Everything tastes bland 5 weeks post-op

[ryan_86 335]

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?

[Arabesque 6,494]

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.

[catwoman7 10,874]

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.

[Bettyboop56 33]

I'm 3 months post op and crave spice. Raising the bar of heat from pre-op. Haven't had issues.

[ryan_86 335]

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.

[smc124 118]

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.