starryskies

Did your team give you portion size recommendations and guidance around number of meals & Snacks if any a day? If not ask for some as you will find them helpful. The next advice is to stick to those recommendations.
Are you eating slowly? It takes at least 20 minutes for the message to get through that you’ve had enough. If you eat too quickly you will get over full & be uncomfortable & you’ll really know it when your restriction kicks in! Take small bites, use small cutlery (teaspoons, cocktail forks, baby cutlery, etc.), put the cutlery down between bites, sit back from the table & wait a couple of minutes. Then ask yourself do you need the next bite or just want it. If you just want it put the cutlery down again. Personally I aimed not to feel full but to feel like I had enough & didn’t need more.

As @SpartanMaker said it takes time to learn the difference between your real hunger and your full cues. Before eating take a moment to think about why you’re eating? Are you bored, emotional (sad, angry, frustrated, stressed, anxious, etc.)? Are you eating out of habit (like because you’re watching tv, a movie, it’s an old snack time,…)?
Sneezing, hiccups, runny nose can be full cues for many. If you’re craving a specific food, flavour or texture that’s not real hunger. I get restless with real hunger as if something is wrong. It usually takes time to realise I’m actually hungry and then I can logically understand why I would really be hungry - missed a meal, didn’t eat much at a previous meal, etc.
It takes time to understand all this, what your signals are, and what strategies to manage it all works for you. Give yourself grace while you’re working it out.

So this idea that you can stretch your pouch somehow and make it permanently bigger is mostly myth.
First, right after surgery your stomach is swollen. Over time, the swelling goes down, thus you can accommodate more food. This is normal and to be expected. Second, your stomach is designed to stretch. This too is normal. Think of it like a balloon. With nothing in it, it's small. Fill it up and it gets bigger. Let out what you put in it and it goes back to its original shape. Third, while you can't really make your stomach any bigger, you can train it over time to handle more food. If anything, this is what's happening to people that think they "stretched out" their stomach after surgery. It's not really any bigger, but you have trained it to not "complain" as much when it is over full. There's certainly a limit here though to how much you can stuff in and I promise it's always going to be less than it was pre-surgery. I would caution you to be careful about frequent eating. If you're eating multiple times a day just to put something in your stomach, it is possible to outeat your smaller stomach. It's best at first to eat on a regular schedule because as you alluded to, it's hard to understand both hunger and fullness queues.

Gastric bypass on January 20th, I’m a great over worrier in general but I feel recently I’ve been eating a lot more than usual not in terms of size but frequency. Feeling full is still a sensation I’m getting used to so I’m settling for feeling not hungry instead but sometimes it tips into feeling uncomfortable. How would I know if I have stretched my pouch?

I am not to goal yet but I can tell you that as long as I keep my Protein high i seem to lose weight independent of actual calorie goal. I am 6 months out and am shooting for 130 grams of protein and somewhere around 1500 calories. Continuing to lose a couple lbs a week even though it’s not terribly linear lol.

Am seeing that I have a msg but when I go to it theres nothing there. So if u want to email me your numbers or fb names I can set up the whatsapp group or fb group. My email is lea9794@yahoo.co.uk

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I seem to have the day 5 post op blues if there is such a thing. I am really hungry today, I think because my pain has subsided greatly and I'm moving more and also because the liquid medications and the shakes seem to leave a artificial sweet taste in my mouth. I crave salt like mad too. The last few days I've been having a shake for Breakfast, milk mid morning, Soup for lunch, milk mid afternoon, soup for tea and a shake/smoothie later in the evening (one tin of soup will do me 3 ish portions) and I have water/ sugar free squash/tea throughout the day. Is this too much? I'm so worried I'm going to stretch my pouch. I haven't been or felt sick, occasional I get a little tight chested but I think that's a signal to slow down/stop. Really gassy after everything too.

Sorry to be moany!

I’m not your doctor, but have more soup!

Hey, you were right! It didn't hurt one bit! I only had one of the 5 dressings changed as they all looked good and the nurse was more worried she's introduce infection by fiddling with them. Back next week for clips out :/

It shouldn't hurt. Sometimes the tape can stick to the skin a bit and pinch when coming off ("like pulling off a bandaid")..
You're gonna do great!

I think it depends on where you are as to whether surgeons are not doing them as much. Here in the UK we have yet to have any horror stories and I'm pretty confident from the research I did that the band is as much of a viable option as the others.

My choice was based around not wanting to permanently alter my internal organs, the option for reversal, recovery time etc, but that was MY choice. The best you can do is lots of reading and think about what it is you want, speak to your surgeon and get them to discuss the options and statistics with you. If you look for bad you will find bad about anything. Good Luck!

Hey every one, I thought I would start a stages recipe thread for the 3 stages. Maybe a mod can make these stickies. Then when ever we want a recipe from a certain stage we can check out these threads, and if we find a good new recipe we can post it in the threads. What do you guys think??

This is a really, really horrible thing to write on a thread of people who have just had their bands put in. What did you actually hope to achieve by writing this? Give people advice, give them warning signs to look out for, give them some context regarding your circumstances. Don't just come here and tell them the life changing decision they have just made almost killed you! Not nice at all!

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