The Lap Band Surgery Diet
December 20, 2008 by Lap Band Surgery
Filed under Featured Articles
If you are going to have lap band surgery, part of your preop education will be to familiarize yourself with the lap band surgery diet. When your stomach is the size of an egg, you will be eating hamburgers and fries anytime soon. The way eat will be completely different for a minimum of two months.
For the first 2 weeks your diet will consist of protein shakes, baby food or normal food that is pureed and strained. It is important that you eat slowly and try to consumer 32 ounces of water each day. This sounds easy, but trust me when I tell you it is much easier than it sounds, especially the water part.
After two weeks, you will begin adding soft foods back into your diet. Anything you eat will have to be chewed extremely well or it can cause great discomfort as it passes through the opening in your stomach.
You will add more foods to you diet over the next month. Vegetables should come next and meats will be last. Keep in mind how important it is to chew everything well. You will soon figure out which foods will be okay to eat and which foods your body will not tolerate. Although, with lap band surgery, you have less problems with your stomach not tolerating foods than with any of the other reconstructive forms of gastric bypass surgery.
It is important to stop drinking 30 minutes before you and to wait 30 minutes after you finish eating before you drink anything. And there is no drinking during the meal. It is also important that you take vitamins so that you do not become malnourished. During early recovery, it is difficult to get all of the necessary nutrients through food because you cannot eat enough.
Things will change for you over the first year as you lose weight and your body gets used to your new smaller stomach. The gastric bypass diet is something that is temporary. While you are going through the first few months following your surgery, please try to keep this in mind. Concentrate your efforts on making healthy changes and your lap band surgery will be a success!
