is small - that is a very restircive diet long term and one that I could not stay on forever.  WLS makes it  manageable to live on 1000ish cal per day - not easy - but manageable using all the normal diet tools I ever learned - label reading portion control,  learning healthy ways to deal with stress, protein first, etc.

It is easy to consume liquid calories of 2000-4000 cal per day and regain but it is possible to follow the rules that work.  I am only 19 months out, but I have lost all my excess body weight - that is the first step for me.  Keeping a sig amount off is the second. 

Best wishes for your journey

According to the op sig, it shows she already has the rny.

You should be a little scared, hopefully that small amount of fear might help you stay on track, but people do fall off from time to time. 

You can regain with any surgery. Carbs are still absorbed by the body, refined carbs in abundance will have anyone gain weight pretty quickly no matter what surgery they pick, going back to old habits like drinking & eating, avoiding the scale/avoiding clothes getting tight, etc would put people back on the path to regain.

It's also possible that they never had a plan to ease into maintenance, that they relied on their tool too much & didn't keep in mind that what they did to lose the weight is the same thing they have to do to keep it off.

Your intestines have tiny hair-like appendages called villi.  The villi hold the food against the intestines so that ail of the calories can be absorbed.   During RNY surgery part of the small intestine is bypassed so calories do not get absorbed.  The intestines start to grow more villi so that all calories can be absorbed again.  By the end of two years the body once again absorbs all or almost all calories as it did before surgery.

The pouch that can start out to be as small as a grape grows larger and ends up with between eight and twelve ounces of capacity. 

The opening at the bottom of the pouch called the stoma that keeps food in the pouch can stretch out and let the food go directly into the intestines.  Then you can keep eating and eating because there is no restriction from the pouch.  You have more than 25 feet of intestines that you can pack the food into.  Drinking with your meals will get the food into the intestines quickly and allow you to eat enormous amounts of food without any uncomfortable feeling of fullness.

The body remembers how much it used to weigh and fights to get that weight back.  RNY is a temporary weight loss procedure.  It can be used to keep the weight off for life if you follow some rules.  No eating with food, tracking all food eaten, weighing daily, drinking at least 64 ounces of water, exercising and stopping regain as soon as it starts by eating fewer calories.

Right now you are in the honeymoon period.  Use these next two years to learn eating habits that will let you maintain your weight loss for life.  Don't make the mistake of thinking you are in maintenance when you reach your goal weight.  Keep losing even if people say you are too skinny.  Your honeymoon will end sometime around the end of year two and you will then go into bounce-back regain mode.  The average regain is twenty pounds.  Try to go twenty pounds under your lifetime goal so you have the cushion for bounce-back. 

Remember what happened to your cousin and resolve to still be at your goal weight ten years from now and then for the rest of your life.

^^^^^ Excellent advice ^^^^^^^

So well put, that I have nothing to add but agreement.