It happens every autumn. The holiday season approaches with all its promises of celebratory eating. Visions of sugarplums dance in my head and I think, “It’s just not fair.? All the wonderful food treats might as well have skull-and-crossbones poison labels on them. Not because the treats are incompatible with my Lap-Band®, but because I still love them and, given enough time, can still eat any amount of most of them. And that would throw my bandwagon veering down a bad road and over the edge of a cliff.As WLS post-ops, we need recipes for holiday eating that won’t sabotage our weight loss success. I’m not talking about recipes for calorie-free cookies. I’m talking about recipes for success: ways that we can enjoy the holidays and continue to lose or maintain our weight.
Social eating poses many challenges to the WLS post-op. How to resist the dessert tray? How to refuse a helping of the potatoes that Mom mashed by hand especially for you (with just a little gravy)? How to chat with 19 people of three generations, including seven children on a screaming sugar high, and still concentrate on taking tiny bites?
When I’m faced with a party, a potluck dinner, a restaurant meal, a business trip, or a vacation nowadays, managing my eating seems next to impossible because I have so little control over the food served. I’ve had to find new ways to navigate those events. I do that with advance planning, even for unpredictable situations. If I can’t plan the food, I can still plan my approach to it.
My #1 rule is this: in any social eating situation, do not experiment with new foods (that is, new to the post-op you). You don’t know how well they’ll go down and you don’t want to disgrace yourself in public. This has been hard for me because I love to try new foods, especially when I travel, but taking food risks in public is just not worth the potential pain and embarrassment.
Your approach to social eating will depend partly on whether your hosts or fellow guests know about your weight loss surgery. I socialize with people who know I’ve had weight loss surgery and people who don’t know. Handling the ones who don’t know is worth an article of its own. Sometimes I use fancy verbal footwork to deflect awkward questions. I’ll ask the hostess for her recipe or a portion of dessert to take home, or change the subject altogether (“That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to ask you about…?).
Try to find out what will be served at a party and decide in advance what you’ll eat. Eat something solid and protein-rich before you leave home. The old advice to “save? your calories for the party is risky business for anyone trying to manage their weight. Imagine how irresistible the buffet table is going to look if you haven’t eaten for 10 hours. And imagine how uncomfortable and embarrassed you’ll be if the party food disagrees with you because you’re too hungry to eat it carefully.
If at all possible, bring some food that you can eat and share with the other guests. Tell the host or hostess, “I can’t wait for you to try this great recipe I found.? If you know alcohol is going to be served, bring a pitcher of a non-alcoholic beverage you like and announce that you thought everybody might like to try your special punch or fruit tea.
Stand-up can be easier than sit-down affairs because everyone is too busy balancing a plate, cutlery, beverage, and conversation to notice when you sneak off and ditch your uneaten food, but the “finger food? commonly served at stand-up events is a terrible idea for anybody with a surgically reduced stoma. Human teeth are just not designed to take a small enough bite of a food that’s solid enough to be held in the fingers, so proceed with caution.
At the end of a sit-down meal, I’ll grab my plate of uneaten food and a neighbor’s empty plate and head for the kitchen while saying, “Do let me help clear the table.? In a restaurant you’ll need an alternate exit line, like, “Excuse me while I call my babysitter.?
Whether you’re standing up or sitting down, cutting up your food into tiny pieces and occasionally moving them around your plate with your fork are good ways to camouflage your Spartan WLS eating style.
Restaurant food portions that used to delight me now look gargantuan. If portion sizes worry you, it’s perfectly OK to tell the server that you would like the meal to be weighed or measured before it’s brought to you. The restaurant’s mission is to serve you. Even if they’re serving food from pre-measured packages, it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that the three-ounce portion you requested involves putting half of the six-ounce package on your plate. Just say something like, “Would you ask the kitchen to put only three ounces of chicken on my plate, with the sauce on the side??
If you’d rather weigh and measure your food yourself, go ahead and tote your scale and measuring cups. Who cares what the other diners think? You’re measuring your food, not slaughtering a goat.
What if the restaurant won’t accommodate your special requests? It’s up to you. If I were dining with a group of people, I’d downplay the situation because why would I want to involve the whole group in my little problem? If I were alone, and depending on my mood and hunger level, I might request an audience with the manager, quietly depart for another restaurant, or just make do and make a mental note never to return.
