Living with Your Gastric Sleeve

Your lifestyle is made up of the actions you make repeatedly. This includes the foods you eat, the amount of activity you engage in, and the choices you make day after day. Like most habits, your lifestyle behaviors become second nature—they are tendencies that are unique to you, but encourage normalcy in your life. Here is our advice for living with a sleeve

Following gastric sleeve surgery, you’ll have to make a collection of fundamental changes to your lifestyle. This will include changes to:

  • How you manage stress
  • The way you react to hunger cues and emotional eating triggers
  • Level of alcohol consumption and tobacco use
  • Where and how often you dine out
  • The food choices you make daily and their nutritional values

Living With A Sleeve will introduce several additional life-factors that you will have to adjust to. This includes changing relationships, personal changes to your level of self-esteem and most noticeably changes to your body weight.

There are several tools that may help you cope with these changes, and you may choose to make use of them after weight loss surgery. These tools include:

  • Plastic surgery
  • Support groups

You will also learn to manage your gastric sleeve by paying close attention to your body and developing a deeper level of awareness concerning your dietary habits.

Developing a Healthier Lifestyle When Living With A Sleeve

A lifestyle behavior is something you participate in without a second thought. To lose weight, you’ll have to make some changes to your everyday behaviors. Even after weight loss surgery, the choices you make every day will influence your level of weight loss success.

Adopting a healthier lifestyle requires a full shift to an improved state of being. This requires a combination of:

  • Psychological changes
  • Nutritional changes
  • Activity changes

Developing a healthier lifestyle can happen faster than you may think. There are three primary steps to take:

1. Identify Poor Habits

Poor lifestyle habits can hold you back from achieving an optimal state of wellness. Unfortunately, many of our habits are embed in our daily routine, and you may not even notice when you engage in a behavior that has potentially negative consequences.

Draw awareness to poor habits by:

  • Becoming more mindful of your actions and eating behavior
  • Journaling your actions, eating habits and daily routine
  • Asking a friend or family member to become a source of external accountability

 2. Replace the Bad with the Good

Instead of simply erasing a bad habit, consider ways that you can replace it with something positive. When you attempt to stop a negative behavior, you create a void in your routine. Filling that void with something healthy can encourage you to move forward.

Consider swapping negative habits for healthier counterparts:

  • Replace unhealthy snacks with fruits and vegetables
  • Instead of eating to manage stress, go for a walk
  • Refill a water bottle instead of getting soda or juice from a vending machine

3. Repeat

The trick to making a new habit stick is repetition. Research suggests that it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. Once a habit is formed, it starts to feel like second nature and breaking it will take some effort.

If you get started today, three weeks from now you may find yourself in a much healthier place.

From the Palmyra Surgical Blog

  • Understanding the Glycemic Index
    Understanding the Glycemic Index
    Carbohydrates are one of the six essential nutrients. Despite common talk about avoiding carbohydrates for weight loss, our bodies require them to thrive. Carbohydrates contain sugar. When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks down that sugar and absorbs it into the cells with the help of a hormone called insulin, where it is then converted to fuel and used for energy.
  • Reasons to Consider Weight Loss Surgery
    Getting weight loss surgery is a choice that can have a major influence on your health and quality of life for years to come. The conversation surrounding weight loss surgery may come up at the advice of a doctor, after seeing a friend who was successful in their weight loss efforts or maybe after a series of frustrating weight loss attempts.
  • Managing Special Occasions after Weight Loss Surgery
    Every time you turn the corner there is another fast food restaurant or bakery loaded with its own temptations, and you do what you can to stand strong and stick to your post-bariatric diet plan.
  • Shop Smart to Lose Weight
    Healthy Shopping Strategies for a Healthy Household
    When one person in a household gets weight loss surgery, it is actually common for other members of that household to lose weight too. This is called a “halo effect.”
  • Making Healthy Food Substitutions after Weight Loss Surgery
    Approximately six weeks following weight loss surgery you’ll start making the gradual transition back to a whole-foods diet. This is an exciting period for many people. After weeks of gaining sustenance through liquids and soft foods, being able to enjoy a regular meal is something to look forward to.