Discussion Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) thread

[TheNihilisticViking]

Hey!

I've decided to make a thread for fellow suffers of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and this should hopefully be a place where we can share our experiences and problems with it. Maybe offer advice, support and guidance to each other, too. Well... when it comes to myself, I've been suffering with IBS-M (Mixed) since my late teens and early 20s, but I'm in my late 20s now. I'm unsure about the causes of my IBS, but I think that it's linked to my mental health (mainly my depression/anxiety) and also overuse of antibiotics and PPI medications. As we know, there is no cure for IBS at the moment.

 

[smokingfish99]

I don't suffer from ibs but do suffer from a similar crippling digestive issue. Have you tried amitriptyline? There's great success stories with it for people with terrible ibs

 

[TheNihilisticViking]

I don't suffer from ibs but do suffer from a similar crippling digestive issue. Have you tried amitriptyline? There's great success stories with it for people with terrible ibs

I'm on Fluoxetine 30mg and it seems to help a little bit and I was using Probiotics from a shop in UK called Holland and Barrett, it's a health related shop. However, the Probiotics are kinda expensive and also cause diarrhoea occasionally (when I go up to highest potency of them). I'm also taking multivitamin supplements and stuff, too. I mostly have IBS-C, but it becomes IBS-D when I'm severely anxious and stressed, with occasional vomiting. Fluoxetine seems to speed up gut motility, so I don't get constipated as much. I've had to take Movicol sachets and other Laxatives a few times in the past to flush my body out because of being backed up for weeks. Also, my water intake is high, so I don't understand why I should be getting constipated. It's strange. Also, certain foods and stuff trigger me, including caffeine, dairy (I'm also lactose intolerant), eggs, coffee in general and some beans and legumes, plus some other stuff and some oils, too. Because I started taking Omega Oil pills, but I had extreme diarrhoea for hours several nights in a row with those. I've also been tested for coeliac disease and I'm thinking about going back to the doctors to get checked for IBD/Crohns Disease at some point because I think I may have that and not IBS, I don't know though. It's so strange.

 

[onewho]

Give the carnivore aka zero-carb diet a try for a month or two, after getting the practical do's-and-don't on it via your own research (forums, bloggers, vids / channels etc) and getting your questions answered in whatever such communities you find. Particularly with regards to nutritional-completeness (it's easy to ensure — but also if going in under-informed easy to get wrong). Short version: fresh fatty ruminant meats (beef or lamb) dominant with other meat kinds on the small/seldom side, butter ad-libitum is fine (it's technically-dairy but practically-no-lactose), eat when hungry, stop only when full, don't have any other scheduling rules here initially.

Given the no-carb, no-fiber nature of this way of eating, high (animal) fat intake to full satiation is paramount because such kcal excess isn't stored as body fat (no insulin highs because no carbs in meals) but rather just shuttled to the bowels, thereby softening stools, preventing constipation, and replacing all the very bowel nourishment that people are (questionably-so, perhaps) expected to laboriously and gassily obtain via bacterial fiber fermentation.

Since this is a keto diet, there may be minorly-irritating but ultimately harmless and transient "keto-adaptation symptoms", as can be (re)searched as well.

Bowel-movement frequency and stool volume are still way reduced in this way-of-eating due to higher / fuller digestability of meats and way less undigestable-residues (aka fiber), but shouldn't be "constipation" (hard) stools, or else you went too low on fat and/or too high on off-regimen food additions or ingredients (or, if you stuck strictly animal-foods-only, then excessively it was too much cheese).