Counting Calories?

Before the surgery I lost a grand total of 82 pounds. I did it through calorie restriction; I watched and recorded everything I ate. The traits I've come to call my Aspergian self required me to do things by servings; I had to eat the serving entirely so the calories would come out correctly in tracking. I obsess over the calorie counts and at the end of the day I'd have a tally from the fitness website of how many calories I've had. I couldn't eat anything unless I had what I thought was an accurate count of calories per serving for items I was putting into my mouth and because of this I couldn't just eat baked foods or most homemade food; it had to be packaged because of the nutrition labels.

Since the surgery, though, I've not tracked a calorie. I don't go by servings or anything else mainly because it seems that I'm not taking in enough for it to "count". I won't be able to have solid foods for another couple weeks; I'm still on a "clear liquids" schedule until Wednesday. After Wednesday I'm hoping to move to a simple liquids diet; I'm looking forward to being able to try taking some Progresso split pea soup and strain it through a coffee filter to have the remaining broth. I sometimes wonder if it's sad that this is the type of thing I look forward to. I look forward to the broth of split pea soup and the first time I can sit down and eat even one scallop at Red Lobster. Is that really weird?

Right now I'm eating mostly juice popsicles, jello, milk and water. I can have broth but I just haven't taken the time to pour it and microwave it. I suppose I'm just not hungry enough to take the time to do that.

But this has me thinking; once I'm on solid foods again, will I be tracking calories? How would I? If I'm not hungry for a full serving, how would I eat everything without getting sick?

Or would I try doing what normals do...just eat until I feel full? I mean, will my new stomach work that way?

One of the biggest fears I have is that my lack of hunger right now is a side effect of the healing, that my stomach is puffed up right now like most injuries are just as they begin healing wounds (ever see how puffy plastic surgery patients look post-op?), so maybe it gets full more quickly. Thing is, I haven't felt full. I also don't feel hungry.

I guess right now I'm eating out of a conscious sense of needing material to repair my wounds (milk does a body good, right?) and for the feel, the texture, of the food. But not so far I'm not eating because my stomach is gurgling or because I just can't resist a bite.

So what am I going to do? Hope that the mechanism that tells me, "Dude, you're full!" is now reset to an appropriate level? Hope that the stomach will give me that uncomfortable, eat-one-more-ounce-and-you'll-vomit feeling after a few ounces of food? Or keep track again of every serving that goes into my mouth and set a calorie target for eat day? Or maybe I'll have to come up with a "rule of thumb" where I can't eat any more than a certain amount at one sitting and have that amount three times a day, hoping that the food I fit into that quantity will always be so low in calories that I'd lose weight to a level close to what the normals typically are?

I have no idea. Right now I'm just suckin' down juice popsicles and milk for most of my calories (milk is fat-free, so it's about 80 calories a serving...8 ounces?...and the popsicles are 15 calories each). I don't want to subsist off that forever, though. I find myself sometimes wondering what that strained split pea soup would be like...and that scares me too, because what if something in the surgery didn't work?

Maybe time will tell, or the dietician next week will have some answers or insights. Right now I am just kind of living in fear of what the next hurdle to come my way will be.