Traces of nuts

[j4]

Saw the doctor and he was slightly more helpful than they usually are. He agreed that while stress is probably making things worse, being uncomfortable and in pain tends to make people stressed, so let's try to fix the problem or at least the symptoms.

Booked in for blood tests next week, but in the meantime he wants me to cut the following things out of my diet for two weeks:

* dairy produce
* tea & coffee
* alcohol
* citrus fruits (LJ icons don't count)
* under-ripe fruit (do people eat this for fun?)
* nuts (see? but at least he didn't say I was going nuts)
* chocolate
* re-heated food e.g. dried pasta (?)
* toast
* ready-meals
* food colourings and additives
* fun

Okay, I added the last one of those myself.

He also suggests eating porridge made with oats and bran for breakfast instead of my usual, apparently risible fare. ("What do you have for breakfast?" "Uh, yoghurt." "Yoghurt? Just yoghurt?") More fibre, basically. Porridge is nice (he didn't say I couldn't put honey on it ... or bacon for that matter), but it does mean getting up earlier.

If cutting out all the above helps, then I can reintroduce things one at a time; if it doesn't help, he says it might be worth trying cutting wheat out for 2 weeks. Of course if the blood tests say I've actually got Swine Flu the galloping lurgy something identifiable that's nothing to do with diet, than I can go back to eating whatever I like, hopefully.

I wouldn't mind so much but addedentry basically lives on pasta, bread, and cheese (and chocolate!) so if I have to cut any of these things out long-term then we're basically going to be eating separate meals for the rest of our lives. :-(

Anyway, at least it's something concrete to try, which is better than sitting on my arse feeling sorry for myself. We'll see what happens.

Comments

[taimatsu]

Anecdote, only tangentially relevant: re. fibre in the diet, I was once prescribed Fybogel, the psyllium husk drink things. They tasted unpleasant (and they're lurid orange or yellow!) but most entertainingly if you leave them out in the open unconsumed for a while, they turn into a gel (as the observant might have guessed from the name), and cannot be poured away, but flollop into the sink like jellyblobs.

Assorted other thoughts, also barely coherent and certainly not helpful:

Could you perhaps have muesli with added bran for breakfast?

Identifiable foods which have caused me trouble have included apple juice (and any large quantity of juice in general), grapes, and pizza. None of the components of pizza, just pizza in general, which is really weird.

Does O not eat rice? Potatoes?

Fingers crossed for you. I damn well hope *something* helps.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he does eat rice and potatoes. He also has a full cooked meal at lunch (free from college) so he may just have to live with having a slightly less fun cooked meal in the evenings.

[taimatsu]

I will have to consider the maximum fun possible within your list of restrictions, and hunt for recipes...

[j4.livejournal.com]

No, really, it's okay. I can easily find enough to keep me fed and not-too-fed-up for a couple of weeks; & when I come home from work I'm generally not really in the mood for starting trying to cook anything adventurous or follow other people's recipes.

[taimatsu]

*nod* Makes sense. Sorry. I'm certainly struggling to cook anything at all when I get in from work. I'm still adjusting to the real world :/

[imc.livejournal.com]

Golly, is there anything left after all that? I hope you get some benefit from it.

"Re-heated food e.g. dried pasta" confuses me, too. I don't think of dried pasta as "re-heated" really (and does this mean you are allowed to eat crunchy uncooked dried pasta?) and the only reason I can think of for avoiding pasta is because it contains wheat or gluten or carbohydrate, and that's nothing to do with how it's cooked.

[voiceofsauron.livejournal.com]

Presumably you are allowed fresh pasta which hasn't been cooked!

[j4.livejournal.com]

is there anything left after all that?

Meat, fish, vegetables, rice, bread! There's plenty of solid food left, it's just all the fun extras that have gone. (Garlic is still allowed though thank goodness.)

[khalinche.livejournal.com]

I'm glad the doctor took you seriously. Giving up tea, coffee, cheese and booze is a thing of horror, of course, but you might be surprised at how easy the rest is. Good luck! I always have a mental surfeit of recipes (although not for lampreys), just ask if you want suggestions.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Giving up coffee is something I do occasionally anyway; and I haven't had much booze lately because I've been feeling so rotten. (The main thing I'd miss about giving up booze completely is being able to order anything worth drinking in a pub.) Dairy-free I did for ~16 years so it's not a big scary thing, just a pain in the butt when I have a fridge full of yoghurt and nice cheese. The hard thing is remembering that I've got to check the ingredients of absolutely everything again, & basically can't buy anything in a deli or a cafe or a restaurant, can't "just buy lunch from the shop", can't eat biscuits that are handed round at work etc etc. *sigh*

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the doctor has put you on a sort of exclusion diet - so probably thinks that you have a food allergy or intolerence. I'd guess that the blood tests are for Crones which would show up on one.

