To eat, or not to eat?

I'm giving this purees issue a lot of thought. I've been pushing the "purees" line by figuring that soft solids chewed A LOT surely is as good as pureed? But I'm reading OH.com and feeling guilty. I have a tool that perhaps I am mistreating. But here's the thing, and I can see why some folks apparently get a bit fed up with obesityhelp.com ...I had no idea that I would spend so much time HUNGRY. Not head hunger, I mean stomach growling, physical hunger, unable to distract yourself from the HUNGER. There are some slightly preachy (though I'm sure well intentioned) posts there about how you have to deal with your emotional eating issues, the band is on your stomach not your head, you have to figure out how to deal with head hunger, etc etc. All excellent points, and they are totally right on. But what about the actual growling hunger, physical hunger? What's up with that? Is that the 800 lb gorilla in the room that no bandster wants to talk about?


Why can't people just say that yes, without restriction, you are hungry? Really hungry, sometimes?




I do have emotional eating issues, as I think many, many people do. No doubt there. But that is something I have been dealing with for a long time before I ever considered WLS. And honestly, I don't really find myself wanting to eat so much out of boredom, loneliness, anger, frustration, whatever as I do out of actual physical hunger.

The full liquids and purees regimens that my surgeon's nutritionists outline are sensible, pragmatic, and nutritionally complete, as much as one can be on so few calories. It's hard to stick to for a long time. Maybe I just need more calories, and then I will feel more satisfied? I get plenty of protein, less than 100g of carbs, about 20% of my calories are coming from fat. But I'm consistently eating less than 800 cal, and for the first several days that was totally fine. No problem. The last 3 days I've been okay too, on the purees, which technically I should still not be taking until next Tuesday. But my band is so loose, the purees go right through too, and my stomach doesn't have to do any work.

I'm hearing that advancing the diet too early might seem fine at the time, but later can lead to slips (band slips) because the stomach didn't heal properly around the band. I'm looking for some documentation on that; so much of what the WLS community says doesn't seem to be necessarily backed by reliable research, so I take some of these claims under advisement for the time being. But proper healing is the point of the liquid and puree phases, and that's a point well taken.

So...I'm going to back it off to true purees. And I'm going to eat more calories, and add some treats. I'll continue tracking everything on www.fitday.com and continue getting all the nutrition that I am now. But I'm still going to eat tuna, I'll just whirl it in the blender a little first. The more real protein I can get, and the less reliance on powders, the better.