PRE OP DIET

I am new to this site,but have been reading here for some time. Has anyone had trouble with the 2 week slim fast diet prior to surgery? This has got to be worse two weeks ever. Has anyone cheated on this, and what would the concequences be? Surgery date March 29.

Hi Jerry. My surgery is March 28th, and I've been on the Slim Fast thing for two and a half weeks. It is hard, particularly the first week. I found it got a bit easier as my sugar got regulated and I stopped craving it so much. I cheated a couple of times, but only very small things. I have lost 24 pounds. You can do it. Keep telling yourself, "I can do anything for two weeks." You are definitely worth this. Another thought that helped me was that NOTHING tastes as good as skinny feels. Beyond that, I just kept drinking water and chewing sugar free gum when I needed to chew something. I hope some of this helps. Take care and let us know how it goes. ~Ellen

From what Ive heard most people end up cheating. Personally I didnt cheat but I wanted to so bad. The purpose of the two week diet is to shrink your liver AND thoroughly clean you out. If you cheat just a little, your liver is still going to shrink, but you are going to make your surgeons job harder as he/she will possibly have to contend with food in your small intestine, etc. When they did my surgery, I had 3 major (at least to me) but short term complications. Only one of them was in the hospital. Something about the stress of the surgery caused my kidneys to go into shock and they shut down on me. As soon as the surgeon realized what was going on he had me take some kind of medicine that restarted my kidneys so in the end it wasnt so bad. For the first week or so after surgery I had to take medication to help my kidneys along until they were able to work on their own again. The kidney problems led to my 2nd complication about 10 days post op. I didnt realize it but my electrolytes were very low and I ended up collapsing in the shower. One minute I was trying to rinse the shampoo out and the next thing I know my kids are screaming at me to "please dont be dead Daddy!!!!!". In the end it was a simple thing to fix. I got some gatorade and withing a day I was doing much better. I am 100% sure that this was caused by the medications I was given to help my kidneys.... Im not faulting my surgeon just making the point that when one thing goes wrong it tends to cascade into other things. I cant help but feel if I had fudged a little on my preop diet that it might have made things just a little bit worse for myself and in the end Im not sure I could have made it through much worse. Truthfully I went into surgery with a lot of comorbidities also which probably contributed to my tough time post op. I dont want to try to scare you. You may breeze through your surgery with no problems. But trust me, for the first 7 to 10 days after your surgery you will feel like youve been run over. Everything you can do now to minimize that and make it easier on yourself, you would be wise to do. Besides, that 2 week preop liquid diet isnt a 2 week preop liquid diet anyway. Its a 2 week preop liquid diet followed by at least 2 weeks of post op liquid diet, followed by several weeks of pureed foods diet, etc. You might as well get used to it now.

Hi and Congrats Jerry. Not every surgeon requires the preop liquid diet. My surgeon did not, unless you were at risk of gaining. The purpose of it as pointed out in RM"s post it was to shrink your liver. This is for your own benefits. I had the two week liquid diet after surgery and it was very difficult. I did cheat on the post op diet, but it wasn't anything major. Good Luck! Jennifer