Last supper of sorts?

I made the mistake of having weeks of food funerals before I started my two-week pre-op diet. And that meant I had even MORE weight to lose after surgery. I really regret having the food funerals. In my mind, I was saying "I have to have pizza", "I have to have nachos" etc. thinking I wouldn't have those foods post surgery.

The truth is, I can eat anything I want at two years post-op. Now, I may choose not to, but I can eat almost anything. What I do now is modify former favorite high-carb terrible for my body foods.

Pizza, for example - now I take half of a FlatOut wrap, toast it in the microwave oven, put sauce and cheese and turkey pepperoni on it and broil it, and voila, all of the delicious flavors of pizza!

For pasta, I sometimes use shirataki noodles (no carb) and add pesto and shrimp to it. Awesome.

For nachos, I will use a few tortilla chips, and a few ounces of ground turkey with taco seasoning, cheese, light sour cream - heavenly.

The truth is, I don't miss the flavors of my old favorites. The difficulty is realizing that you perhaps used food in times of loneliness, anxiety, stress, and your new smaller pouch cannot take the mass VOLUME of foods you used to eat. I remember having a super stressful day about two months post-op, and prior to surgery I could have eaten a pizza, and instead I had a chicken sausage link and couldn't even finish that. It felt really unsatisfying because I was dealing with HEAD hunger. My stomach is still satiated with 4-6 ounces of food, but sometimes my head wants more. It's a daily struggle.

So basically I am saying do as I say, not as I did ;) Don't feed your body more crap since that will result in more weight to lose. Trust that you will be able to eat many delicious things after surgery, in smaller quantities, and with more of a focus on dense protein. Sure, sometimes I still wish I could binge on noodles, but then I think about how phenomenal it feels to carry around 160 lbs instead of 350, and how energetic and fabulous I feel!

If I ever feel sorry for myself about why I can't eat pizza and crap like "normal" people, I think about the vast quantities of those foods I had in my first 35 years of life, and I think I had more than my fair share :)

Good luck with surgery!

I didn't feel the need for a a splurge before the liquid diet. My "splurge" was the surgery itself and a brand new me! My friends at work, however, did hold a "mini-margharita, farewell to fat" toast for me. In tiny mini-margharita glasses, in preparation for not being able to drink alcohol after surgery, we toasted my new start. It was great!

I went to one Indian rest and had my favorite dish - but I was not on a full liquid diet and it was 3 weeks before surg. While some may disagree, you will not want to stray off the diet in the 2 weeks before surgery because you want your liver to shrink - it has to be moved out of the way so the docs can get to your organs and the smaller it is, the better your recovery may be.

This tells you about your liver shrinking - it is discussed in terms of gall bladder surgery, but applies to WLS also.

A 2-week-long restrictive diet appears to shrink obese patients' livers enough to make gall bladder laparoscopic surgery quicker and easier, researchers reported here....

"When obese individuals diet, their livers actually shrink and that permits surgeons to more easily perform the laparoscopic surgery," Lewis told MedPage Today. "The shorter surgery time also means less anesthesia for the patients, and allows the patients to be up and moving more quickly." He also noted that when livers have less fat, they are not as rigid and can be moved more easily in the surgery, with less physical damage occurring."

http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/DDW/45600http://www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/DDW/45600