Food taste

Was wondering if after surgery if food taste weird and smells to?

I had my gallbladder removed and after surgery I could not stand the smell of white bread - Stromans type, and still to this day can not eat it. Which isn't all that bad because white bread = bad. 

 Yup, it does change.   The smells have calmed down for me a little (its 3.5 months since surgery) but I HATED the smell of Truvia, the new fake sugar.  I can't be in the same room with it.  I've had to move some things off the table when eating dinner with my folks (like marinated artichokes).  

I hate the taste of most drinks now.  Stuff I once loved, I now find totally gross.  

It was really bad for me when I first had my surgery but coming up on 15 months and it isn't so bad now.  I couldn't tolerate sweet smells at all.  White bread, nope, I was on the pier in San Fransico at 3 months out smelling sourdough bread and loving it.   I am pickier though.  Smells are smellier, tough meat is tougher and dry is dryer.  My husband says I've just turned into a foodie.  I say I always was.

Yep, many of us have noticed that the smell and/or taste of lots of different things may be very offensive immediately post-op. It's very strange!  For me it was the taste of Crystal Lite, which I used to love. I could not STAND the taste, or even the smell of it, right after surgery. I just started drinking it again, at about 6 months post-op. The smell of certain spices in my spice cupboard set me off too - all I had to do is walk past that cupboard & I'd feel sick.  I had a watermelon hand soap in one of my bathrooms that drove me crazy too until I threw it out! Hope you don't encounter this with your surgery (although, for me, it didn't last too long)! Good luck!

yep, what Linda said.

Immediately pre-op, I was being bombarded with holiday food commercials.  Everything I smelled I craved.  I wanted everything.

At about a month out, my surgeon's after-care guidelines allowed me to add in more food choices.  By then, I didn't want to eat!  Some of it was being scared about what the food would do to my system, but a lot of it was just that I didn't want to eat much.

My tastes changed.  Sweets were really too sweet for me.  I was a major water drinker pre-op; post-op I hated it for at least the first year.  I couldn't do cold beverages for the first year either -- either room temp or warm.  I went through a lot of food phases, where I only ate a small variety of the same things over & over again, and that would change up every month or so  (except cheese -- that has been a staple from the beginning!).  Thins I loved pre-op, I could no longer stand the thought of.  Things I ate at 3 months out, I didn't want again until months later.

Now, it all seems to be back to normal.  Except the major cravings thing.  Well, I get them, I just don't need much of anything to satisfy the craving.... but that isn't what you asked about!

You most likely will have some aversion to food as most have said, but I didn't at all. Nothing has tasted or smelled bad to me. The one thing only was that foods with sodium or salty foods taste so terribly salty; that 's it.

 Yes, tastes changed for me, too.  I was diabetic pre-op and could not wait for the resolution to be able to sample sugary stuff...ugh, made me gag and I hated it.  I drank a regular pepsi over tons of crushed ice and it tasted like that coca cola syrup they used to give us as a kid to make up throw up when stomach virus came around.  I gag at the smell of pancake syrup, so Denny's and IHOP are a challenge to me, unless I toss back plenty of coffee and keep a half-full cup by my nose to sniff (yeah, it's weird, but it works).  The smell of bananas is also a huge problem, didn't like them pre-op, can't tolerate the smell post-op.  I have a bread machine and I usually add cinnamon to the whole grain recipe for a nice touch, plus it makes the house smell great.  The taste of sweet became intensified by like a jillion times and is not pleasant.  Ironically, I love the smell of baking beef, bacon, chicken soup, lemon tea, peppermint tea, fresh ground coffee.  Maybe it's God's way of protecting me from going nuts?!

Well, nothing changed for me, and quite frankly, I was really hoping that it would.  I wanted to lose my taste for sweets.  Didn't happen.  I have, in addition to a cast-iron stomach, cast-iron tastebuds, it seems.

Psychologically, I just started liking salad again - I'd had so many damned salads over the course of my life while trying to lose weight, that I avoided them out of spite.  This summer, they taste pretty damn good!  But physiologically?  No.  I didn't even have that "bloodhound nose" that some people get - where smells are too strong.

My thinking is thus: if you've been pregnant and experienced significant changes in appetite or sense of smell, then you're probably going to experience them again during the rapid weight loss phase, as the same kind of hormonal fluctuations are happening to your body.  All of the estrogen stored in fat is rushing through your system, bringing with it the emotional changes experienced in pregnancy.  I was the happiest damn pregnant woman you ever met, and my rapid weight loss phase was absolutely joyful.  I never had any cravings during pregnancy (and only one food aversion - fowl of any sort.  If it had feathers, it was off the menu!), so I haven't really had any bizarre cravings or food aversions since my DS.

I'm willing to put that theory to the test, though, since it's only a hypothesis.

Interesting! I guess my experience supports your theory because I've never been pregnant, and nothing tasted different to me after surgery either. I never noticed any smells that bothered me. I did have major food aversions, to any kind of meat that had gristle or any inedible bits (sausage, hamburger, etc.) but it wasn't the taste that bothered me.