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Everything tastes bland 5 weeks post-op



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I I’m close to 5 weeks post-bypass, and food just tastes bland. I do get hungry, and I do get full (sort of), but I don’t feel satisfied. Feels like I have to over-season stuff just to taste it. This gets better, right?

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Oh yeah, the change to our taste buds & for some smell. It’s temporary but can make certain foods taste flavourless or really disgusting. Same with smell - you can become more sensitive to certain smells or certain smels make you nauseous. How long it persists is individual.

When you say satisfied do you mean an emotional satisfaction from eating or sated as in you don’t need to eat any more/don’t want to eat more? The emotional satisfaction you may have got from food before is related to head hunger & how food may have comforted you or made you feel better. Emotional satisfaction is related to your relationship with food & something we all work through. (Not saying you won’t enjoy eating. You will still enjoy delicious foods & eating but your relationship with food will change & you’ll understand why you eat better.) With the surgery you can also lose your appetite so not be interested in eating. Plus your nerves were cut & your healing so all those old messages about hunger, having eaten what you need, etc. don’t get through like they used too. And you may find a lot of those old signals feel different & you have to learn what those signals are & mean to you.

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it'll likely be temporary, but I would suggest taking full advantage of that while it lasts - turn the negative into a positive. If food doesn't appeal to you that much, then you likely won't eat all that much of it. You'll start seeing it more as fuel. Which is what we actually should be doing - seeing food as fuel. I completely lost my hunger and appetite for five months, and although it was disconcerting at first, by the end I wished my hunger & appetite had never come back. It was so much easier to stick to my program when I was never hungry and didn't give a flip about food.

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01/28/2023 09:13 PM, Arabesque said:



When you say satisfied do you mean an emotional satisfaction from eating or sated as in you don’t need to eat any more/don’t want to eat more? The emotional satisfaction you may have got from food before is related to head hunger & how food may have comforted you or made you feel better.


I mean like even a modicum of enjoyment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say eating is unpleasant, but it’s borderline a brief, annoying chore. I still want to do it, but even going from liquid to purée, purée to solid was disappointing. There’s a volume component to it, but even more prominent is just missing flavor. It’s like my taste buds have only two settings now, bad and meh.

So, I guess what I’m saying is the hole where food used to be in my life is big and it sucks. I was never an emotional eater, but I was a boredom eater and a hedonist with food and wine. I know this and the resulting depression are to be expected after surgery but still sucks.

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I feel like I experience a bit of the opposite … more of a taste sensitivity where foods may taste overly salty or sweet l, probably both rooted in the same hormonal changes though.

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      On day 4 of the 2 week liquid pre-op diet. Surgery scheduled for June 11th.
      Soooo I am coming to a realization
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      On day 4 of the 2 week liquid pre-op diet. Surgery scheduled for June 11th.
      Soooo I am coming to a realization
      of something and I'm not sure what to do about it. For years the only thing I've enjoyed is eating. We rarely do anything or go anywhere and if we do it always includes food. Family comes over? Big family dinner! Go camping? Food! Take a short ride or trip? Food! Holiday? Food! Go out of town for a Dr appointment? Food! When we go to a new town we don't look for any attractions, we look for restaurants we haven't been to. Heck, I look forward to getting off work because that means it's almost supper time. Now that I'm drinking these pre-op shakes for breakfast, lunch, and supper I have nothing to look forward to.  And once I have surgery on June 11th it'll be more of the same shakes. Even after pureed stage, soft food stage, and finally regular food stage, it's going to be a drastic change for the rest of my life. I'm giving up the one thing that really brings me joy. Eating. How do you cope with that? What do you do to fill that void? Wow. Now I'm sad.
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      1. summerseeker

        Life as a big person had limited my life to what I knew I could manage to do each day. That was eat. I hadn't anything else to look forward to. So my eating choices were the best I could dream up. I planned the cooking in managable lots in my head and filled my day with and around it.

        Now I have a whole new big, bigger, biggest, best days ever. I am out there with those skinny people doing stuff i could never have dreamt of. Food is now an after thought. It doesn't consume my day. I still enjoy the good home cooked food but I eat smaller portions. I leave food on my plate when I am full. I can no longer hear my mother's voice saying eat it all up, ther are starving children in Africa who would want that!

        I still cook for family feasts, I love cooking. I still do holidays but I have changed from the All inclusive drinking and eating everything everyday kind to Self catering accommodation. This gives me the choice of cooking or eating out as I choose. I rarely drink anymore as I usually travel alone now and I feel I need to keep aware of my surroundings.

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        BTW, the liquid diet sucks, one more day and you are over the worst. You can do it.

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