Here are other suggestions to make restaurant eating more manageable:
- Check out the restaurant’s menu and make your meal choice before you go. Many menus are available online (try dietfacts.com), or you can phone ahead and ask.
- Avoid buffets and all-you-can-eat restaurants.
- Tell servers not to bring bread or rolls to the table. If they does anyway, hand back the serving dish while saying, “No thanks,? or quietly place the bread on an unoccupied table.
- Share a meal or an entrée with someone else.
- Order only an appetizer or a half-size entrée.
- Order a child’s meal (if the children’s menu includes anything remotely appealing and WLS-friendly).
- Order a regular entrée, have the server bring a to-go box with it, and put half of the food in the box before you start to eat.
- Order an extra vegetable instead of potatoes, rice, pasta or other starches. At breakfast, substitute fruit or yogurt for hash browns or toast.
- Order salad dressing, sauce, or condiments served on the side so you can control the portion size.
- If everything on the menu looks dangerous to you, play it safe and order soup.
- If you can eat sweets, sharing a dessert can be fun. If nine people order three desserts and everyone takes a piece of each dessert, you all get to try something new without gorging yourselves.
- Don’t drink while you eat and avoid alcohol, which is empty calories and tends to make a foolish food choice or an extra serving seem like a great idea. Put a napkin or bread plate over your beverage glass so the server won’t fill it.
- Go out to lunch (when restaurant portion sizes are usually smaller) instead of dinner.
It’s a good idea to carry “safe? foods with you, so you won’t be caught short and forced to make an unwise food choice when you’re on the run. Keep non-perishable items like protein or fiber bars in your car. I carry a tote bag with me almost everywhere (my husband watches me pack my stuff into it each morning and asks hopefully, “Leaving home??). My necessities of life are in there, including a few snacks, packets of Crystal Light and Splenda, and a water bottle.
There is virtually nothing on a fast food menu that I will eat nowadays, and food eaten fast is just not compatible with my post-op eating style anyway. If I had to be on the road a lot, I would carry a cooler in my car (plus paper napkins, paper cups, and disposable cutlery) so I would never have to resort to a fast food place. But if fast food is your only option, you can order salads (dressing on the side), plain sandwiches without the goodies (wrapped in lettuce instead of bread). or a small cup of chili. Just shut your eyes and hold your breath when the French fries hit the fat in the fryer.
Eating airline food isn’t much of an issue nowadays since most airlines provide meals only for long flights anyway. You can pre-order a special meal (ask the airline for a list of options) for flights with complimentary meal service. Most airport shops and restaurants offer a wide variety of food choices. When those food options don’t work or I’m in a hurry, the snacks in my tote bag keep me going.
If you must travel when you’re on a liquid or puree diet, carry single-serving packets of protein powder with you and buy milk (in a convenience store, deli, or restaurant) to mix with it. Most full-service restaurants serve things like oatmeal, yogurt, soup, smoothies, juice, and milk.
Hotel shops often have a refrigerated case stocked with juice, iced tea, and milk (ignore the soda), though their snack selections can be calorific.
Seven months after I was banded, I took a vacation at an all-inclusive Caribbean resort where food and alcohol lurked everywhere. The resort offered health-conscious menu options, and I offset liquid calories like rum punch and coconut-banana smoothies with daily exercise classes, walks, and swimming.
Weight loss surgery is meant to improve, not worsen your quality of life. It shouldn’t be a sentence to lifelong misery. Try to enjoy vacations, holidays, and special events not just for the food, but for the fellowship. Schedule plenty of non-eating activities - pumpkin carving, tree-trimming, carol singing, delivering meals to shut-ins, serving meals at a soup kitchen - and deal with any weight gain when the party’s over. You might even be pleasantly surprised to discover you lost weight while dancing your way through New Year’s Eve!
Jean McMillan is a writer, artist and Lap-Band® success who lives in Tennessee with far too many pets and a sadly-neglected husband. Her motto is: “Dogs are like potato chips. You can’t have just one.? An OH member since December 2007, she is the author of Bandwagon, a giant encyclopedia of adjustable gastric band advice.
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