If you have recently had an ostomy, I am sure you have a lot of different questions on your mind at the moment. How will this ostomy affect the rest of my life? What kinds of things will I not be able to do going forward? How will my daily life be impacted? Well, hopefully I can help answer a few questions about what it is like to have an ostomy in a more long term scenario and ease some of the anxiety you are probably feeling right now. A big question that a lot of people have after getting an ostomy is this – how will my eating habits be affected? Well this is a logical question to ask, since an ostomy greatly changes the way you are going to be expelling food waste from your body. If you haven’t already, then I highly suggest that you have some long conversations with your doctor and primary care physician before looking for advice from someone like me. Though I have spent a lot of time with a stoma, I would not say that I am an expert – rather, I just have my own personal experience with which I feel like I might be able to add some useful advice here and there.

https://youtu.be/G-IcSTqeIPo

The first thing to keep in mind is that you will be pretty much out of commission for a bit after surgery. Your body will be super sore and sensitive, and you will probably just want to be getting a lot of rest. After all, your entire natural process of dispelling waste has been completely changed and you’ve been all cut open all over the place. It makes sense that your body may be unhappy for a little bit! But that is okay, because you will recover just fine. As you are recovering from surgery at home, it is a good time to start getting used to eating again.

For the first few weeks, you’ll probably just want to eat really bland foods that are easy on your digestive system. I personally like rice a lot, because it is cheap, easy to make, easy on the stomach, and very yummy! You can buy a massive bag of rice for relatively cheap and it will last you a good long while. Foods like that will be nice on your sensitive digestive system while you are in the process of recovering from surgery. Take my word from it, you will want to be as careful as possible!

Once you have begun to recover a bit here and there, it might be time to start slowly introducing new foods to your body and your diet. Of course, you will want to make sure that you get the go-ahead from your doctors and all other medical personnel before you really start to delve into the world of new foods. However, once you are all medically cleared to do so, go ahead and start eating some of the things you used to enjoy! The reason you will want to reintroduce foods slowly is because you want to make sure you can assess how your body responds to each new food item. Trying different foods one at a time will help you figure out what you should and should not eat going forward.