Confessions of The Goat Girl.

You can def. keep!  But, like others have said, you may need to be careful the first few months out of surgery.  I felt 100% comfortable around 8 months out with spicy stuff and I eat it all the time too.  Sriracha, Frank's, Cholula, red pepper flakes, cayenne are common in my house :)

Yum, Frank's! I can't imagine a piece of fish without Louisiana on it, but Frank's works great for chicken. I'll have to remember to try tiny bits of spice at first whenever I do get back to re-introducing spicy items.

Here's my experience:   pre-op I could eat anything and everything.   Post-op the only thing that has given me fits (BIG fits) is anything spicy or tomato-based.  It causes horrific acid and reflux issues.  I didn't actually make the connection at first (I'm bad at listening to my body!) but now I just avoid, avoid, avoid.  

Give your stomach time to heal, talk to your surgeon and IF he says it's ok, go slow on introducing it back in and listen to what your tummy is telling you.  

This isn't going to be an immediate thing - I imagine that immediately post-op and up to 6 months out I'll have to restrict. Probably a very limited diet during the 'honeymoon' big weight loss phase. I plan to be cautious with my new tummy. I'm hoping that a year from now though, I'll be able to satisfy my spicy cravings. It would be terribly dull if I could only eat bland white chicken and fish the rest of my life. I'd have to live with it, but you know. A bit disappointing.

I'm not a big beef or pork eater, so at least there is that. I have read that a bunch of folks have trouble with beef. It's not a big part of my diet now, so if it's a problem food in the future, that wouldn't make much of a difference to me.

Keith has a Pinterest page and one of his pins was 36 Low Carb & High Protein choices.  Lots of different proteins out there besides chicken and fish! 

http://bembu.com/low-carb-and-high-protein-foods

Thanks to Keith for sharing his Pinterest with this forum 

I'm going to collect as many low-carb, high-protein recipes as I can. I see that salmon is on the list. Does anyone here eat salmon tartare? It's one of my favorites, but I wasn't sure if I could have that post-op since raw fish isn't as flaky.

I had sashimi a few weeks ago. It slid down very nicely and made my belly very happy :)

I was cleared for as hot as I could tolerate as soon as I hit the puree phase and I took advantage of it. One of the first things I whipped up in my food processor was chicken pureed with sriracha sauce. No problems! I eat hot sauce probably at least once a day and it doesn't bother me a bit.

Hot sauce is just a thing with me, I swear I can't taste chicken and fish right without it. Good to know you had no problems with it. I'm still not so sure about puree'ing chicken, but it's worth a try!

I had reflux fairly bad and before my cpap years ago I would wake up choking on acid. When I had the sleeve I have not had reflux since. It has been 13 months. I had my gallbladder out as well and it was very bad. The surgeon said that was more work then my sleeve it was so bad. They said that may have been the cause. Anyways I had a salad from subway yesterday and had them put franks and sirachi on the chicken. You could smell the heat while it was still in the microwave. I ate it without drinking and had no issues. My wife can not eat anything remotely hot and wonders how I can do it with out drinking.