It is important to follow a gastric bypass diet after a surgery.  The diet is designed to be gentle on your new smaller stomach, to ensure proper healing of the staple line, and to help you avoid overeating.

Gastric Bypass diet is generally divided into four phases, which I will describe in short. You should also know that the last phase of the diet will actually turn into your regular diet for the rest of your life.  

Gastric Bypass Diet Restrictions

You may not know but your stomach can normally hold about 6 cups of fluid at a time, and after a gastric bypass surgery, your new stomach pouch will only be able to hold only about ½ cup. That is 12 times less capacity, which sounds to me like you will need a major change in your eating habits.

To make sure you are eating right after the surgery, you should consult a nutritionist about the gastric bypass diet before starting it on your own. Here you will get only a briefly overview of what the gastric bypass diet consists of and what it recommends:

Vitamins and minerals – that’s what the gastric bypass diet recommends on the first place – taking multivitamins and minerals every day for the rest of your life. It sounds scary but these are the facts – you’ll need them.

Because of you won’t be able to eat enough and the certain level of malabsorption after the surgery you won’t be able to meet your daily requirement of vitamins and minerals from your food. It is strongly advisable to take vitamin and mineral supplements. If you usually don’t drink milk then 500 mg of calcium citrate twice a day is enough meet your daily needs.

Proteins – are very important part of your gastric bypass diet because they aid in your muscles growth and skin repair after the surgery. The recommended daily intake of proteins should be about 60-70 grams. The greatest source of proteins after a gastric bypass surgery is the protein supplements. I know one very popular protein supplement that contains no fats and is very tasty, you can check it here if you like.

Foods high in proteins and low in fat (that automatically excludes fried foods from your gastric bypass diet – fast foods and most snacks) – your meals should be low in fat because fat will be difficult to digest after the gastric bypass surgery.

The only fat you can eat is from lean meats and fish and low fat dairy products –tuna canned in water, crab, salmon, lean beef, lean pork, white meat from chicken or turkey; as well as egg whites, low fat milk and milk products. Cooking techniques are simple – baking, broiling or grilling.

Foods low in added sugars – it is important to avoid foods high in refined sugars because of the “dumping syndrome” that most post gastric bypass surgery patients experience after eating sugar and sweets.

“Dumping syndrome” is not pleasant because it can cause urgent diarrhea, nausea, lightheadedness, flushing, and stomach cramps, which are results of the rapid “dumping” of the food into the small intestine and the intestine is not used to concentrated sugar foods.

I advise you start reading food labels and avoid products which contents list includes sugar, maple syrup, honey, molasses, corn syrup, corn sweeteners, glucose, lactose, maltose, dextrose, sorghum, sorbitol or mannitol. Instead you can use artificial sweeteners.