IBS and diet – the plan of action (or less action…!)

This post follows the last…

Yesterday i began to change my diet in earnest, after a couple of days of research and starting to make small changes.

My diet plan for this week is as follows:

Foods allowed:

Rice (focussing on white as less fiberous, though may eat brown later in week when i see how things go) – i have basmati (white) and pudding rice to start with.

Quinoa – a seed which look like a grain and is high in protein/nutrients and i think easy to digest

Soya milk – i usually use soya milk anyway as i don’t like cow’s milk and as many people don’t do well on a lot of lactose i also prefer to eat my dairy allowance as yogurt!

Boiled/steamed vegetables – avoiding sprouts/cabbage/normal brocolli/onions etc that may be particularly wind-forming

Tofu – figure it can’t be too indigestible as well processed

honey and nut butter – these seem to be ok according to the powerpoint presentation and can be used to help things taste like breakfast/pudding

herbs, cooked fresh garlic and ginger – to give some savoury flavour

Potatoes – have not had any yet, but can’t see that they should be a problem if cooked freshly and still hot – hmm hot potato!

Still water and herbal teas and 3 cups maximum of caffinated tea (no point going through caffeine withdrawal or having none of my favourite things!)

This means i have cut out: dairy products, gluten, Quorn (i eat quite a lot of Quorn (a meat substitute) so worth seeing if it upsets me at all, fizzy water & other fizzy drinks (can cause gas to pass all the way through, they say), raw foods, fruit, whole nuts and seeds, fermented foods (vinegar, yeast, soya sauce) and reheated foods…

It seems extreme but i won’t be keeping it up for long i can tell you! I just feel it is worth a try to

a) give my system a rest

b) see if changing my diet can improve the worst symptoms

c) see if anything i eat a lot of is not agreeing with me

As i mentioned in the last post, i am not willing to do a proper elimination diet to see if i have food intoleraces. I have done it before with no definite conclusions and as an energy-limited person reliant on someone else to cook all main meals it is a lot of disruption and effort. Just this week will be hard enough!

Breakfast is my main problem – yesterday i had oats with soya milk, as apart from boiled rice it was all i had in, as it was before my partner was going to the supermarket! Today i attempted to make rice pudding in a pan with soya milk, then added some honey and a sprinkle of cinnamon (ooh, naughty – not on the list!). It took constant stirring (not all by me) for half an hour to get the rice soft enough to eat and i am wondering even now if it was cooked enough – hardly something i can do each morning, and to bake it in the oven in the traditional way takes a lot longer. You can make quinoa “porridge”, so i may try that tomorrow, that cooks in about ten minutes – phew! (If that does not work/is horrid, i will be introducing oats back into my diet quick smart i think! They are meant to help with IBS anyway, unless you have a problem with gluten.)

So, i don’t have a definite strategy of what to do at the end of the week, but if my symptoms have improved, i think i will reintroduce some of the foods i eat the most of usually, one at a time over 2-3 of days, and see if anything changes.

Top of these i think are: bio yogurts, oats (then my lovely spelt, barley and oat muesli), Quorn, seeds (which i usually add to my muesli but the theory seems to be they can be too husky unless ground up).

I think i have already realised that i need to eat less fruit and raw veg, but i need to look into the “resistant starches” more and see if i can find a good table of foods and their values – i have found a couple but they only list a few things, such as rice, bread, potato in freshly cooked, cooled and reheated states, and bananas (which seem to be very bad). It would be useful to know more about specific products (oat/rice cakes for example) as well as which fruit and veg are easier on the tum… i love fruit! I think it will be trial and error on that front.

Obviously i need to keep an eye on keeping a healthy diet while making these changes, particularly with reducing raw fruit and veg as i think they provide a lot of vitamins and minerals which can be lost in cooking. I hope to be able to eat some whole grains and beans/pulses, as again they are so nutritious… I may just need to keep an eye on quantities!

I may look into probiotics as well but think i need to do one thing at a time, so i may experiement with them further down the line…

Early results!

Well, yesterday was a much better day with massive wind reduction and no other problems except a bit of stomach ache which is usually present anyway 🙂 I was a little concerned that i may have reduced too much fibre and would have the opposite problem to usual, but today also seems fine. I did eat quite a pile of steamed veg so i am getting some fibre to keep things moving along!

Even if i don’t get to the “bottom” of all my problems, knowing that i can go on a certain diet just to calm things down is a good start, i hope the rest of the week is as good as this early start!