So, after the sleeve gastrectomy surgery, you’re going to be taking in 400-600 calories a day for the first few months, and when you do eat, you’re now going to have malabsorption, which just means you’ll no longer be absorbing all the nutrients from your food. Because of this, you have to take vitamins every day. This is no longer optional. There are a lot of vitamins made specifically for bariatric patients; by the time you’ve had surgery, you’ll have gone through at least one sample packet. I’m gonna talk real quick about two brands:
Bariatric Advantage
I realized I wasn’t getting any iron from my multivitamin, and you have to get iron. So, I went to the BA website, found a multivitamin with iron, and ordered it, along with a chewable calcium citrate pill (black cherry flavored). When I opened them I almost vomited. The calcium pills smelled like the corpse of black cherry that’d been found in a citrus grove, a week after its murder. The iron pills smelled like Satan’s dingleberries.
When I called them to arrange the return they said no. I’d opened them, so they were non-refundable. I harassed them into a change in mindset, and shipped them back same day. My refund is pending. Fuck Bariatric Advantage.
Barimelts
These are what I’ve been taking for months now. They don’t have iron in their multivitamin, so you have to buy Iron + Vitamin C. Smells and tastes citrusy. Barimelts are dissolvable and all of them taste fine to me. Every day, this is the routine:
- Multivitamin x 2 (morning)
- Iron + Vitamin C x 3 (morning)
- Calcium Citrate x 2 (afternoon and again in the evening)
- Biotin x 1 (afternoon)
It works out to about $100 a month. You can afford it, your food budget has shrunk by more than half. The big takeaway from all this is in bold above.