What to eat?

[Bifcus16]

I was reading on another thread about those who have no appetite. That is serious, and can lead to real complications, but right now I have the opposite problem.

I am absolutely ravenously starvingly hungry, but I don't know what to eat. I think I've lost the plot a bit.

I have had constant D for nearly three weeks now, and the volume of food I input affects the volume I output, but otherwise nothing seems to make any difference. I thought it would stop when I got over the flu, but no. This morning I had to get out of the shower twice to use the loo. sigh.

I have tried limiting my diet down to rice, chicken soup, and bananas but that didn't work. I tried paleo but the sight of the output unprocessed veggies put me off very quickly. I tried just eating a proper sensible meat and veg thing with no processed anything but that hasn't worked. I have tried avoiding eggs and/or soy, but usually don't last more than two days before I find myself breaking that rule because I am so hungry. At no time have I knowingly ingested gluten or dairy, although I am not sure I haven't got some gluten cross contamination.

I think part of what is happening is that I feel disinclined to eat a solid breakfast since that is when the D is most active, so I end up with rice porridge. That then causes a slump in blood sugar. I am then tending to fall into the junk food trap - even if I have bought a sensible lunch it somehow isn't enough.

Any suggestions on what to eat would be appreciated. I guess I am flopping between saint and sinner and need help to reestablish the middle ground. It might be all right to have brown rice and veggy stir fry with pumpkin soup for lunch, but then it doesn't help if an hour later I am sneaking out of work to get to the shop to buy Sweet William dairy and gluten free chocolate - and eating the whole 100g bar in an hour. I'd buy a sandwich if I could get a GF one.

I haven't lost weight, so I am eating enough. Just don't know what is the best strategy to avoid hunger and give my gut the best chance of healing.

BTW, I haven't been like this since I was first diagnosed. Usually I eat dairy, get problems for three days, eat sensible and it clears up.

Feeling out of control.

Lyn

[tex]

Lyn,

I understand what you're saying, because we've all been in that dilemma. My opinion is that it's best to eat a hearty breakfast, unless you're too nauseated to eat, or you have some other valid reason not to eat breakfast. I've always started the day with a decent breakfast, (unless I was too sick to eat), except for a two week period between a series of barium x-rays, and a colonoscopy, when I came up with the bright idea that if I didn't eat anything but jello and clear liquids, then I would be excused from going through the misery of the familiar "GoLytely" routine, ahead of the colonoscopy. All that scheme earned me was a skin and bones physique, and a world-class case of hiccups. My butt got so skinny that it hurt to sit in an unpadded chair, and the hiccups went on for hours, day after day, night after night, with very few breaks. The worst part was that I had to go through the GoLytely cleanout, anyway. When I got extremely nauseated, about half-way through, they did agree to let me stop there, since I was cleaned out, anyway.

Anyway, maybe it's just me, but I never could tell that eating breakfast made any significant difference in the total number or volume of BMs that I had to deal with, because I usually had to go through two of them before breakfast, anyway. At least, after eating breakfast, I wasn't hungry all morning. I ate a lot of hard-boiled eggs, or poached eggs and bacon, or sausage, or even pork steak, for breakfast. Something that would give me some energy to work with.

My theory as to why you are reacting more these days, is because once you get the two main offenders out of your diet, (gluten and dairy), and your gut begins to heal, your immune system becomes more sensitive to any other intolerances in your diet, that it has been ignoring, up to that point. Statistically, it's likely that soy is your remaining major intolerance, but that's certainly not chiseled in stone, because a few of us are indeed intolerant to eggs, (and various other things, on a declining probability scale). At any rate, you would be better served, to cut out soy for a week or two, and eat a lot of eggs, than to eat a little of both, or eat them in a random pattern. If you don't like to see undigested veggies in the loo - don't eat 'em, because most of us can't handle the fiber, anyway, until our gut heals. You can't necessarily eat a full paleo diet, while you're in the healing stage. Most fruit, many veggies, and nuts, berries, etc., will prevent you from achieving remission, because the fiber irritates the gut, when it is so sensitive. After your gut heals, (IOW, after a year or two of a very restricted diet), then you will probably be able to tolerate all those paleo foods just fine.

Protein gives us strength, and helps to heal the gut, and meat and eggs are good breakfast sources of protein. One of our founding members, (who runs marathons), had the motto, "Never leave home without a pork chop in your handbag", (and she meant it, too).

Tex

[Bifcus16]

Thanks for the advice, Tex.

I think you are right about the eggs and protein. If I exclude soy but increase the eggs, it is substantially easier to find something filling to eat, and helps with issues like portability. Eggs and meat also drop the GI of anything they are eaten with. That will give me enough alternatives to make it easier to avoid soy.

I am completely trained to go for totally lean meat that is either organic or small producer, but if I compromise on that and get some nice fatty GF/CF/SF nitrate free sausages, it would hit the spot.

I like eating my veggies, but part of that is knowing I need them for nutrition. It is a matter of priorities at this point and absorbing nutrients from what I am eating is more important than sending nutrients straight through.

I need to get this under control, not just because of the D, but because I also get swellings of the fingers toes etc, accompanied by muscle stiffness, all of which impacts badly on lifestyle. I am skipping yoga today because I can't bend my wrists back far enough to do basic sun salutations. That is not good for my mental health, so it can't continue.

Thanks again,

Lyn

[Hank]

Hi Lyn & Tex,

Lyn, I completely understand. I had stopped eating at all and was losing weight rapidly when I recently got my diagnosis. In the last two months, I have been on entocort. I have stabilized but have not had a normal BM in months. So.... Although my doctor did not say it was necessary, I recently gave up alcohol completely (At least for awhile). My Redbridge gluten free beer sits in my fridge. If you normally partake you may want to take a pass for awhile.

