One of the most important changes you’ll need to make to your diet after weight loss surgery is cutting out sugar. Reducing the amount of sugar in your diet can be just as important as cutting the total number of calories that you eat. It can protect your teeth from decay and reduce your risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The combination of weight loss surgery and a lower sugar diet can even help to relieve the symptoms if you already have diabetes

Useless Calories Sugar exists naturally in many foods, usually in relatively small amounts, but refined sugar is often added too, to make us buy and eat more. The added sugar doesn’t come with any extra vitamins or essential nutrients, so it is just useless, empty calories. You need to read the labels of everything you eat carefully so you can avoid these useless calories. Look out for the less obvious forms of sugar such as fructose, glucose, sucrose, corn syrup, molasses, and hydrolysed starch. You should also stop adding any extra sugar yourself, including to your tea or coffee.

Changing Your Tastes Adapting to a low sugar diet can be difficult, particularly if you have always had a sweet tooth. However, the amounts of added sugar in our food have risen rapidly in recent years. By choosing lower sugar options, you are actually going back to the flavours that you would have enjoyed ten or twenty years ago. Low sugar foods might not seem sweet compared to the high sugar options available today, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be enjoyed. You just have to wait for your taste buds to adapt.

Dumping Syndrome One thing that might make it easier to avoid sugar after weight loss surgery is that some procedures can have a side effect known as dumping syndrome. You might start having symptoms like cramps and diarrhoea if you eat high sugar foods after gastric bypass or gastric sleeve surgery. It could be enough to put you off these unhealthy foods permanently.