Why eat slow?

Dumping syndrome has NOTHING to do with how fast you eat.

Although, if you do have dumping syndrome and you eat fast, then you won't notice the effect until you have a LOT of the stuff that is making you ill in your system, making the dumping much much worse.

Most times when I ate early on, I ate slowly, so that I could pay attention to whether or not a food would make me dump. By eating slowly, I could stop early, and have only a mild bit of dumping.

Once I thought a soup was fine, and I was 3/4ths done when I realized it was too sugary and that dumping was awful.

Interesting. Thanks for all the info. I certainly don't want to stretch my stoma or make myself overly full. I'll stick with using my timer for now.

I still can't make my meals last 30 minutes but I do eat as slow as I can because if I don't food ends up getting stuck on me. For me: Eating too fast = not chewing well enough = Uggh! Pain!

Today was my 6 week check up. The Dr. PA talked about how long between bites with me. (Because I mentioned the vomiting I've been having)  She pulled out her picture showing our insides, pointed out the stoma and telling me that if I don't wait long enough in between bites the food would not have a chance to slip down into my pouch opening up room in my stoma for a next bite. If I eat fast the Stoma fills up and can stretch which is a NO NO.  Any ways I finally get it now. But they still insist on 10 mins between bites. That is so hard to do no matter how much I try.

Actually the stoma can't "fill up" it's like a doorway between your pouch and your intestine. with the door removed. It's small so that food WILL back up inside your pouch, you'll feel full, and stay full for a while. That's the point

The idea is to eat your meal so that your pouch gets full, and you feel restriction and you don't eat a large meal...that's the point of restriction.

Seriously, if I waited 10 minutes for one bite of food, it would be in my intestine. I would NEVER fill up

10 minutes between bites? OMG that is crazy. It'd take you an hour to have 6 bites! Good luck with that one.

Yeah!! So no I don't wait 10 mnis but I do work on slowing down a lot more.

I can't imagine having to wait 10 minutes between bites. If I did this I could eat a twelve course thanksgiving dinner (if I didn't mind it stone cold).... My doc stresses taht we shouldn't let a meal go longer than 30 minutes, because if we do, then we're allowing the earlier part of the meal to exit and clear up space for larger meals. Accordign to your doctor's plan, you'll never get full, never stop eating, and never have time for drinking.

SLOWING Down is a hard one. I have learned to cut my food up into really small bites and put my fork down between bites. It comes natural now. My husband has a bad habit of asking me for help with something before I have a chance to have breakfast. I have had to make him understand that I have to eat and I have to have a certain amount of time. If I don't I'll likely gulp it down when I do eat. It's a matter of retraining him. LOL