My body has long exited the normal 'Diet and lose weight" mode. From my own experience, people who "eat less" to lose weight are performing "magic" that has no bearing on my actual reality. Try explaining this one to doctors, no one believes you. Friends who have spent enough time with me do.
My digestive problems which are a constant bane of my life, has limited the eating. I seem to go from doing good to bad rather quickly and had two days of nausea and pain. Realizing the food allergies are getting worse and worse has limited the eating.
Now having a hate relationship with food because it causes me pain more often then not has limited my eating. If a doctor told me to go on a diet, I'd laugh in their face and tell them to try having to eat like I do. That includes avoiding even the seeds in strawberries and sesame seeds on buns or health food store sesame chips, to keep from painful bowel attacks as well as all dairy, potatoes, fish, anything fried, anything with too much oil, and a vast variety of other foods that seem to have become my enemy.
I even due to warmer weather and this focus on community involvement and trying to do at least a few things with my life, from art to a new interest in disability advocacy have been more active [well for me], in between times spent in bed, but that hasn't seemed to help though some of the stamina has improved at least on a good day.
I know a normal person would be losing tons of weight, I'm not from what I can tell. I wondered if I have finally exited the 500s, somehow I doubt it. Sometimes this sort of thing is scary. I think about my life and experiences and how everything I am told does not match my own reality.
Oh, I remember the days when I could just cut back a little bit and see the difference on the scale and in my clothes....back when I was a teenager. It hasn't worked that way for me in a long time. In fact, restricting and counting calories or "dieting" made me gain weight! I only count calories every once in a while now out of curiousity and I usually eat 2,000-3,000 a day now but can actually lose weight(I feel like this is magic even though I understand the science now). I used to believe the "a calorie is a calorie" nonsense. Everything we eat interacts with our bodies in different ways. Believe it or not but our bodies can actually restrict or increase the amount of energy it extracts from meals depending on what it believes (either rightly or wrongly) our energy needs are. I think you need to eat MORE. I don't know what your diet looks like now but if you're hardly eating you're sending the signal to your body that there's not enough food around. Eating more (of the right foods in the right macro ratios) tells your body "hey, I'm getting plenty of nutrition and energy on an ongoing basis. It's okay for you to let go of some" :)Oversimplified, but it's true. I know I've made some diet suggestions before but they are all just suggestions and you have to do what works for you which is hard with the food sensitivities and digestive problems. Maybe a first step could be just eliminating grains. Try it for a week with absolutely no grain products, gluten free or not. Grains are incredibly hard on the gut. Or do a Whole30 which is an elimination diet(google Whole 30). Don't worry about the carbs just yet and try to work out which foods are bringing on the problems. Whole30 is an awesome plan and I've read tons of success stories of people who find thier IBS "cured" during this elimination diet. I bet it's the grains/legumes.
ReplyDeleteBtw, I hope your husband is feeling better.
I am looking into your diet suggestions, eating lots more vegetables, especially during weeks, of better finances. I do have to figure out more in replacing the proteins given the food allergies, and more complex carbs and recently found a god health food store to go to though its some distance from where I live. I actually do think I've been eating too little, due to illness and even said to husband I worry about weight gain when that happens. I did try the gluten free diet for a year but didnt work, though I think I definitely have some gluten sensitivies, just seeing what Raisin Bran [obtained from a food pantry] did to my system was scary. With beans, I have terrible problems with those, they do not digest well, even hummus seems problematic, what do you think of that?
ReplyDeleteThanks my husband is feeling better, he has some improvement, I did get him to the doctor and he was able to get some help. I will google Whole 30, anything to work now. I am not sure what triggered this latest attack, could have been even stress, though I know I accidentally ingested some whey [milk], it was in something I never thought would be in the item I ate, but there it was.
correction to above "good health food store"
ReplyDeleteYeah that worked when you were a teen, I never had it work, I do not believe in calorie in and calorie out either. I kept diet journals for years, average in the low 2000s, well on days when digestion is working. It probably was dropped kicked far lower the last two days, though I am recovering somewhat now.
ReplyDeleteWow, given your issue with bran and beans it seems like a Whole30 is exactly what you need. There's no doubt the grains and legumes are an issue for you and are irritating an already inflamed gut. I would even take it easy on fiber from any source for a while. Don't believe that you need tons of fiber in your diet. I'm not saying it's bad for you but it's no miracle food either, whatever you can get through fruits and vegetables is more than enough. Bran (Whole grains) and legume fiber are major gut irritants and contributes to leaky gut syndrome. There are some good videos by the author of Fiber Menace that are worth watching. Also, I remember while watching "Sugar, the bitter truth" on youtube there is somewhere in there a good explanation of how exactly fructose causes gout but it's a long video and I don't recall how far in. You could do a pubmed search for "fructose and gout" and I'm sure it would turn up a bunch of articles. Anyway, it's well established that fructose causes gout and you probably already know this. The problem is (and this is true with a lot of health problems) is that knowing and eliminating the cause doesn't automatically become a cure (though it can). Especially with gout you still have to find a way for the body to excrete the high levels of uric acid and if the kidneys are overwhelmed and not functioning properly that's hard. I don't know much about that but I've read some and heard some just in passing researching other diseases and I know removing fructose is a help and I remember reading that high doses of vitamin C can help with excretion process. Hope that helps a little, I know someone who has that and the way they describe it sounds so awful. A Whole30 may just be the ticket for both of you!
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