Is my pouch gigantic? Have I blown it already??

I'm two weeks out and I'm concerned about how much I can already eat and drink without feeling overly full. I'm at the pureed stage and my typical foods include homemade chicken salad, refried beans, cottage cheese, Greek yogurt, and mashed potatoes with turkey gravy (finished the potatoes today and not re-buying because of the carbs). I can eat a good 6 oz of these items (the beans did leave me feeling a bit stuffed). I don't drink with my meals and I wait to drink afterward. In the first few days I had to sip because water felt heavy and uncomfortable. Now I can drink pretty regularly. I just downed 16 oz of coconut juice with no problem. I've had no vomiting or dumping episodes.

I've read that you can't stretch your pouch with liquid and I guess 6 oz of food isn't enough to do it either so what's going on??? I'm really nervous because as an entrenched carb/food addict I was hoping for more help in the form of restrictiveness from my pouch. I know it's a tool and I can't rely on it entirely but I was hoping it would be more of a deterrent. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated!

When you had surgery, they cut the nerves that signal your brain that you're full.  It can take weeks or months for that to heal.  "Til then, you need to measure your food and eat the amount you're supposed to eat.

But no, your pouch is not gigantic.  How many ounces of beans or potatoes could you eat pre-op?  See the difference?

Despite so many RNYers being terrified of stretching the pouch (and some less than scrupulous surgeons/NUTs using that fear as a scare tactic to gain patient compliance with their post-op eating plans), your pouch is NOT a fragile, latex balloon-like structure... it is made from the least stretchy part of the stomach (immediately below the esophagus and along the first part fo the lesser curvature of the stomach), so unlike very old RNY surgeries, you cannot easily stretch out your pouch.  It will enlarge over time (and is expected to), but you are far more likely to stretch your stoma (by habitually overeating, or (potentially) by drinking with meals or not chewing well).  You cannot stretch ANYTHING by eating too much pureed food or by drinking "too much" liquid (or by drinking carbonated beverages).  So please do not expend a lot of energy worrying about stretching your pouch.

As Kelly said, though, you need to be measuring your portions and sticking to the amounts your surgeon's plan calls for since you cannot trust how it feels until your nerves are working again. YOu can drink as much liquid as is comfortable because the liquid goes through your funnel-like pouch very quickly.  If you drink too much too fast, it will just begin to back up intio the esopagus and you will KNOW it!  If that  happens, you just need to slow down a bit.

Lora

 THank you.  I hvae been terrified of this.  My mom had RNY a bajillion years ago when it first "hit the market" and she is starting to gain her weight back.  She claims that she has stretched her pouch and freaked me out about it.  Your information made me feel a LOT better :)

Your mom may have an enlarged pouch depending on how long ago she had it and how her particular surgeon fashioned the pouch (early out there was no consensus on it), but... according to my surgeon less than 20% of the people that she sees with significant weight gain have a scope that shows a pouch OR stoma that are enlarged beyond what one would normally expect from a mature pouch... which means that in over 80% of the cases (in her experience, of course), people have just gotten lax about what they are eating and their physical activity!  Logging food intake for several weeks is the recommended first step (and some surgeons will not do anything until a patient who is regaining has done this, since so often that shows exactly where the problem lies (and usually it's too many carbs)). 

The point of doing it for several weeks, BTW, is two-fold. Number one, most people will initially be more vigilant when they know they are tracking their food (and that the doctor is going to see it!), so they tend to cut down on what they eat and the third or fourth week is more likely to relfect how they have been eating every week than the first couple of weeks.  Number two, sometimes when they SEE how much they are eating (or realize how much they HAD been eating based on what they eat those first two weeks combined with what they normally WOULD have eaten but didn't because they were logging it all), they realize that the problem isn't the pouch after all and go back to being more vigilant about their food without having to even return to the doctor.

Lora

Thank you. I didn't realize that there are no signals right now. I'll measure my food in the amounts recommended and just stop eating when it's gone!