like i thought it would. if your food just sits in your pouch to help you feel full, why when you swallow it gets stuck and you can feel it going through the band. Does that mean you should stop eating because your pouch is full and your forcing it down? Does it mean your foods not really sitting in your pouch but going through?

Its going thru, and it sounds like you aren't chewing it properly...what did you eat that did that??? You may want to try eating slower too.

I had cream of wheat get stuck...ugh. sipping hot water dissolved it. So I took cream of wheat of the list. I also found out that Tuna doesn't work for me either...too dense I think...dang, I love tuna too.

I still find it hard not to drink when I eat...well not so much that as waiting an hour to drink....and eating an hour after you drink just doesn't make sense to me at all!

Best Wishes!

Here' s what should happen:

You eat slowly and chew your food well. The band will cause you to get full faster because your food will sit on top of the area of the stomach with the band around it and slowly fall down through the opening. Once you feel a sensation of food too high in your esophagus or seeming to back up in your throat (there are lots of other signs, too), you are finished eating.

If you are chewing well, eating slowly, stopping when you are full and not eating very very tough food (like fajita meat for me), you should not PB and the food shouldn't be stuck. I have had a lot of PBs in my day and know this to be the truth for me.

FN-reformed PBer

The idea of all of this is to feel full with very little food. To do that you must chew, chew, chew. The food will be small enough to pass at some point to the larger stomach where the stomach acids will start the digestion process. The upper stomach (pouch) has the nerve endings that signal to the brain it is full. By eating slowly the brain has an opportunity to receive the signal and you can stop eating.

Drinking liquids while eating pushes the food down faster and may prevent you from receiving the full signal. Or you may not feel as full as long because the food is going to the stomach faster. That's why when you are in the liquid stage you may always feel hungry.

Eating hard Proteins, like meat, cheese, etc. instead of Soup and mushies help keep you full longer. That's how the band is supposed to work.

Good luck on your journey.

Food begins moving through the band as soon as you start eating it. The goal is to feel satisfied faster, on less food. I too have felt that wierd sensation of feeling the food pass from the upper stomach to the lower stomach, but that doesn't mean that the upper stomach is now empty, and it doesn't mean that what you felt go through is the bite you just took, it could be the one before that, or the one before that. If you are getting stuck on stuff often, evaluate what you are eating, how well you are chewing, and how fast you are eating.

If the food still passes kind of easy you may still need a fill, it could be minimal .1 c.c. or .2 c.c. . This happened to me at the beggining and though that band did not work. Also the food still passes, but at a slower rate than normal, thats an advantage. What I do is to drink liquids first then the solids, so the solids dont washes down.

Even if you wait a while and drink after solids, you are still washing your solids down. So try with liquids first or have a fill.

Remember this is my case. It could vary from bandster to bandster.