Preparation is the key to success...I hope.

I've spent a lot of time over the past few weeks preparing, planning, thinking, and...buying. I want to make sure that when I come home from the hospital, I have everything I need for those intial weeks. I am guessing I will be feeling pretty crappy, and I don't want to have to scramble around assembling the things that I need.

For Christmas, one of the things that I got is an immersion blender. It's a neat gadget that I can use to puree various foods when I am in the soft/pureed foods phase. (Tangent: for any of my non-op friends who are reading this, I have to gradually return to eating solid foods - first I will be on clear liquids, then full liquids [like cream soups and stuff], then soft or pureed foods, and finally back to solids.) I am trying to think of things that won't be gross pureed. A lot of the "recipes" I have found involve pureeing things like chicken or ham, which just seems disgusting to me. I am thinking refried beans, maybe chili, soups, stuff like that. I have some unflavored protein powder to add to foods during that phase so that I can amp up the protein, since I won't be eating much meat.

I've also ordered or purchased all of the vitamins that I will need. I found out a couple of months ago that my levels of vitamin D and iron are very low, and that's with a whole stomach! This brings home for me just how important it's going to be for me to take all of my vitamins every single day. I have to take chewables for the first couple of months, and then I can switch to a capsule if I want.

For a multi, I've landed on Trader Joe's chewables. They taste good, have a negligible amount of sugar in them, and have all of the nutrients that I need in a multi. I will take two of them per day, because I won't absorb as much after my surgery. I also need to take calcium citrate - not carbonate or any other form. The reason it has to be citrate is that other forms require stomach acid to break them down so that they can be absorbed, and I won't have enough acid to do that after surgery. I finally found a calcium chewable that doesn't taste like fruity ass: the orange flavored chewable from Building Blocks Vitamins (and if you click on the second link, and look on the left, they will send you free samples). I got the raspberry iron from them as well, which is also in the best form for WLS patients, ferrous fumarate. I will also take a sublingual b12 twice per week.

I've got some protein powder and some ready-to drink-shakes, but I will probably need to get some more. A lot of those things are pretty damn gross. The one that I have found that I like most so far is Click, but it really doesn't have the ideal nutrition stats for a WLS patient, since it has caffeine and 7g of sugar to only 15g of protein. It's really, really good though. Muscle Milk light ready-to-drink is decent, as is the Optimum Choice powder that I have. I think I may get one more thing just for variety, because I am going to have to consume a LOT of protein (what are you laughing at?) after my surgery, so that my body doesn't try to consume my muscle because it thinks I am not feeding it enough.

I guess the only thing I've got left to do is maybe make a couple of pureed meals to freeze. I think that those little half-cup gladware things will be perfect for freezing individual portions. I'lll wait and do that a bit closer to S-Day though.