On around Day 3 or 4 after surgery, things get exciting!  You graduate to a Full Liquid Diet.  This is particularly exciting because it includes Strained Low Fat Cream Soups.  You will never realize how much you love these until they are all you have!  🙂  For this phase you can have all of the things from Days 1-3 with the addition of:

• Low fat skim or 1% milk, soy milk, almond milk, Lactaid
• Strained low fat cream soups
• Low sugar low carb protein supplements

I was so happy!  I used Fairlife fat-free milk to make my soups to fortify them with protein.  This milk has 13 g of protein in a cup (and only 6 g carbs) so it was a great choice (and still is) for me.  It tastes great too.  I made my soup on the stove top so that I could be sure it wasn’t lumpy….strained it twice to remove any meat, lumps or veggies…and then separated it into 2 ounce servings that would be ready when I was.  My favorites were Cream of Chicken, Cream of Asparagus and Cream of Mushroom.  It was just nice to have something different at that point.

The schedule is the same – protein at the top of the hour (2 oz, taking 15 minutes to consumer) followed by hydrating liquids (2 oz per 15 mins).   A large part of the day is spent prepping, and when you are not prepping you are SIPPING!  It is like a job.  I was constantly sipping something, recording it in my journal, warming up soup, or some combination of those things!  It. Was. Exhausting!