Life after bariatric surgery is a long series of small questions, and the surgeon’s leaflet answers only the first few. This archive covers the months and years that follow a sleeve or a bypass. What do you swallow every morning? Why is your hair thinning? Is a glass of wine ever safe again? And how do you sit at a restaurant table without undoing the work?

Start with nutrition, because everything else rests on it. There are the vitamins and supplements you will take for life and the signs of a deficiency to watch for. Then come the guides to hair loss, bone health and muscle loss, the three places a deficiency shows first. Hydration has its own rules when the stomach holds a cup. Because the gut absorbs less, the doses are higher than a healthy adult would take.

After that come the habits. There are guides to coffee and alcohol, to eating out, and to grazing and emotional hunger. The weight loss stall that almost everyone hits has an article too. So does pregnancy after surgery, along with cold medicine, spicy food and the chewing rule. Most of these habits are about pace, so the guides say how slowly to eat and drink. Articles specific to one operation live in the sleeve and bypass archives.

Most of life after bariatric surgery is routine once the first year is over. Still, someone has to teach you the routine, and these guides are those notes. For meals built to these rules, the Bariatric Cookbook follows the same stages and portions described here.