Porridge which chopped up bacon in it is very nice.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

crohn's can't be diagnosed by a blood test, though if the test shows high inflammatory markers, it might mean other tests are worthwhile.

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

> Porridge which chopped up bacon in it is very nice.

You know, normally I disapprove of porridge, but that sounds mmmm

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

When I had the breakfast conversation, I was saying, "Uh, nothing. Well, coffee." You can imagine how well that went...

You know, looking at what you've said, though -- I do vary my carbs. No way would my stomach tolerate eating just pasta, every day -- more processed (white, soft) bread similarly, is a food with which I need to practice moderation. Ditto pizza -- I used to be able to tolerate far more of this when I was younger. But then, I couldn't tolerate irritants like chilli as well as I can now. Swings and roundabouts. On top of the dietary trinity of wheat, rice and potatoes, there are (delicious) outliers like polenta and quinoa -- and always the various different sorts of bread.

Underripe fruit, re-heated foods and ready meals are known causes of making already dicky stomachs somewhat dickier. Toast is scritchy, citrus fruits are acid. All these are fine for a normal digestion but might be upsetting someone who's already having problems.

If it turns out to be the booze, I'm sorry. I do have a friend for whom that turned out to be the case -- and I have to exercise more caution with wine (only wine, but still, come on!) as I grow older and will doubtless (just as my mother has) at some point decide the stomach trouble isn't worth the fun.

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

P.S. One thing to bear in mind if you're switching off the booze, tea and coffee is that fruit juices (especially in quantity) can also cause problems.

[j4.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell ANYTHING can cause problems; I mean, between them the people I know are allergic to pretty much everything except water ... so I'm just going to give up the things I've been told to give up and carry on having other things. (Most fruit juices are citrus therefore no go anyway, so I'm drinking more apple juice than I would normally.)

BTW re previous comment we don't eat just pasta, really, but quite a lot of pasta (mostly just that it's so much quicker to cook than rice, also I can't cook rice anyway - it always always always goes sticky/burnt/lumpy/crap no matter which 'no really this method totally ALWAYS works' magic recipe I try, I think it just hates me).

[scat0324.livejournal.com]

Don't pasta and rice both take "about ten minutes"? Not that I'm arguing with the rice vendetta against you, which probably makes it feel like longer!

[j4.livejournal.com]

Hm, I thought rice took longer. It certainly *seems* to take longer, and it's much more sensitive to things like getting the right amount of water, so takes more thought... conversely, some of the quick-cook dried pasta only takes about 6 mins (and fresh pasta even less!).

But yes, I am probably just prejudiced against rice. :-}

(I can cook brown rice okay -- maybe it's less sensitive to cockups? -- but that really does take a long time.)

I like rice

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

Brown rice and wild rice tend to take in the order of 25 mins. Bismati, jasmine, etc., take 10. There are ‘easy cook’ treatments that are microwaveable or otherwise prepared in a few minutes.

Ken Hom’s ’perfect rice’ recipe ends with the pan on low heat with the lid sealed, steaming the rice in the last traces of water. This seems to me to make it fairly immune to variability in timing.

… except water?

[damiancugley.livejournal.com]

Jeremy was allergic to water for a while after the roof fell on her …

[emperor]

Good luck with that. I think I'd just cry if told to cut all that lot out, even for 2 weeks - you are clearly made of sterner stuff!

[htfb.livejournal.com]

Adding oatmeal to your yoghurt produces instantly a perfectly palatable mush, rich in fibre, which you can consume even with a broken and immobile jaw. (Ask me how I know that.) After a few weeks living on nothing but this and soup you will feel like the Old Man of Tobago.

[venta.livejournal.com]

If porridge requires too much early activity, then something like Ready Brek is (more expensive but) a quicker alternative. Or All Bran with soya milk (not as nasty on cereal as you might think - admittedly not that nice either).

Good luck with this - obviously discovering long-term food intolerances would be quite sucky, but then being rather ill long term is also sucky. Hurrah for doctors who actually listen.

[j4.livejournal.com]

How is Ready Brek easier - can you just put boiling water on it or something?

