Cottage cheese test

My beautiful twin, Carolyn, sent me this information to share with you. Actual instructions on how to do the "test". This was presented at the 2000 meeting of the ASBS by Dr. Latham Flanagan, MD. I have read about it before but didn't really have instructions on how to do. "How big is my pouch? This is a question that just about all patients ask. It is expected and appropriate that the stomach pouch will enlarge somewhat as the months pass after gastric bypass. Some of this enlargment is an actual increase in size and some represents a softening (regaining of elasticity) of the pouch and its outlet. The real answer is that the FUNCTIONAL size varies with many factors such as the time of day, the amt of time taken to eat, the type of food eaten, mood of the patient, and other factors. It is expected and appropriate that the pouch will handle a much larger amt of mushy foods such as mashed potatoes and less of solid food such as chicken. This test is meant to be a standarized, reproducible measurement of the physical size of the stomach pouch in a person who has undergone gastric bypass surgery. 1. Purchase a container of small curd, lowfat cottage cheese. Begin the test with a full container and in the morning before you have eaten anything. This will be your breakfast that day. Eat fairly quickly for less than five minutes or until you feel full. The idea of the rapid eating is to fill the pouch before there is much time for food to flow out of it. 2. After eating your "fill" of cottage cheese, you will have a partially eaten container that has empty space where the cottage cheese used to be. 3. Start with a measured amount of water (16 oz for example) and pour water into the container of cottage cheese until the water is level with the original top level of the cottage cheese. 4. Voila! The amt of water poured into the container is the FUNCTIONAL size of the pouch. IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME DOING THE TEST, DON'T PANIC. You are likely to find that the cottage cheese size of your pouch is way bigger than your surgeon told you he/she made at the time of surgery. Dr. Flanagan's data indicates that the average size of the mature pouch by cottage cheese is 5.5 oz. HE ALSO FOUND THAT SIZES RANGING FROM 3 TO 9 OZ HAVE NO IMPACT on the person's success in weight loss". Hope you all find this as interesting as I did! I will do the test as soon as I get some small curd cottage cheese! Thanks, Carolyn Gilliland, for sending this to me and Dr. Flanagan for this simple test! Good luck all.

We greatly appreciate your interest in helping us build our Q&A database. To discourage vandals from posting garbage, however, we require people to register before posting.

You must be logged in to post an answer. Click here to log in.