Question:
Can any body tell me about or what the Cottage Cheese Test is? Thank You

   — drumrollplease (posted on December 23, 2007)

December 23, 2007
I didn't know what it was. I googled "cottage cheese test." It is a pretty simple way of measuring the size of your pouch. Google it..it explains it better than I can. Good luck.
   — Debbi S.

December 24, 2007
Purchase a container of small curd low-fat cottage cheese. Begin the test with a full container, and perform the test in the morning before eating anything else (this will be your breakfast on that day). Eat fairly quickly until you feel full (less than five minutes). Note that the small soft curds do not require much chewing. The idea with the rapid eating is to fill the pouch before there is much time for food to flow out of it. After eating your "fill" of cottage cheese, you will be left with a partially eaten container that has empty space where cottage cheese used to be. Start with a measured amount of water (16 ounces, 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. Voila - the amount of water poured into the container is the functional size of the pouch.
   — [Deactivated Member]

December 26, 2007
There are lots of reasons why the so-called "cottage cheese test" is simply a bad idea and why I have always advised against it. First, you take a test because you will do something with the information. But, if you take the cottage cheese test and find that your pouch can hold 8 oz. of food, you shouldn't eat that much. And, if you find that it's smaller than 1 oz., you would already know eating more than that amount made you uncomfortable, so the test would little for you on that end. Secondly, the cottage cheese test is incredibly inaccruate. There is no constant for measuring how well your pouch emptied the food you had consumed the day before and there is no way to indicate whether the cottage cheese you used had been fully pressed to extract any moisture. As a result, the amount of cottage cheese you can ingest at a particular time is no sure-fire indication of what your pouch can OR SHOULD hold. The best pouch test is the one you will engage in every day with everything that passes your lips-- where we all become very aware of how certain foods make us feel and how slowly we need to eat.
   — SteveColarossi

December 29, 2007
The cottage cheese test is pretty useless, in my opinion. You are supposed to measure out cottage cheese and eat until you can't hold anymore and allegedly the amount of cottage cheese you can eat is an indication of the volume your pouch will hold. There are two major flaws with this. First of all, your pouch has two holes in it.... an entrance and an exit. Cottage cheese enters via your mouth/esophagus and exits at the bottom into your intestines. As you eat, food exits at the bottom of the pouch. This means you'll most likely be able to eat a larger amount of cottage cheese. Secondly, 1/4 cup of cottage cheese measured out of the package is going to take up more space than before you "chew" it up. From what people have posted, it sounds like the cottage cheese test is most commonly done to prove/disprove whether one has stretched their pouch. If you have stretched it prematurely (unlikely), stuffing it full of cottage cheese isn't going to help the situation. Your pouch will stretch over time, this is normal and unavoidable. If you want to know the size of your pouch, call your surgeon and ask. The cottage cheese test is more likely to give you a belly ache than to provide you with any useful information. But hey, at least you'll be getting some bone building calcium!! I know that this post sounds very negative... my apologies.
   — mrsidknee