Monday, September 16, 2013

No Deficiency Diet update

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.