I don't mind the taste of soya milk (got used to it being dairy-free for ~16 years...) but less happy about the links between soya and infertility. :-/ (Yes, I will research this properly rather than just assuming that because I read it in the papers it must be true.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yup, Ready Brek is basically instant porridge, just add hot water (or, in other circs, hot milk) and stir. I guess you might want to check whether it's still suitably high-fibre, because I don't know if the making-it-powdery process damages its fibrosity.

I thought the infertility thing was just guys ? The NHS actually provides quite a useful "science behind the headlines" website, if you don't know about it. I'll now go and read there about soya (http://www.nhs.uk/news/2008/07july/pages/soyabasedfoodandmalefertility.aspx) :)

porridge!

[(Anonymous)]

That's great your GP is taking it seriously, I hope that you are able to find some cause or improvement

Ready-brek is not very nice compared to the awesomeness of porridge (providing it is sufficiently covered in crunchy brown sugar) - porridge actually works ok done in the microwave which doesn't take anywhere near as long as making it on the hob.

Exclusion diets are no fun at all and make eating out difficult (I would eat a bowl of plain rice - what excitement!) but it is only for a short time and we did discover some new dishes in the process... giving up caffeine and the accompanied week-long headache will be no fun I'm sure.

Also, there is rice milk as an alternative to soya milk. Or if it turns out to be a lactose thing then there are non-cow milks although I've not heard of commercial badger milk. Dunno about the effect of oestrogens in soya milk - all things in moderation I spose and I presume that you're not eating soya 'meat' cooked in soya milk with a glass of soya milk on the side...

Good luck!

--
Angharadxxx

Re: porridge!

[venta.livejournal.com]

porridge actually works ok done in the microwave

This is very true - but just make sure you make it in a bowl at least three times as big as the quantity of porridge, and watch the damn stuff like a hawk. The alternative is cleaning really quite a lot of porridge off the inside of the microwave :)

Re: porridge!

[j4.livejournal.com]

What venta says about exploding porridge in microwave. Been there, exploded the porridge. :-}

There are lots of non-cow milks, yes, but many of them still have lactose in... when I was dairy-free as a kid (no pun intended) goat's milk still made me just as ill as cow's milk.

Badger milk would be fun but it'd probably cost a fortune, can you imagine how long it'd take to get a pint of milk from a badger? :)

soya 'meat' cooked in soya milk with a glass of soya milk on the side

Blehhhhhhh! What a horrible thought. :-}

BTW thank you very much for your email - sorry I hadn't got round to replying but there's loads of useful suggestions!

[k425.livejournal.com]

under-ripe fruit (do people eat this for fun?)

I prefer my bananas on the greener side of yellow, rather than the browner side. Which makes them under-ripe - but not unripe.

If he wants you to cut out wheat, ask him to have you tested for coeliac disease first (if he hasn't included that already) since if you cut out food containing gluten your body won't be producing the immune response any more and it won't show up.

Good luck!

[j4.livejournal.com]

If he wants you to cut out wheat, ask him to have you tested for coeliac disease first

Yes, I think that's supposed to be included in the blood tests. I suspect I will be eating plenty of bread for the next couple of weeks because it's about the only moderately-fun thing left. :-}

[lnr]

At least you are still allowed non-citrus jam. And nuns! Although maybe not for eating.

Glad you've got a sympathetic quack, and hope something helps!

I wonder if he included calcium/parathyroid level tests. Apparently digestive problems can be a symptom, as can tiredness and depression.

[k425.livejournal.com]

CAKE!
Jelly!

[j4.livejournal.com]

Well, I've got plenty of dairy-free cake recipes, but no time to make them; and most shop-bought cake is no use because it's got things like milk and butter in. And jelly usually has colours/additives etc! So, yeah, another two fun foods that I can't have for the time being.

[camellia-uk.livejournal.com]

Breakfast in the always-oversleeping, credit-crunch household is currently porridge with mixed fruits. Porridge done in the microwave is really fast, and frozen mixed berries are nice and cheap (often throw in a banana as well for sweetness).

No tea and coffee is the real kicker, but presumably herbal/fruit teas are ok. Goat milk is apparently a lot easier to digest than cow milk, depends if you like the taste of it, but that also goes for goat's cheese. Plus there's rice milk etc, and I've even seen something out there that's apparently lactose-free cow milk, don't ask me how they do that!

Re: the soya thing, our biology teacher told us that soya would basically kill us all (did you have the same teacher?) and I avoided it for years, until someone pointed out just how much soy products they consume in China and surrounding countries, with no problems at all. Think it's like the whole oily fish debate, no-one really knows.

