mistysj

Look near the bottom of this thread: http://www.bariatricpal.com/topic/292105-is-seafood-okay/

I made a list of all the post-op diets I could find from reputable sources online (surgeons and Bariatric Centers of Excellence, as well as international practices of renown). The list is here: http://www.bariatricpal.com/topic/255776-list-of-vsg-post-op-diets-from-surgeons/ If your surgeon publishes their diet plan online, add the link to the original post.

I didn't mean to be short. I was at a family dinner. for soft food I ate a lot of: eggs cheese Yogurt Cottage cheese Cereal with milk (like Special K or uncle Toby's flakes) Porridge with Protein powder stirred in after it cools a bit Canned Soup with extra chicken added Beef mince with gravy or bolognaise Canned chicken mixed with Mayo, onion, and gherkin relish (I call this chicken salad) Refried Beans with cheese Hummus Canned peas Baked beans Custard with Protein powder stirred in I actually ate a lot of fish but I've left that out for you. Sashimi, smoked salmon and canned tuna were staples.

Same risk with raw as always. Make sure it's fresh. The best tip for sushi is go when it is very busy!

Heaps of soft food recipes on the Food and Recipe section.

Sushi is soft food but the rice and the nori will be a problem so stick to sashimi and know it is a great source of Protein. Try more tender fish like salmon or tuna and skip the octopus and sea urchin for now.

Have my surgery set correctly but I can see the DS forums by default. This doesn't bother me, but there was a little but of seams earlier when a RNY responded to a DS post about vitamins by accident and things got snippy.

If you are on purée then you should be fine if you purée it. If you are on soft, just avoid rubbery ones like squid or overlooked shellfish. Chew very well.

Everyone's capacity is different. Men tend to hold more than women. Tall people seem to hold more. It has to do with the length of the stomach. Your surgeon will make your sleeve the right size to accommodate your natural stomach length. There are a few rules of thumb. First, there is nothing that says you need to stuff yourself. Second, if you can hold more volume that means you can fit more veggies! Nobody seems to be able to hold a huge amount of good lean dense protein. Third, don't compare yourself to others.

Fixed Johns Hopkins to account for their new more detailed info.

Pick one of these if you can't ask your surgeon. I'm surprised they didn't give you guidelines. http://www.bariatricpal.com/topic/255776-list-of-vsg-post-op-diets-from-surgeons/

Follow your surgical team's plan. Do a search in these forums for "three week stall" and realize that the first month is not about weight loss but about your body healing. If you look at two months out nobody is still stalled and everyone loses significant weight. This is not the time to start changing your diet. This is time to follow the instructions and stop weighing yourself more than once a week.

It is "The End of Overeating." You got a bit mixed up with the title.

You will be able to hold more in the liquid phase. Up to 1/2 cup of liquid in half an hour or 1/3 of a cup of a liquid food like yogurt. When you get to purée, you will start by holding about 1/4 cup and probably get to 1/3 cup by the time you go to soft foods. I'm over 7 months out and can hold about 2/3 of a cup of food at a meal. Everyone is slightly different. The most important thing is don't try to stuff yourself and don't feel like you have to clean your plate. The physical hunger could be acid so it is standard to ask if you are taking a PPI like nexium. But it is also fairly normal during the liquid phase and passes for lots of people when they are on purée.

Your stomach is nowhere near the chair when you are sitting down. The staples are microscopic and the whole staple line is covered on the outside with tight stitches. Your stomach is one of your most well protected organs, especially as you presumably still have lots of padding since you are not far post-op.

I feel like I get hungry like a normal person now. It happens 3 or 4 hours after my last meal, depending on what I ate at that meal. It is easy to satisfy. And it is general hunger, not an unquenchable craving for a specific food. It's easy to sit with the hunger if I need to wait a bit longer to eat. It doesn't tend to lead me into bad choices (but I do sometimes get head hunger, where food "talks to me").

Christmas in Australia is a lot different, because it's in the middle of summer and it's bloody hot! We had Christmas lunch with one side of the family today, and we are having Boxing Day dinner tomorrow with the other (closer) part. Christmas lunch: Lots of chilled Chardonnay and champagne. I didn't drink any because we had afternoon drinkies planned with our neighbors. Boiled, chilled prawns (very traditional, we bring these) Seafood salad Beetroot salad Cold sliced ham Crackers, pate, cheeses, dips, hummus Homemade brioche rolls (my husband makes these, I had about 1/3 of one) Roast turkey, served cold There must have been other stuff but I didn't have it Desserts: trifle (with a tin of white rum in) or mini Christmas puddings. I had about 1/3 cup of trifle. Boxing Day dinner: Baked ham (brought by us) Butternut pumpkin (squash) casserole (baked by me, the sweet kind with nuts and brown sugar on top. I will add an extra egg for Protein -- request of DH's dad) Banana bread (made by DH. Half the bunch of bananas off our tree went ripe at once so we have to do something) Whatever DH's dad's Aussie wife decides to cook. Hopefully some vegetables. Sometimes her cooking is amazing and other times it's shocking. (DH and his dad are Canadian, it is a late-in-life marriage.)

