I would be very cautious about any meal plan that was designed by anyone except a nutritionist.
What I did was keep track of protein-rich foods in my PDA-- remember those? Nowadays you can keep track on your phone. I knew the number of protein grams in every serving of protein rich food that would serve as my entree. The post-op eating plan served as my template and I just made sure that the foods I ate conformed to the protein-rich, low-calorie items on the list the nutritionist sent me home with.
The best thing you can do is avoid carbohydrates like the plague. Write down what you plan to eat tomorrow in a journal the night before. Weigh and measure everything you eat. And your journal, write down everything you actually did eat, or check off items that you wrote down the night before. Sometimes we need a visual aid in order to keep track.
Most people don't realize they are overeating. A lot of people graze, which is absolutely lethal. It's important to be extremely conscious of what goes in your mouth.
I think what made my post op eating easier was the fact that I used Magic Milk, which was a recipe given to me by my nutritionist. It's very simple. It's just one quart of nonfat milk blended with one packet of dry milk powder, like Milkman, which was my favorite. This doubles the protein in an 8-oz glass of milk to 16 grams. You can then use the milk as the basis for cereal like cream of wheat or Malt-O-Meal or for sugar-free fat-free pudding, cream soups or any other recipe that calls for milk. And when you use the milk with hot cereal, don't use water. Use milk as the basis for your cereal and cook the cereal in the milk instead of water. It's just one way to get more protein.
I was always a big milk drinker, and I love pretty much all dairy, so I would have yogurt or cottage cheese and I would make sure they were fat free and plain. I could add fruit, vanilla, cinnamon, sweetener, or anything I wanted to to jazz it up. I would sprinkle flaked nutritional yeast all over my cottage cheese and sprinkle it with flax seeds. That helped with any possibility of constipation. I also always sprinkled wheat germ on anything savory.
I changed my style of eating drastically. I always set out a nice plate and pretty flatware and glasses or cups or goblets and put them on a tray which I would take to the table after I had made my food. Then I sat down and dined. I didn't eat, I dined. I pretended I was in an old black and white movie where people sat at a table together with a tablecloth and ate boiled eggs in little egg cups and made sophisticated conversation. I am a person with a vivid imagination so this was a big help to me.
One of the most important things it's to put your silverware down while you chew your food. If you are eating something out of your hand, take only one bite at a time and put the item down while you chew it. And even though people are now advised against it oh, I was not advised against drinking water with my dinner, so I always had a chilled glass of water which I sipped to help with the swallowing of the food.
And I made smoothies, using Magic Milk and yogurt which I mixed up and then added fruit before blending or after. But I find smoothies a little waterlogging and not that satisfying to my appetite.
I mean, let's face it. We eat like pigs. One way people get fat is to take big honkin' bites and take one and then another one right away until your mouth is full and then chew it inadequately and swallow it in a lump.
The risk of eating so slowly is that your food might get cold and there are some foods that are just disgusting when they are cold, like fried or poached eggs. I literally set my plate on a heating pad if I was eating some kind of entree like that. And I made an effort to include a raw vegetable, like salads or celery sticks, or a piece of fruit, like an apple, that was hard enough to need a lot of chewing. I never swallowed food until it was like mush in my mouth.
This was the hardest thing for me to do because it really grossed me out to have the feeling of mushy food in my mouth. But I got over it.
I am actually a visual artist and went to Art School in Los Angeles. I still sculpt and draw and paint but I also design food. That's actually a big commercial field, designing food for commercials. I am strictly an amateur but I have a lot of photos of food I have cooked or baked and presented on a plate. You may be able to see some of them if you go here:
www.americanbariatrics.org
But understand that even if you see a plate full of food, I did not eat all of it. I present food on a plate as part of the design, but as soon as I take the picture, I scrape a few bites of each item onto a smaller plate and then put the original plate of stuff in the refrigerator. I actually usually eat all of the protein because I have already measured and weighed it and that is the centerpiece of my meal.
I have been really lucky because I have mostly defeated my eating disorder. I was anorexic and bulimic as a teenager and then I just let myself blimp up in my late 30s after confronting the trauma of my childhood, which included sexual molestation. I let my dysfunctions drive me and I comforted myself with food. There is also an underlying destructive force in overeating. It's like we don't deserve to have a decent life because we are damaged beyond repair. So why not do what feels good? Eating feels really good.
There are there are a lot of members here who have figured out great ways to eat and great things to eat and I hope that they will also add their menu tips to this thread so that you can see how varied your eating can be. 13 years after the fact, I can't even stand the thought of stuffing myself full of food like I used to. And I am the person who would get in the car, go to the drive-thru, pick up a big bag of fast food, then go to the 7-Eleven store and buy a bunch of crap there and a super big gulp, and go to the ice cream store and buy a quart of rocky road or pistachio ice cream and take it home and eat every bite of it and then try to vomit it up. Sometimes I couldn't make my gag reflex work so I would end up looking like one of those statues of Buddha, and I would sit there uncomfortable, practically in agony, for the rest of the night. But once I got through that, I would do it all over again the next day.
The only reason I didn't get obese to the point of being unable to move was that I had a physically taxing job. I was a landscape gardener and I had to pick up a lot of machinery and sling it up on the back of my truck, or hundred pound bags of fertilizer or bags of grass clippings, and this went on all day, in the heat of the day, and I must have easily consumed a couple gallons of water before I got home. I also worked out sporadically at the YMCA, doing weight training, not weightlifting, but using weights on my ankles and wrists and then doing exercises with the extra weight on.
Long story short, if you are making the commitment to have weight loss surgery, your body will want you to make the commitment to eating much less food and different food than you used to eat. For some people it is extremely difficult to change their eating style. For others, if they don't change their style, they will find themselves feeling sick or vomiting or having diarrhea or being constipated. Your digestive system has been altered and it cannot break food down the same way it used to.
If self-esteem is an issue for you, as it is an issue for most people who are obese, I recommend a really good book and I recommend this book to everybody all the time. It's called "The Only Diet There Is" by Sondra Ray. It's not a diet from food. It is a diet from negative thinking. I cannot overstate how good this book is. The result of the book is often that the reader feels beautiful. I kid you not. That's what she wants, is to teach people that if they eat positivity they will lose negativity and their physical body will reflect it.
I often find myself feeling like Alice in Wonderland, finding a box with a tag on it that says Eat Me, and hoping to grow bigger or smaller in order to get through the door or the other side of the mirror, I just eat it. That is definitely going down the rabbit hole into Wonderland where things are far from wonderful.
Here's a resource I've been working on that you might find helpful:
THE GOSPEL OF BARIATRICS The organization for bariatric surgeons and patients: https://asmbs.org/ USDA FOOD AND NUTITION GUIDE The official government resource for nutritional information in food: https://www.usda.gov/topics/food-and-nutrition...
www.americanbariatrics.org
Good luck to you, but you've already taken the steps you needed to take to begin your journey to a New Life. You're going to be fine. And as you go along and learn, lend your support to somebody here who is in your same position. Help others as much as you can. It feels really good and it takes up a lot of time that you might be spending eating!
