Drinking & Eating

All the way thru yr 3 I was hard core about not eating and drinking at the same time, strictly following my surgeon guideline of 30 min before & 1hr after rule...Somewhere around the holiday between 3-4 I let the before slide to drinking right up to when I was ready to eat & after to at least 30 minutes...I seemed OK with that and still pretty much follow that guideline...EXCEPT - in yr 4 and forward I slid a little more and now I usually have some kind of sweet with my morning coffee protein drink...

Been waivering...I find I really enjoy this little treat & not really motivated to give it up...BUT the voices in my head are bickering...One says - if I really want to get back on track I've got to break this habit, Two says - its just one little treat so its OK, Three says - once is a while is OK you're only human...

 Questioning myself & how much I really want to get & stay on track...And is getting BOT really about going all the way back to the original plan with NO straying or is it finding somewhere comfortable in the middle ground that I feel like I can live with, without being extreme...

The only time I do not follow my guidelines is when I am eating out.  Honestly it is so I can cheat.  I purposely will drink while nibbling on appetizers, etc. so that it pushes the food out before I absorb too much of the not great choices, that way I can still have my meal.   My surgeon guidelines for a WLS grad allows me to drink right up til time to eat (although I try to stop 10 - 15 minutes before) and then wait at least 30 (preferably longer) before resuming.

Only you can decide what is going to work best for you.  For myself, I wouldn't feel like I was really getting BOT, if I allowed myself to "break" a guideline every day.  I would need to only allow myself as an occassional thing.

Ms Court,

You really have hit my dilemma right on the head...It started out being only with my D/H when we went out for our weekend starbucks - we would share a treat & has gradually become acceptable to doing 4 out of 7 days, this scares me, what if it continues to spiral & gets out of control...It hasn't affected my scale YET, I'm maintaining where I am & have been for 3 yrs...but the reason I'm here on the BOT board is because I'm not really mentally happy with the 15lbs of rebound that found me at the 3 year mark & want to get back under 130 as a consistant daily weight...

I feel like I'm still reaching within myself to find true motivation to really follow the guidelines & stop failing to find it...

Interesting question... My surgeon never made mention of restricting fluids w/ meals.  I have read from other posts and believe it makes sense, so I try to follow.   I wonder if this is the reason why I never reached my goal???

 Alesia:
I thought I was the only one that had talking voices in their head.  If you could, try drinking your morning protein coffee first and then eat your treat.  You may find out that by eating them separately, you can only eat 1/2 the treat.  By eating the treat with the coffee, you are turning it into a slider food that is going straight through the pouch and, in my life, straight on my hips.  I drink mostly at breakfast, but at lunch, I always have my fluids right up to the time that I eat.  I then have my protein bar and really do not need anything else for a hour, sometimes, I forget and a hour and half have gone by.  But, as always, we do what we feel works for us, and if you are not gaining from this, it could be working for you.  Just my thoughts.

Tess,

I like the suggestion about breaking the sweet snack away from the coffee...I think mentally I have started tying them together & feeling like it it my right to get to eat them together like that...I might want it less if I'm not getting them as a pair that mentally I'm thinking of as "one"...And its a baby step I think I can handle - not taking away completely just modifying when I get it...

I read a post once from a girl whose hard rule is once she eats, even if its just 2 peanuts, she cannot drink for at least 30 minutes...By putting this parameter on herself she then was limiting her ability to get enough to drink and she constantly worried about drinking enough...It had a 2 fold effect, because she wanted to keep her liquids up she would say no to grazing...screwy but in a logical kind of way that worked for her...

Still working out my process almost 7 yrs out...

This is definitely an area I know I need to get BOT with. I only managed to stay within my surgeons guidelines for about 6 months, and then when I found things hard to eat, or that I wanted to get more in, I started drinking when I eat. Now it is just habit, but one that I am finding really hard to break.

Drinking with meals period was one of my major fears post op because prior to surgery I got
ALL my liquids in while eating & never drank otherwise except alcohol...I actually started working on giving up drink with food 1 month before surgery & post op never broke the rulepost-op until that fateful holiday season 2008 when I experimented with having a bite of sweet with my coffee at a holiday gathering...I still follow the guideline all other times, but regularly have accepted that I am willing to break the rules to have my sweet treat with just 1 of my cups of coffee a day...

Struggling with feeling that giving in to this urge is why I cannot seem to stay on track for all my eating choices throughout the day & thus sabotaging getting BOT...