Ok, I’m bout 10 days from my surgery. Lots of little details coming all together, and for as much as I’ve read, learned, etc over the last few months… and I keep coming up with more and more information. I thought I would share a few things.
WLS is not a cure, it’s a tool… but like you need saw blades to use a saw the surgery as a tool needs “blades” to go with it.
Ok, while I am going to be eating a lot less, I’ll still be eating. Since McDonalds will be out of the picture I will need to be cooking. I heard about this book.. Eating Well After Weight Loss Surgery. My sister ended up getting it for me for Chritmas. Another one I found was Recipes for Life After Weight-Loss Surgery. In browsing through these, they both have some intesting recipes that look really good.
My biggest issue though is the whole cooking for just me. Even in these books, the recipes are geared towards cooking for two-four people. I am going to have to go through the recipes that look the most promising and figure out which may freeze well and such and maybe mark others for having some company over or share with Mom for when we do family dinners or something.
Getting enough protein is going to be a huge deal. 60-70g a day. For the first year, it will be really tough to do that by eating along. Enter protein powders. Travis, the son of a good friend of mine works at Nutrition City, a local supplement retailer. I stopped in the other week to see what he would recommend. 
I know he’s not a doctor or even a nutritionist, but based on what I’ve already read, I was looking more for something that fit some specific criteria… decent tasting, could be used in drinks or cooking, and low-carb. He recommended Champion Nutrition’s Pure Whey.
I picked up the 5# container of the vanilla flavor. It’s got 23g of protein per scoop, and there’s just over 70 scoops in the container… or about two month supply if I add one scoop per day to my diet. Whey is a dairy based protein, so I will need to see how I react to it after surgery as the lactose (milk sugars) could cause issues. I’m hoping it’s ok, cause it does taste pretty good. I’ve made a couple different smoothies with yogurt and things like orange juice (think dreamsicle taste), blueberries, and banana. I also mixed some up in applesauce and it was not terrible. But, to get enough in to the small amount of food I will be eating… not sure that will be an option. I’m going to try adding a scoop to just water and drinking it over the course of a day I think. About four-five days after surgery this may be my main shot at getting my protein.
Travis also gave me a bottle of a protein water to try that he said a lot of WLS folks pick up by the case. Isopure, zero carb dietary supplement. I tried the Alpine Punch flavor. Each 20oz bottle has 40g of protein, under 200 calories (the Orange is listed as 260calories on the web site), no aspartame or preservatives, and is made with filtered water, whey protein, flavorings and sucralose. I’m hoping that the sucralose (a form of sugar as all “lose’s” are) is low enough to not cause issues. It’s a 0 carb drink, so we’ll see. It tasted pretty good, but did leave a sort of after taste in my mouth… and I could feel it on my teeth. If I get more of this, I may try mixing it half-n-half with water and see how that goes. I’m not sure if it is worth the price of over $4 a bottle or about $40 for a case of 12, but it may be worth keeping on hand for days I know I’m just not getting enough protein in my meals. We’ll see.
So, these are some of the first few tools to go in my new tool-box. I’ll write about more of them in the days to come. Oh yea… the links to the two cook-books are Amazon affiliate links. If you’re interested in them… great… if you get them through Amazon… spiffy… and if I get a few bucks to help defray my web hosting costs, all the better. Just wanted to be up front about it.
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