Most patients feel magical after Bariatric Surgery. Most or all of the excess weight gone. You fit into regular sized clothes. Daily activities are so much more fun. You start doing things you never thought you could; for example- running a marathon.
But is the picture rosy ever after? Without any maintenance work? Not really.
By falling back into old eating habits and large meal portions, you are likely to gain some weight back.
When you underwent a Bariatric Surgery, your Surgeon did one of these or both in combination.
Either he bypassed some length of your intestines to allow less absorption of what you eat.
Or he reduced the size of your stomach to restrict how much you eat.
If not, he combined both these techniques depending on underlying cause of your obesity.
All great so far and you lost most or all of excess weight in the following months or a couple of years.
But the trouble starts if you slowly start eating more and more every day or make high calorie diet as your new daily routine.
This is like you are working against your own long-term success after initial euphoria.
With this habit you start stretching your stomach which is nothing but an expandable muscle pouch and slowly create more space there once again for dumping more or rich food that gets converted to fat.
After 5 years from surgery, if you are not careful, 20-30% of lost weight may come back.
Here are the 5 simple steps you could take and avoid this situation by preventing the stretching of your stomach after a Bariatric procedure.
1. Do not Drink Fluids During Meals:
Two big benefits come by following this simple step.
a) Your stomach gets some time to digest solid foods without they quickly getting washed away by the fluid you gulped. When food stays longer in your stomach, you don’t feel hungry as quickly after the meal. Which means you may not crave for that piece of burfi after meal as much you used to.
b) Consider drinking your fluids an hour before meals. This will help curb hunger pangs that would otherwise tempt you into eating large portions during meal time.
And never drink carbonated (especially diet – new studies show diet drinks can increase hunger) drinks at all. They can mix with your food and create gas that can put pressure on your stomach causing it to bloat.
2. A small treat is better than a big meal:
Its important to change what you consider as a treat. A large meal on a special occasion is not OK. However, when friends are eating chips or ice cream or chaat, its OK to have a little bit as a treat from time to time. Limit your treats to once or twice a week and keep the portion size small.
3. Don’t miss breakfast or any scheduled meal:
When we skip a meal such as breakfast, its easy to get so hungry and overeat the following meal. This will expand your stomach which was made small by the surgery. So eat small and regular meals.
4. Small portion size is more important than large low calorie servings:
If you try to eliminate everything with fat or sugars, then you are bound to fail. Moderation is the key. Don’t eliminate every tasty or rich thing from your diet. If you do, you will probably end up cheating and then binging. Remember, food is not the enemy. The enemy is the excess. Enjoy your food in moderation.
5. Don’t overeat:
This is the obvious one but needs to be said. It takes more than one meal to stretch your stomach and cause issues. However, if you give yourself a big meal here or there, it will eventually get out of hand. That’s how most cases of obesity start. So, do not overeat. Even if its your Birthday or Diwali.
NObesity has a cumulative experience of treating thousands of patients with Bariatric Surgery. We also facilitate India’s largest active support group for patients after surgery. A large percentage of our patients are successful in maintaining weight loss after years of surgery by following these simple steps to avoid weight regain.
Our free of cost life-time follow up program for all our patients and those operated by other surgeons is designed to help you stay fit for rest of your life.
For more details about post bariatric diet, please call +91-89999 49999 and set up an appointment with our dietitian
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