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Nutrition and Exercise after your Gastric Band
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by David Keogh, October 1st, 2012
Many patients are anxious and unsure about beginning our nutritional and exercise programs when they initially have their gastric band procedure. For this reason, I have decided to explain the basics of both programs in the hope that this will alleviate some anxiety towards them.
Firstly, the nutritional program! For the first month after your gastric band procedure you must follow a strict diet of liquids, followed by thicker liquids, followed by pureed foods and finally followed by normal foods. You will feel full after a very small portion of these and typically you will lose quite allot of weight within this time. After this first month you will begin to follow our long term nutritional guidelines. These long term guidelines are not a diet! Let’s be honest, the main reason most people opt for a gastric band is because diets haven’t worked long term. For this reason, the guide is focused around a long term lifestyle change rather than putting you on yet another diet. There’s very little that you’re not allowed to eat. The main focus of the guidelines is on the quantity of foods that you eat and the way the you prepare them. We believe that this is the only way to successfully maintain your weight loss long term. You will also be educated on how to read food labels correctly, what foods you should avoid after your procedure, what foods are best, what foods to choose in the supermarket, how you should eat each meal and what fluids you can and cannot drink. Incidentally, we don’t ban alcohol! Following these guidelines has been proven to produce long term weight loss results.
Now onto the exercise guidelines! Before you start stressing yourself out over the thoughts of exercising, you can relax. It’s not as hard to exercise as people think! Realistically, many of our patients are unable to do any form of vigorous or strenuous exercise, therefore, we don’t expect you to do it! Exercise should be viewed as any movement that you make. Whether that’s walking from the living room to the kitchen or even getting up off the couch to change the channel, it all counts as exercise. Initially, depending on your capabilities we may advise not to engage in physical exercise for the first couple of months until we lower your weight, it really will depend on each individuals capabilities. Ultimately, we would like you to be capable of doing 30 minutes of exercise each day, however, this is our long term goal. This takes time to build up and as your weight decreases it will get significantly easier. These 30 minutes are quite easy to fit into your everyday routine. It doesn’t need to be continuous. It can be broken down into 2 sets of 15 minutes, 3 sets of 10 minutes or even 6 sets of 5 minutes. Doing something as simple as walking around your house while you’re on the phone for 5 minutes will contribute towards your 30 minutes per day.
As you can see these guidelines are quite manageable and there is no need to be anxious about either of them. Ultimately, they’re focused around each individual patient’s needs and abilities. By following these guidelines many of our patients have lost as much as 9 stone within the first year, however, we would like our patients to lose the weight steadily. A weight loss of 6 stone within the first year would be what we would expect.
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