I never regretted it for one moment and I have hardly ever seen people on these forums who regretted it unless they had a complication or they were very new post-op. I have never seen a complication-free 6+ month post-op who regrets the surgery despite having lost a significant mount of weight. I guess they must exist and I'd like to hear from them to understand what their regrets are. The first month is rough. liquids are boring and purée is a pain, you have to sip all the time and everything feels weird. Hormones are surging through your system. You are having to deal with your life without "using" food. It's tough. Even knowing this pre-op isn't enough for some people to be prepared. I will say I had an easy recovery and it never felt like a burden to me. I was able to keep a positive attitude throughout. After all, I really wanted this from the bottom of my heart, and I had no complications and almost no pain. This is when you need support. Get it from BariatricPal, as well as your partner, family, surgeon, psychologist, minister, best friend, whoever. Just get to the soft food stage and not only will you be able to eat more normally, but your risk of complications goes way down at the 6-week mark. By two months, you are most likely on solid foods and you can eat at restaurants again. You are back at work and seeing people every day. You can start exercising. Before you know it, you will be living pretty much normal, dropping weight and gaining health.

Your surgeon will probably remove them at your follow-up. At any rate you can ask at that appointment. Most of us didn't have staples in our incisions.

Yep it is safe to fly. Wear compression socks and drink lots of water. Take some shake powder with you and buy bottled water to make up your shakes if you must have a meal on the plane. You can ask the flight attendants if you can use their sink to wash out your shaker. Otherwise just have water or tomato juice on the plane if you can skip eating and it is a short flight. If it's a long flight try to walk in the aisles as much as you can.

The tolerance for sweet tastes is almost always reduced after surgery. Things just taste too sweet. That does tend to ease off a bit with time but not for everyone. That's why you shouldn't stock up on Protein shakes you like pre-op because there is a huge chance they will be too sweet after. Fatty foods can make you feel sick post-op so people with that reaction may lose the taste for those foods,whether fried ones or things like ice cream. Lots of us find that we start to really enjoy vegetables and we really like non-fatty seasonings like chillies, exotic kinds of salts and fresh herbs. We branch out and get more creative with how we prepare foods. We can realize that some foods give us energy and make us feel great so we can start to gravitate toward them. Some foods fill us up too quickly or hurt our sleeves and we will generally learn our lesson and tend not to have those foods often. For me, one such food is French fries. I can't eat enough of them to feel the emotional satisfaction so I usually don't start.

I'm in Australia and I can't get all the great low-cal low-carb high-Protein shakes you guys in the US have, like Premier Protein. Even Syntrax nectar costs me twice what it costs you guys. There are just a few options that are relatively high quality. Optifast VLCD have 17 grams of protein for 152 calories. Musashi has one variety that has 25 grams for 113 cals and one that has 30 grams for 171 (closest I can find to Premier but not RTD). I haven't tried it yet but probably will when my Optifast runs out. There is another brand here called CelebritySlim. They taste great but are comparatively low-protein and high-carb. They also have other things like tea tree oil that I find fishy. Short of racking up big import costs, I think maybe my best bet is buying pure unflavored WPI (I can get it here) and making up my own shake recipes. I'd ideally like to stay around the 30 grams mark and have 170 or less calories. Most of the homemade shake recipes I see online are more like 300-500 calories. Has anyone tried this? How did it come out?

Thanks I feel heaps better today. not 100% but at least 80%! I hope I'm 100% tomorrow.

Cool! I stand corrected then. I hope their ingredients and nutrition labels are found to be correct.

I had a nice Christmas lunch with family and found it really easy to eat "within my means". I didn't drink, playing the "I'm sick" card. Our neighbors are coming over for a drink in a bit and I will have one then and some eggnog tonight. But I will stay close to my calorie goal and i haven't felt deprived and haven't stuffed myself either. Santa brought me a Fitbit Flex and a Fitbit Aria wireless scale! I had the Fitbit One that clips on but this one is a bracelet. I love it! And the scale syncs with MyFitnessPal automatically and checks my body fat % too. I also got a Fossil bag and a new board game, and Secret Santa gave me a mushroom growing kit!