# I've cured my IBS! low starch = quicker evacuation + no leaky gas!



## tummyrumbles

*My most successful diet is a combination of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and the low FODMAP diet. This thread might be confusing for people as I was still eating starches and high FODMAPs and getting mixed results. I wouldn't bother reading this thread as I was still eating the wrong foods.*

*This is the new, improved diet and here's the link:*

http://www.ibsgroup.org/forums/topic/278738-combination-scd-and-fodmap-diet-cures-leaky-gas/

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I probably shouldn't have said "I've cured my IBS" in the title, but things have improved dramatically on a low starch low FODMAP diet. I don't eat breads at all. I also don't eat high FODMAPs like nuts and legumes. At the moment I'm restricting high FODMAP vegetables like cauliflower, cabbage etc so the only vegetables I eat are cooked low FODMAPs or a small amount of low FODMAP salads. I'm trying to limit all grains, including corn.

I'm constantly editing this opening post, as I'm always experimenting with this diet. I'm still not sure what the actual physical process is causing the carbohydrate malabsorption - it could be enzymes, bacterial overgrowth or something else entirely. An exclusion diet is the best way to minimise IBS symptoms.

My breakfast is always the same: cooked (quick) porridge oats with a pot of tea. I don't take any meds at all. I tried probiotics for about a week but stopped these as I wanted to test the diet on its own.

My best day was on Saturday 21/3/15, when I had a 7 minute evacuation, a type 4 Bristol stool type and no leaky gas at all. My first gas was at 4.00 pm.

This is the diet I ate the day before:

*Cooked porridge oats for breakfast*
*Lunch at work: slices of ham, small block of hard cheese, 2 eggs*
*Dinner: 7.00 pm. Grapes, 1/2 roast chicken, large bowl mashed potato & pumpkin, dessert: icecream.*
*Piece of cheese and more grapes at 10.00 pm. Bed 10.30.*

However I had a very similar diet on 23/3/15 and had constipation for an hour from all the protein, although sausages are full of rice flour and I generally don't eat these. I had actually reduced a lot of starch in my diet for the last year or so but found if I lacked sleep the previous night I'd get gas in the afternoons. A successful IBS diet should work all the time. Normal people get constipation too if they don't get enough sleep - but they don't get the gas that we get.

It's a bit of a balancing act. I know I'm carbohydrate intolerant and that the gas from this seems to impede motility somehow. The longer and gassier the morning BMs the more likely I'm going to have gas that day as I haven't fully evacuated. But too much protein is constipating for me so it's finding the right balance.

Lately, I usually only have a few gasses during the day.

I was having sketchy results having salads for lunch. If I lacked enough sleep the previous night I'd get gas in the afternoons. A true IBS diet cure should work regardless of whether or not you get enough sleep, get stressed, eat late at night etc.

The higher protein, lower carb diet seems to work extremely well, assuming that your main problem is carbohydrate intolerance. I'm hoping to gradually add one carb at a time. If I eat food that I can digest well - and also food that doesn't constipate - I have normal BMs with little to no gas, and definitely no leaky gas and my stools smooth and easily expelled.

This thread might be confusing with so many good days and bad days but this is what it's like.


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## jaumeb

I eat SCD wich is a low starch diet.


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## tummyrumbles

Due to the flurry of interest in my opening post I thought I'd do a daily blog attached to this. (I hope that's alright - someone let me know if not).

This will be a warts and all with real time description of my BMs! I'll include everything - good and bad, mistakes and all.

TR


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## tummyrumbles

I don't take meds at all, but over the last week or so have been taking probiotics. It's only got 2 types: acidophilus & bifidobacteria.

Breakfast is always porridge (oats) with 3 cups of tea, nothing else.

5/3/15 Thursday

first day of low starch diet.

Got up 7 am. BMs: 8.40, 9.25, 10.10 (2 hrs)

lunch: salad - lettuce tomato carrot & cheese. potato scallop 4.30.

dinner: 2 bowls ham hock soup (quite fatty) with well cooked potato, pumpkin & carrot, some well-cooked broccoli, banana & yoghurt, 3 small chocolates.

usual gas p.m.

bed 10 pm. slept well


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## tummyrumbles

6/3/15 Friday

got up 5.45 am.

BMs: 6.50 to 8.10. 1.5 HRS.

lunch: usual salad & cheese

Gas: very good. no gas till after lettuce and only 1. Next one not till after 5.30.

(first time ever negligible gas at work unless under-ate previous day)

lunch at work: salad - lettuce tomato carrot with cheese, 2 eggs, grapes

2 bowls ham hock soup & vege soup (didn't discard the fat) 6.00 pm

bowl ice cream. 1 choc.

fried mushrooms in butter late (11 pm?). yoghurt. some chocs.

bed midnight.

Questions: best day ever but ate potato scallop yesterday? Just under starch threshold?


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## tummyrumbles

7/3/15 Saturday

got up 7.30. BMs: 8.40 to 10.00 (1.5 HRS)

tummy rumbly. No gas till late afternoon.

