Technically he was told he could have a normal diet almost immediately after surgery, but we quickly discovered independently that EEN really helped at that time. I think it was a mistake for that not to be recommended by the doctors. The exact timeline was something like: EEN for about 6 weeks (once we could tell that it was obviously helping at that time) then slowly adding more food in.
Unfortunately inflammation came back up somewhat after food was added, so our hope that the surgery would lead to a full remission turned out incorrect. So what ended up happening is that he went back to EEN after we gave food a good test until he started Stelara a few months later.
You might look at this and think, "wait a second, he still needed EEN and Stelara even after surgery? What good did surgery even do?" But his case was very very difficult, and we had already been using EEN for quite a while even while he was on Remicade and Entyvio in order to stave off disaster. I don't know whether or not Stelara would have worked if he hadn't gotten surgery, but I can say that his inflammation was much lower after surgery than before so I think there's a good chance it would not have worked until after the surgery knocked out most of the inflammation. His fecal calprotectin while not on medication went from 9000 before surgery to 600 after (now it's below 50 and he's eating a normal diet).
Anyway, if someone can stand it, they should try to do at least a few weeks of EEN during recovery from that surgery.