Bowel Surgery Preparation and Recovery
How our dietitians can help you
- Optimising pre surgery diets: We guide you through any diets required before procedures like colonoscopy or bowel surgery, ensuring nutritional adequacy and food enjoyment.
- Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) Protocols: We use evidence-based ERAS strategies to help optimise your surgical outcomes and support a smoother, faster recovery.
- Post-Surgery Nutrition Management: We guide you through post-operative diets- such as clear fluids, pureed, or low-residue options. We ensure you meet your nutritional needs for healing and strength.
- Making Recovery Practical and Enjoyable: With personalised advice and practical strategies, we help make the recovery period more manageable and enjoyable. We support your return to a regular, balanced diet when appropriate.
- Post-surgery gut symptoms: Even after a successful surgery, you may experience short-term or ongoing gut symptoms. We help you understand and manage these symptoms through diet.
More about pre and post bowel surgery
Dietary Management
Surgery pre-hab and ERAS: We work with you to optimise your diet before and after surgery using the evidence-based Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocol to improve surgical outcomes and support a smoother, faster recovery. After surgery, we help you transition through various post-operative diets-such as clear fluids, pureed, or low-residue options. We aim to meet your nutritional needs for healing and strength, and reintroducing preferred foods as soon as possible.
Using tailored advice and strategies, we make the recovery period more manageable, supporting a gradual return to a regular, balanced diet. Also, we understand that gut symptoms can persist even after successful surgery, and we’re here to help you understand, and adapt to these changes through thoughtful dietary support.
Low Anterior Resection Syndrome (LARS): is a condition that can occur after surgery to remove part or all of the rectum, typically for rectal cancer. This procedure is called a low anterior resection (LAR). You may experience symptoms such as more frequent or urgent bowel movements, inability to control bowel movements, variability in timing of bowel movement (days between then multiple bowel movements in a short period) or a feeling that the bowel has not been completely emptied.
The nature of symptoms depend on many factors, including the extent and type of surgery. These symptoms can obviously significantly impact quality of life. Dietary management of LARS requires tailored advice based on medical history, symptoms and your quality of life goals. We will discuss dietary changes, food behaviours and supplements or medications that are specific to managing your symptom profile. Our dietitians work closely with a pelvic floor physiotherapists and can refer to these services as needed, which often complement dietary strategies for management of LARS.
Stoma management: A stoma is an opening created surgically to allow waste to exit the body after part of the bowel is removed. This can occur after surgery to the bowel for management of IBD, cancer, traumatic injury or bowel obstruction. A stoma can be temporary or permanent depending on the reason for its formation. Stoma dietary management aims to support nutritional adequacy whilst managing stoma output.
Dietary requirements post stoma formation focus on recovery and tailoring dietary intake to manage stool out to prevent blockages and optimise quality of life. Dietary management of a stoma usually transitions towards a balanced diet with support from your dietitian to maintain a diet that supports optimal output without unnecessary dietary restriction. If you’re reversing a temporary stoma, your Help Yourself dietitian will support you through evidence-based Enhanced Recovery After Surgery (ERAS) protocols to optimise your recovery and help you manage bowel movements long term
Book with Kerith or Georgina
Kerith and Georgina specialise in various gastrointestinal conditions and symptoms. Their consulting work with clients complements their research in gastrointestinal nutrition.
Face-to-face appointments
Kerith offers appointments at Newcastle Gastroenterology and Health HQ Salamander Bay.
Contact Us
Email – office@helpyourself.com.au