As someone who had to undergo an ostomy a few years ago, I get asked a lot of different questions. Ostomies are kind of a funny subject because a lot of people don’t really know a lot about them, and they sometimes get curious about living with a stoma. Among other various questions about life with a stoma, one of the questions I get asked fairly frequently is about my eating habits with a stoma. Now, eating is obviously going to have a direct impact on people who wear ostomy pouches, since all of our waste and output is funneled through the stoma and into the ostomy pouch.
It makes sense that people are curious about what happens to the food that I eat and if there are certain foods that I should avoid. Well, I am here to tell you all about my food journey after getting an ostomy and don’t mind answering questions like these. After all, I am definitely someone experienced and knowledgeable in the world of ostomy and not just some random guy on the internet ranting about ostomies and stomas for seemingly no reason. Anyways, in this article I will be telling you about what you can and can’t eat after an ostomy and my overall thoughts on eating before and after undergoing my surgery.
The first thing that I would like to talk about is my eating habits directly after surgery. When I first woke up from surgery in that hospital bed, the last thing I wanted to do was eat any food. In fact, I can remember feeling like I never wanted to eat food ever again. It is true that you barely even have an appetite after undergoing an ostomy, and I was feeling that exact same way. While I recovered in the hospital, I ate very little; on top of this, all that I ate was very bland food that the doctors basically forced me to eat. I was still pretty much in the same boat once I finally got discharged from the hospital and headed home with the addition of my stoma. I was instructed to eat little portions at least 5 or 6 times throughout the day, but even that was a tall order because I was just not hungry. My appetite used to be an insatiable monster that could devour entire nations all in one sweep. After surgery, however, I was left in shambles of who I used to be in that regard.
Once things got better and I started to recover a little bit more from surgery, I started to reintroduce foods that I used to eat back into my diet to see how they would sit and work through my stoma. The good news about getting an ostomy, and what the doctors had informed me of before surgery, is that once you have gotten more adjusted to your body and having a stoma, you can pretty much go back to eating the same foods that you used to. However , it is worth noting that gas becomes a bit more problematic when wearing an ostomy pouch, so naturally I try to avoid foods that make me gassy if at all possible. Some foods that I try to avoid are cabbage, beans, spicy food, and chewing gum, because these can cause a lot of gas.
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