Good luck with the next 2 weeks anyway, hope you feel better soon :-S

[camellia-uk.livejournal.com]

By the way, I'm currently eating a 9 Bar. Have you tried them? All seeds (no nuts) mixed with honey, and topped with carob (not chocolate). And they're really really yummy. They also do quite well for a got-to-grab-something-fast breakfast, if needed.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Porridge is so heavy in the morning though, it's horrible. :-/

Herbal/fruit teas are okay, yeah (except presumably citrus fruit teas...).

Goat milk is apparently a lot easier to digest than cow milk

True, but I think it still counts as "dairy", & it still has lactose. Shame, cos it's nicer than cow's milk anyway. Rice milk is kind of weird... nice to drink occasionally but I wouldn't try to put it in anything else. I've had lactose-reduced cow's milk, it tastes like UHT... a bit plasticky.

I don't remember Mrs Steele saying that soya would kill us, so might've been someone different... :) What's the oily fish debate? You don't mean the made-up nonsense about fish oil making you clever (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/sep/16/badscience.uknews), do you?

And yes, I have tried 9 Bars - v tasty but quite expensive for a flapjack! :-}

[scat0324.livejournal.com]

My Mother-in-law did an exclusion diet for a while last year, and discovered an allergy to tomatoes. Before this, her symptoms were similar to yours, and now she's much much better - I hope you track down whatever it is for you. However, when they all come over, I have to contend with:

• No tomatoes for her (now she's excluded them generally, even the slightest trace in a sauce brings her out in a rash)
  
• No meat for S-i-l (fussy!)
  
• No vegetables for B-i-l (fussier!)
  
• No lactose for B-i-l's girlfriend (allergic)
  
• No salicylate (http://salicylatesensitivity.com/food-guide) for me

Oh, and two boys with typical toddler food habits - fun!

[j4.livejournal.com]

Yikes. So you can't eat most vegetables (or in fact pretty much anything, judging from that website) anyway?? I had no idea!

[scat0324.livejournal.com]

What that site doesn't say, but I was told and my experience bears out, is that salicylates break down with heat, so I'm fine with most vegetables (since obviously we tend to eat them cooked) but I'm cautious about fresh fruit. Actually even that's mostly OK - I get an itchy mouth usually, and at worst, bleeding gums/palate (not nearly as bad as it sounds!). It's Ibuprofen that has the cool effect of making my face and neck swell up so my shirt collar becomes tight and I look like some kind of Hollywood makeup monster.

[lnr]

Also if you can put up with them being *very* sweet caramac bars are tasty but not chocolate.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Um... I've never had caramac but according to Wikipedia "The unique flavour is maintained using sweetened condensed milk, butter and various artificial flavourings". So that's dairy, dairy, and artificial flavourings (all banned)...

The vast majority of shop-bought sweets, cakes, biscuits etc have dairy in, I'm afraid. Even if they don't need butter/milk etc then they usually have whey powder added because it's cheap filler. :-/

[lnr]

Drat, I guess I should have realised since it's a sort-of fudgey flavour. :(

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

The list of not-alloweds when you have stomach problems is deeply unfun. Removing chocolate, caffeine and alcohol from my life made me a deeply snappy annoyed person. It was *very slightly* better than being in pain all the time, but not nearly enough. Hope you identify stuff soon. Or get good drugs.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Janet,
I stumbled on this when I clicked on Owen's facebook link to your flat details - we met at the Good Friday singalonga Mozart Requiem.
I absolutely had to post a reply to this, as I can really really empathise - I've had awful stomach pains for the last year and a bit and have been referred to gastro people up at the JR who have performed a series of pretty grim tests on me, to conclude firstly that there is nothing wrong with me, then that I have IBS, and then that I don't have IBS but "chronic abdominal pain syndrome" - I've taken enough pills to make me rattle and wish that I had taken out a prescription season ticket but don't seem to have got much closer to managing the pain. I struggle to get into work and have spent a lot of time sitting on my arse feeling sorry for myself (this has been good in terms of the amount of reading I've done this year (over 200 books already!).
The diet looks interesting - I'm waiting for a referral to a dietician to do something similar. The theory behind reheated foods is something called resistant starch. But bizarrely you might find that /less/ fibre is what helps, and also cutting out raw foods. Certainly the latter is a big trigger in my stomach pain.
And who knows about stress?! I wonder if it is a factor in my pain but I don't feel that I lead a hugely stressful life (plus whenever a dr hears my occupation they immediately assume that I cannot possibly be stressed).
I'll be interested to see if the diet works, but hugely good luck in finding some sort of solution...
Anyway, I hope you didn't mind me posting here...
Verity (verity orme magd email)