Tex, thank you for your advice on fiber. What are paleo foods?

Hank

[tex]

Lyn,

You may be able to eat beef, for all I know, but several of us here react to it. We don't necessarily get D, but it causes bloating, muscle and joint pain, headache, etc. for those of us who react to it. I never acquired the habit of eating lamb, but that might be another possibility, if you're used to it. I never considered eating fish for breakfast, either, but I suppose there wouldn't be anything wrong with it.

If you need some carbs to go with your breakfast menu, here in the southern U. S., corn grits are popular, but you would have to leave off the butter, of course. There's always GF toast, I suppose, or even cornbread, but I've never tried cornbread for breakfast. I gave up on GF bread, years ago, and I eat corn tortillas, instead.

Do you feel that the swelling of your fingers, toes, etc., is part of your MC reaction, or due to something else?

Tex

P S I found the problem with the blog image uploads, and corrected it. It should work properly, now - at least it did when I tried it out.

[tex]

Hank,

Welcome aboard.

Briefly, the paleo diet is a reasonably close approximation of the diet utilized by our ancient ancestors, over hundreds of thousands of years preceding the neolithic period of history. During the neolithic period of our history, (beginning roughly 20,000 years ago), nomadic tribes began to establish permanent settlements as they "discovered" agriculture, and slowly developed grain crop production, livestock ranching, dairy, etc. In other words, the paleo diet is a hunter-gatherer diet, and it is sometimes referred to that way. Since our digestive systems were developed over thousands of generations of our ancestors, eating a paleo diet, it is assumed that these foods are more easily tolerated by our digestive systems, and they are healthier and generally safer for us.

http://www.perskyfarms.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=49

Tex

[Bifcus16]

Hi Tex,

I generally eat a lot of lamb, nearly as much beef/veal, and only a little chicken, fish and seafood. And a few odd things like venison, goat and roo when I can get the right cuts. Seldom eat pork, unless it is heavily flavoured with other things. Love bacon, but scared of nitrates. The smell of canned fish makes me ill.

I'll have a go at increasing the chicken and reducing the beef. My butcher has good organic chicken, but he is only open Wednesday to Sunday.

The swellings are a mystery to every medical person I have ever seen. The Rhuematologist thinks maybe a spondylitic arthritis like psoriatic, but there's a few aspects that don't fit. I think it is related to my MC as a food intolerance symptom, but actually a more sensitive indicator than the D. Sometimes when I have eaten a 'suspect' food I have had swelling but not progressed to MC, and it plays up whenever I have MC. It has also been getting progressively more frequent and more serious over the past ten years.

The swelling is unusual because it is usually confined to small areas such as between two joints in a finger, or a bantam sized egg that comes up on the back of my hand, and it comes up very quickly (in an hour) usually later in the day but takes 1-2 days to fully dissipate. A common place is one side of a fingertip (yup, that precise). It can also get odd places like the top of the palate - that is uncomfortable. Arthritis is usually on the joint and is worse in the morning then gets better during the day.

The swelling is not initially painful, but becomes so as I try to use the affected part. If it hits a toe or behind the ball of the foot, it really makes walking painful. If it hits the wrong part of the hand I can't hold a knife, which makes cooking hard. Today it is causing carpal tunnel type symptoms and several fingertips and one quarter of my palate are up. The carpal tunnel is part of the vague stiffness component that comes along after a few days of swellings.

My current favourite theory is that it is a leaky gut problem, with molecules getting out into the bloodstream and causing an inflammatory reaction. I suspect a relationship to micro trauma (hence the hands and feet) but I have no idea of a mechanism for that. I wonder at sarcoidosis or amyloid deposits, since my ACE levels seen to be always high, and Alk Phos is often up, but haven't found anything suggesting they happen this quickly. I also get a regularly blocked parotid (salivary) gland, and my IgM is high. All sarcoidosis pointers, but not enough for a Dx.

I would dearly love to know what causes this - and when DH comes to appointments with me he won't leave without grilling docs on what it could be. But no luck. So since it is worse when I eat something I am intolerant off, it could well be that if I find and remove what is causing the MC the swelling will go with it. Or at least that is the theory I am working on.

If you have any theories on this one I'd love to hear them, because I keep drawing a blank whenever I raise it.

Lyn

[tex]

Lyn,

That's quite an intriguing mystery, (to say the least), and I don't really have any significant insight into it, offhand. The fact that the swelling appears within an hour of the ingestion of food, suggests an allergic response, (rather than an intolerance response), since the food trigger couldn't progress very far down the GI tract, in an hour, (into the duodenum, maybe), and it takes a while for the edema to progress to the point where it is noticeable, in the first place. The fact that the locations seem to be entirely random, is really strange, also. Still, your favorite theory may well be correct, because if the leaky gut syndrome is present, the duodenum would almost certainly be a participant.

I'll keep my eyes and ears open, for any clues that I might come across.

Tex

[Gloria]

Lyn,

Are you maintaining a food/elimination journal? I've found it very helpful in determining my intolerances. You might find a relationship between the swellings and what you ingest.

Gloria

[Bifcus16]

Thanks for the suggestion Gloria,

I have tried that in the past without picking up a connection - until I excluded dairy and could see the difference when I occasionally did have some. I struggle to maintain the discipline with the diary. With more dietary exclusions it might be easier to pick up the relationship however, and hence more encouragement to keep it up.

Lyn