2 biscuits, 1 scone with jam cream.

dinner: grapes, Wagyu beef patty (fatty), fried onions, lettuce tomato. banana & yoghurt. 2 chocs. some cheese at 11 pm. Bed midnight.


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## tummyrumbles

8/3/15 Sunday.

Got up 6 am. BMs: 7.15 to 7.40 (0.5 hours)

lunch:

dinner: lettuce carrot tomato cheese orange grapes. caulifower au gratin.

large mushroom fried in butter

piece fish in coconut milk. (very full)

fair bit of gas started afternoon and at night.

bed 10.00. slept well.


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## tummyrumbles

9/3/15 Monday

got up 5.30.

BMs from 6.45 to 7.14. 0.5 hours. (felt incomplete evacuation but not used to quick evacuation?)

very good at work. Only one gas after lettuce. lunch - grazing from 12 to 3: lettuce tomato carrot cheese, 2 eggs

dinner: wagyu beef patty with lettuce tomato beetroot. banana & yoghurt. grapes. orange.

felt hungry 10 pm. About 10 almonds.


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## tummyrumbles

10/3/15 Tuesday

got up 6 am. BMs 7.30 to 8.30 (1 hour)

7.40 diarrhea-ish, watery

tummy rumbly (from almonds?)

blew nose 8.20 - more diarrhea-ish BM.

Gas until afternoon. Felt unsettled until then.

lunch: lettuce tomato 2 eggs, cheese

dinner: large polish sausage (fatty), caulifower au gratin, grapes, banana & yoghurt. ice cream. bed 9.30.

questions:

almonds low starch but too much fibre?

Do the probiotics make any difference?


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## annie7

maybe it's a reaction to all that fat? some people say a high fat diet gives them D or loose stools...eating a tbl or so of olive oil daily is often recommended for people with C. it can loosen you up.

or, yes, it could be the probiotics...


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## tummyrumbles

Thank you Annie







. Yes, I've been overdoing the fat a bit I think, so I don't get hungry.


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## tummyrumbles

11/3/15 Wednesday

got up 5.35. BMs from 6.50 to 7.52 (1 hour)

felt clear from 7.52 on

lunch at work: hard boiled egg & Kransky sausage (spicy fatty) 11.00 am, 3 bad gas soon after (from nitrates?), usual salad (lettuce tomato carrot) & cheese (no gas after these)

Total gas at work = 5, from 12.00 to 2.45 pm. No gas from then until 7.00 pm.

Dinner 7 to 8 pm. Orange. 1/2 roast chicken. (1 gas), mashed potato & pumpkin, banana & yoghurt (no gas till later in the night)

comments: sausage preservatives cause gas? BMs are still narrow, broken. No full, complete BMs yet.


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## tummyrumbles

12/3/15 Thursday

Woke at 4.30, couldn't sleep. Quite a few gasses. BM at 6.00 am (no breakfast or cups of tea yet)

comments: very unusual for me. Due to irritation from Kransky sausage?

breakfast: 6.30. BMs 7.17 to 8.50. Due to nitrates in sausage or over-eating (1/2 chicken Wednesday night)?

Just plain wholefoods from now on and no more over-eating.

lettuce, tomato & cheese mid-day.

Dinner 6.00 pm. pork chop, mashed potato & pumpkin with green beans. Banana & yoghurt. (nothing else)

Reasonably satisfied but not overly full.

Bed 9.30.


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## tummyrumbles

13/3/15 Friday.

Got up 5.45. BMs from 7.15 to 7.50. *35 minutes*.

Very good at work. *Only one small gas at 2.30*. And 2 going home in the car. (These were all light, digestion gasses)

Grazed on salad veges (lettuce, tomato, 2 small carrots, grapes & a piece of cheese from 10.30 to 3.30.

Well, the good news is this is definitely the diet to cure leaky gas. The downside is that despite grazing on salad pretty much all day I still felt vaguely hungry. Not starving hungry, but still feeling like I wanted to eat more.

I couldn't wait to get home and fill up on a large KFC mashed potato.

(This has some wheat in the gravy but shouldn't be enough to matter. Mashed potato, unlike baked potato, is fairly low starch)

I'm going to start experimenting very carefully with coconut breads.

I need a non-starch food that doesn't cause gas at work and that will help to fill me up. I don't like eating a lot of meat as I have this just about every night anyway.

*** WARNING *** if you start eating salads and they give you a lot of gas or worse, spasms, stop eating.

For lunch you might be better off with just plain mashed potato and pumpkin and some ham.

You don't have to have salad for lunch. I just don't want vegetables because I have these at night and want some variety.

When you start eating salads, have a tiny bit of each vegetable to start with. The next day add a bit more. This helps to gradually become tolerant to the fibre.


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## Muze

You don't mention bloating.Do you get that? My problem is more about trapped gas and a very distended abdomen( and I am otherwise quite slim- thin really) I'd be happy if all my gas would come out like yours!!


