LYNN - Hibernation Syndrome
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Hibernation Syndrome
After WLS, you may be feeling tired and become depressed. When you are
several weeks post op, and are either on a liquid diet or you are eating
many fewer calories than you were pre op, this depression and inactivity
can become more pronounced. All you want to do is sleep, you may have
crying spells, you may begin to believe that the surgery was a mistake,
or you may think ‘what in the world have I done to myself?’
All these feelings are completely normal and, to a certain extent, are
to be expected. The low number of calories you are eating produces what
many of us call the ‘hibernation syndrome’ and your depression and
feelings of despair, are a direct result.
During the weeks immediately following surgery, our body starts to
notice that we are not taking in enough calories. It doesn’t know we’ve
had WLS, or that it’s the year 2003. Our body is missing food, thinks
this is a famine, and struggles to conserve our energy. The human body
reacts like it always has in a famine; it makes us depressed–so we
don’t have the motivation to do anything, and it makes us tired–so we
don’t have the energy to do anything. In this way, we will conserve as
many calories as possible and remain alive. You can see the practical
value of this as our bodies have been living through famines,
snowstorms, and other periods of unstable food supply for centuries.
This stage can last several weeks. Our discomfort is compounded as we
are, at this same time, trying to recover from major surgery, adopt new
eating habits, and deal with a liquid or soft diet. To get out of this
stage, our body has to say to itself ‘gee, this famine is lasting a bit
too long. If I keep conserving my energy with inactivity, I will starve
to death. I’d better use my last store of energy (the remaining fat and
muscles in our body) to hunt up some food’. At this point, our body will
switch from getting energy from food, to getting energy from our fat
(and muscle too if we don’t eat enough protein) and that is what we want.