Well, the no deficiency diet didn't last very long. Aside from being not very palatable, both my digestion and sleep did not take the diet very well so I discontinued it. After the first couple of days, every time I ate red peppers or tomatoes I would get a bloated feeling in my gut within a couple of hours followed by diarrhea. After a couple of days of this, I got really constipated and decided to stop. I normally split a red pepper with my wife in our morning veggies so I can tolerate them, but eating 2 whole red peppers every day was just too much. Without 2 red peppers I found it difficult to get 100% of the RDA of vitamin E. While I typically eat FODMAPS, I think the amount of FODMAPS I was eating during this diet (6-8 per day) was too much for me to handle.
In addition to the higher level of FODMAPS, I also had to eat a couple of servings of seeds which I wasn't not accustomed to. While I enjoyed the sunflower seeds and may keep them in, I was also eating sesame seeds and chia seeds along with flax seeds every other day. The seeds were necessary to get enough vitamin E in addition to calcium and magnesium. I don't typically eat that many nuts or seeds so it may have been a shock to my system.
In addition to the above contributing to GI issues, the volume of spices in this diet was way too large. While 2 tbsp seems like a small amount, with spices it is waaaaaaaay too much. By the third day I was already cutting it back by at least 50 percent. Even split throughout the day I couldn't get down 2-3 tbsp of multiple spices. The spices provided calcium, thiamin, and zinc.
I expected this diet to reduce my appetite significantly, but that really didn't happen. While I got sick to my stomach for about an hour after eating, after that I would get ravenously hungry. I will definitely work on this to try and make it better and more palatable. I think one of the major stumbling blocks is that I have been working to repair overworked adrenals from overtraining for a little over a year and my gut may not be where it needs to be. In addition, I think I need to slowly work the FODMAPS in over time rather than introducing them in to my body with blunt force trauma, same with the spices.
When I designed this diet I designed it on the backbone of my standard diet so my diet won't change substantially. I will begin using spices more as I never really used them before and I think I will leave the sunflower seeds in for the thiamin. Other than that, I miss my old diet and glad to be back on it.
