| Following a Gastric Bypass Diet
New habits and lifelong changes come after bariatric surgery as a result of having your stomach reduced in size, a fact altering your anatomy and the way in which your digestive system works to promote permanent weight loss. Immediately after your surgery, the doctor will help you design a nutritional plan, or will recommend a nutritionist or dietician to help you.
Working together with a nutritionist is the best way to approach your new lifestyle. You can suggest foods that you would like to include, while the nutritionist calculates your nutritional requirements and how much food you will have to eat with each meal, including the size of the serving, texture and consistency of the food in your gastric bypass diet.
After surgery and during the first 3 months, your nutrition will experiment with a series of changes. For one or two days after the procedure, you will not be allowed to eat anything, later you will be introduced to a diet consisting of clear liquids changing to food and consistency as the gastric bypass diet progress. These chained changes are needed to adapt to the way in which your body processes the food.
The different phases of the gastric bypass diet helps you maintain a steady good nutrition while you are losing weight for the next 1 to 5 years which is the length of the entire process. In a brief overview, these are the main phases comprised in your diet:
Phase 1, Liquids
Running for the first 2 or 3 days after surgery, your diet will include clear fluids or semi liquid foods such as broth, milk, juice, cooked cereals and Jell-O.
Phase 2, Pureed foods
For 3 to 4 weeks your meals will include foods with the consistency of baby food, either smooth paste or thick liquid with no chunks.
Phase 3, Soft foods
Gastric bypass diet will transform into meals containing tender, chewable foods including canned or fresh fruit, ground or finely diced meats, and cooked vegetables for the next 8 weeks.
Phase 4, Solid Foods
This is the time when you progress to eating your regular-textured foods, following the advice of your nutritionist
During the gastric bypass diet progression, you will learn more about nutrition and how to control eating to reduce the discomfort caused after trying to overeat. Generally, it will be recommended to have 3 meals a day, but like occurs with regular eating, you can divide your reduced portions in half and have 6 mini portions to eat several times a day after this stage.
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