Bariatric Surgery: What Will Women Eat After The Procedure? - Dr. DeBarros

Dr. DeBarros:
That’s a good question. After bariatric surgery the diet typically what we do is there are two different diets for the type of procedure we have – one is a gastric bypass diet and we divide them up into stages.

Stage 1 is essentially liquids and protein shakes. Stage 2 diet is sort of pureed foods or baby food consistency diets. Stage 3 diet is considered as soft foods like mashed potatoes and things like that, and stage 4 diets are regular foods.

So for a gastric bypass patient, we advance every stage every two weeks. So for a gastric bypass patient it will be eight weeks before you are on real food again. For a LAP-BAND® patient we do the stages in terms of one week per stage. So that’s how we do it at our practice.

Now gastric bypass patients have an issue where they cannot eat certain foods as well, like really sugary foods, which will cause what’s called dumping syndrome, and dumping syndrome is a problem where a person will eat a sugar load or really sweet load, it will go into the small intestine, which hasn’t really seen sugar in that form, typically it goes to the stomach before it goes to the small bowel and what happens is that the sugar gets absorbed immediately and the patient releases a lot of insulin, which causes all sorts of problems because the insulin will cause the blood sugars to drop and patients will result in having sweating or palpitations and they will just feel awful with stomach cramps and things like that. So those things have to be avoided.

Absolutely, I mean that can happen and it can happen for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is gastric edema, or gastric swelling, where the connections, especially for a bypass, you have a connection between the stomach and the small intestine. Now that connection determines how food flows through there.

If there’s swelling where those sutures are placed or the staple line is placed that will kind of slow the process of emptying of that pouch - the same thing with the LAP-BAND® patient. Sometimes they will get swelling as well where the band is placed. So occasionally they have to advance their diets slower and that’s why we use the different stages of diet.

About Dr. John J. DeBarros, M.D., F.A.C.S.:
Dr. John DeBarros is an experienced surgeon and board certified by the American Board of Surgery and a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. He is a member of The American Society of Bariatric and Metabolic Surgeons, The American College of Surgeons, The Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons and the Maricopa Medical Society.

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