Dietary Changes after Weight Loss Surgery

Posted: Oct 08 in Post-Bariatric Diet by

After you undergo surgery for weight loss management, the amount of food you can eat at one time is severely limited. Therefore, eating foods rich in nutrition is more important than ever. Due to the drastically decreased size of your stomach, it is essential that you not waste that precious space by filling it with nutritionally useless foods, and instead focus on nourishing, life giving whole foods like meat, fish, vegetables and fruit. Maintaining good nutrition will help you to be successful in meeting your weight loss goals following a lap band procedure.

Besides nutrition, your initial focus should be to give your stomach time to heal and prevent it from stretching out. If you overfill your newly shrunken stomach, you could experience dangerous complications as well as vomiting, dumping and severe discomfort.

In the first several days following your lap band surgery, you will be restricted to a liquid diet. A few days to a week later, or when your physician finds that you are ready, you can move on to soft foods like ground meats, fish, boiled eggs, and soft cheeses and yogurt.

Next come the solid foods. These include things like firm or hard cheeses, soft raw fruit like pears, pine apple an papaya, meat chunks and boiled vegetables like carrots and daikon radish. Pineapple and papaya will be especially helpful to a post-surgical patient, as their natural enzymes are potent digesters of animal protein and help it break down with little effort.

Always be sure that you push fluids to avoid dehydration, but never have them with meals. Wait at least 30 minutes before and after meals to drink something. Also, be sure to supplement with a high quality multivitamin to avoid nutritional deficiencies, which are extremely common after bariatric surgery. You doctor may be able to tell you where to find special bariatric vitamins in the Warner Robins area.

 

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