Is surgery good for weight loss?

[NatalieLeslie]

My uncle is  50 years old. Weight 115 kg and 5 ft 6 inches. He is doing exercise regularly starting 2016. Doing exercise averaging 60 minutes. He managed to lose 7 lbs but then just stopped losing weight. Maybe diet is not ideal but shouldn't lose at least 1 lb every fortnight with all this hard work? Why is it getting so difficult to lose weight! One of my friends suggested to do weight loss surgery and also suggested a clinic Metabolic Surgery Clinic Istanbul. Has Anyone done weight loss surgery? Is surgery good for weight loss? 

[Dominique · Accepted solution]

The general consensus is that nutrition is a lot more important than exercising for weight loss, or that you can’t "out-exercise" a poor diet. I think it’s especially true for someone with a BMI higher than 40. So my advice to your uncle would be to focus on his diet and not to overly rely on exercising (physical exercise should be performed primarily for health, not weight loss).

As to surgery, you can find many discussions on the subject by searching community posts (for instance, with "bariatric" as keyword). Here are a couple:

Bariatric Surgery whos had it?

Bariatric Patients Here!

[Daves_Not_Here]

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Looking for the appropriate analogy: having bariatric surgery before addressing eating is like amputating a leg because a toe-nail is too long.  Try nail-clippers first.

Agreeing with @Dominique - weight loss is almost entirely about eating.  When you say "maybe diet is not ideal", you have hit upon the answer.  It doesn't need to be ideal but it does need to be the focus.

[Mukluk4]

I would argue that you can be successful to some degree of just increasing activity without changing your diet.  

Assuming before exercise your In = Out or your In > Out but not overly so (you've maintained a certain weight over a long stretch of time +/-5 lbs).  Exercise can swing the pendulum the other way assuming your diet hasn't changed (maybe 10 lbs for someone that just walks or 60lbs for someone that is aggressively active).  But to ultimately reach an end goal defined by a scale, you'll have to change your diet at some point.