You Don’t Need Baby Food After WLS
Great news, right?!
If you’ve heard that you have to eat baby food after your Gastric Sleeve, Bypass, Band or Duodenal Switch surgery…I have great news for you.
You may see a list of diet stages for after your surgery – Liquid, Pureed, Soft and Regular. Some programs will list baby food on their pureed diet.
Every Bariatric Program is different in their diet progression. (Be sure to follow your own doctors recommendations, even if they differ from what I share on this site.) Your program may have a very similar structure to these four phases. Or it may only have three phases. Or it may have five or six phases. There are several different philosophies on the post-op diet, including how to progress yourself back to foods afterwards!
The Pureed Diet is sometimes included, and sometimes not included. I’ve worked for Bariatric Programs that used the Pureed Diet and some that haven’t. So what’s the deal?
Regardless of differences in the diets, the ultimate goal is all the same. To keep stress off your healing stomach. If you advance your diet too quickly, there is risk of irritating your stomach or even causing a stricture or blockage in your new stomach. You certainly don’t want to eat chicken breast right out of the gate for this reason!
If you do have a program that uses the Pureed Diet stage and it lists “baby food” as an option…you can skip it all together. If you just plain can’t stomach the idea of eating out of a jar of green beans, then don’t! I personally wouldn’t recommend it anyway (for lack of protein and for various other reasons) but if your program does include it, do not fret. It’s a guideline, it’s not a requirement.
The same goes for blending your meats (ick!!!) Some programs may list blended meats on the food list which may mean putting chicken thigh meat in a blender with a little bit of broth. Before you ask – nope. I’ve never tried it. No thanks.
Just because you are undergoing a weight-loss surgery and need to cautiously advance your diet, doesn’t mean you have to make it as miserable as possible. While you DO want to stick with only the phase you are supposed to be in, don’t feel like you must endure awful foods. Get creative with your liquids and try soft mushy foods like tuna salad, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt and scrambled eggs. Yes…”real” foods that don’t require a blender or a jar opener! (Check out my blog post “The First Bite, When Your Liquid Diet is Finally Over“)
For the record, my personal recommendation to my own patients and clients is to follow a liquid diet for two weeks after surgery, then advance to a soft mushy protein phase for two weeks. After those first four weeks have gone successfully, patients are advanced back to a “regular” bariatric diet and can slowly begin incorporating more solid proteins. Again, do not replace your doctors recommendations with my own.
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