It's such a blessing to walk this path together with people who truly understand.
— Lenay

I just cant believe how much you think like me. It's very strange to have someone echo your thoughts like that. Thanks for sharing yourself with me.
— Mike

I have to applaud you for being so open and honest. You are very helpful.
— Sue

Through Thick and Thin #48 (August 20, 2004)

Consulting A WLS Nutritionist 21 Months Post-Op

or

Monitoring My Food May Be A Pain, But the Results Are A Comfort

There are few tasks that I hate and resist more than keeping a systematic, detailed log of my food and drink consumption.  It seems to trigger my “Don’t Tell Me What To Eat” reflex from childhood.  Consequently, keeping a food diary ranks right up there with doing my taxes and having the doctor check my prostrate among my least favorite things.  However, there are good reasons for doing all three.  So I recently kept a detailed eating log for a week as part of a consult with a WLS Nutritionist to make sure that I wasn’t malnourished and that I wasn’t going to keep losing pounds until I disappeared.

For those of you who are pre-op, or for post-op patients who aren’t yet at your ideal weight, I want to explain that this is a very real, natural and legitimate concern for those of us who continue to lose after reaching our goal.  Twenty-one months out from my surgery, I’m thrilled with my weight (178, down from 360 pre-op), appearance, fitness and the incredible Lightness of Being I celebrate every day.   But Kari and I kept encountering our fears, and our frustrations about my limited food choices, and so we consulted with Kate Alie, a Nutritionist who has written very helpful articles for Weight Loss Surgery Lifestyles magazine.  I picked Kate because of her expertise working with WLS patients.  Now that it’s done, we’re both very glad that we resisted our resistance.  My taxes are paid; my prostrate is fine; and so is my nutrition and health.

The process was simple, and while it cost us, the expense was more than justified by our results.   Via phone and email, I gave Kate a list of my questions that I wanted answered.  I explained that we wanted a reality check from a WLS Nutritionist to:

1. Confirm (or not) that I was doing a reasonably good and adequate job of providing myself with the nutrition (and balance) I need to be and stay healthy.  If not, I asked, what else or more should I be doing?

2. Explain why I seem to be stuck at the soft-food level and can’t seem to handle most other foods and alternatives without getting sick. (My bariatric surgeon and family physician haven’t had any answers other than sometimes a minority of patients experience these problems);

3.  Suggestions about other high-nutrition foods or snacks I might want to try; and

4. Strategies for training or re-training my stomach to handle more solid foods.

Kate then used her extensive database of foods and their nutritional values, and some special software designed for nutritionists, to analyze my average daily food, caloric, carbohydrate, fat, fiber and vitamin consumption.   Before our telephone consultation, she provided me with a printout setting forth the relative amounts and percentages of any nutritional excesses or deficiencies that she found.   Overall, we were thrilled with her assessment that I was doing very well, and we learned a great deal about how I could improve my nutrition and health with several minor changes.

It turns out, for example, that I was consuming potentially toxic overdoses of many different vitamins, and, on Kate’s recommendation, I have now stopped taking my daily multivitamins to remedy this.  Kate also suggested several different foods, beverages and concoctions I hadn’t yet tried that would optimize my nutrition and health and relieve some of my culinary boredom.  She also recommended more healthful alternatives to some of the less desirable selections in my eating program.  I subsequently made several significant changes and adjustments in my food consumption that were painless to implement, but positive in impact, and when Kate ran my revised eating plan through her computer the results were impressive.  These minor changes have significantly improved my nutrition and totally relieved our fears and concerns.

My greatest disappointment was that Kate wasn’t able to offer any startling new strategies for retraining my Testy Tummy or dramatically expanding my food repertoire (other than scoping my stomach and stretching the hole, which I most assuredly do not want to do.  If it’s working, don’t fix it...)   But I can live (and even thrive) with a boring and limited food program, especially now that I know my nutritional bases are covered.

What did I learn from the process?  That it can be very beneficial – even for us “old timers” (and coaches) who think we’ve got all the answers – to periodically fight off our resistance and submit to the indignity and inconvenience of monitoring our food (and maybe even consulting a nutritionist) to assure that the sloppiness and excesses that often manifest over time don’t ever sabotage our WLS success or our health.

 Glenn Goldberg, VBG 10.24.02, 360/178

Kate Alie can be contacted at nutritionut@hotmail.com.  Her articles can be found in WLS Lifestyles magazine (see www.wlslifestyles.com). 

Note: I’ve been thrilled by the enthusiastic response to my invitation for subscribers to submit their WLS stories for possible inclusion in my upcoming anthology of WLS stories. Submissions must be received by email by the end of August (send them to glenn@WeightLossSurgeryCoach.com).   I’m particularly needing stories from the perspectives of teens, elders and spouses.   Thanks for considering being part of this wonderful new resource for people considering Weight Loss Surgery. – glenn

Click here if you have a ”fruit and vegetable problem” to see if my solution (see Through Thick and Thin #19) will work for you.

Copyright, © 2003, Glenn Goldberg. All rights reserved.
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