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## tummyrumbles

Bloating for me means mainly food residue that didn't digest properly, rather than digestion gas that seems to come out straight away. I used to have bad leaky gas at work because most of the gas was from incomplete evacuation. What this meant was that if I ate a lot of refined starch for instance it wouldn't eliminate easily the next morning. I think a lot of us here have this, where the stool is mushy and broken and there's long delays between BMs. On a bad day elimination can take 2 hours or more, on a good day 20 minutes to half an hour, but a lot depends on overeating too and this is my biggest weaknesss. You can't digest your food properly if you overeat. But once I'm completely evacuated there's no gas at all until I eat again, and that's only minor. If I eat salads during the day there is only a small amount of digestion gas. The downside is that salads aren't a satisfying food so it's not an easy diet to stick to.


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## tummyrumbles

21/3/15

Had the best day ever on Saturday. A 7 minute, complete evacuation. My BM's are usually mushy and explosive (gassy) but these 2 were smooth and effortless. I wasn't getting consistent results with the salads. If I didn't get enough sleep for instance I'd get gas in the afternoons the next day.

This is the diet I had the previous day:

*Cooked porridge oats for breakfast, pot of tea*
*Lunch at work: slices of ham, small block of hard cheese, 2 eggs*
*Dinner: 7.00 pm. Grapes, 1/2 roast chicken, large bowl mashed potato & pumpkin, dessert: icecream.*
*Piece of cheese and more grapes at 10.00 pm. Bed 10.30.*

This isn't a healthy diet at all. It's very high in protein and low in carb, but it worked wonders. I'm not intending this to be a permanent diet, as I can't just eat protein for the rest of my life. I'm going to gradually add one carb at a time to test things, starting with the easy to digest low FODMAP vegetables.

I shouldn't have said "I've cured my IBS" in the opening title. What I've cured is the IBS symptoms. I still haven't found out what carbohydrates I'm intolerant to. I know high FODMAPs and starches are the worst carbs for me. I doubt I can ever go back to eating pizzas, white refined flour etc but I'd be happy if I could eat high FODMAPs like cauliflower again. I'm just experimenting with one carb at a time.

I strongly advise anyone with Leaky Gas and maybe other IBS types as well to give this a go. This is a reddit forum and a lot of people - even those with diarrhea - have had success with a very similar diet, the Ketogenic diet


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https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/comments/1dqe88


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## rewinj

I found oats to be quite the trigger in terms of gas, although they did help the BMs big time. You feel oats don't contribute much gas wise? Perhaps I'm due to trial them again...

Low carb is definitely the way to go. I'm so severely underweight I don't think I can manage it though...


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## tummyrumbles

I eat the quick cook oats and I don't think they give me gas but I go after breakfast so it's hard to tell. I graze on food pretty well all day, so my calorie intake is probably about the same. I eat a lot more cheese and eggs and meat than I used to and they'd be fairly high calorie. I think the worst foods for me gas-wise were the starches, especially the grain starches. Since I gave those up I've had very little gas. I seem to tolerate mashed potato fairly well and it's fairly high calorie, being a starch.


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## tummyrumbles

23/3/15

Really bad constipation for just over an hour this morning. I've never had constipation before where it was quite solid and lumpy. I could feel it was there the whole time but it just wouldn't budge. This was a horrible experience and I would rather have gas than go through that again.

This was my diet yesterday (*not recommended!*)

lunch: 2 pork sausages, 2 eggs, cheese, chocolate ice-block

dinner: 1 pork sausage, 2 eggs, cheese, mashed potato & pumpkin, some green beans, ice-cream

bed 10 pm. slept well.

This is the type of constipation that normal people get! Obviously I overdid the protein. After the hour was up it all rushed down in one lot though, and I was good after that. Only 2 gasses after lunch today and I haven't had any gas after dinner yet. As bad as the constipation was, at least it was all in the sigmoid / rectum (I'm guessing). Since I gave up grain starches I'm not getting those huge delays between BMs anymore where I think the stool is still coming down the colon all throughout the day.

lunch: tomato, 1/2 carrot, grapes, cheese, some cream cake (everyone in the office had it so I had to have some)

Dinner:

an orange and some grapes

2 bacon shortcut pieces, mashed potato and pumpkin, green beans

piece of cheese

large bowl of yoghurt


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## annie7

i eat the quick oats at breakfast, too, like Tummyrumbles said and i don't think they give me gas either. i seem to remember reading somewhere that the quick oats--instant oats--are less problematic than whole oats and steel cut oats.


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## tummyrumbles

Tuesday 24/3/15:

lunch: 3 slices cold roast beef, 2 hard boiled eggs, cheese

4.30 pm grapes

dinner 7.00 pm. pork chop, broccoli, cooked potato & carrot (not mashed), cooked carrot, large bowl ice-cream

chocolates and some lollies

Felt very full afterwards. Slept well.

Wednesday 25/3/15:

BMs: 7.20 to 7.50. 1/2 hour (2 lots only). The usual broken type but not as mushy as when I was eating a lot of starch.

Had feeling of incomplete evacuation afterwards. Very worried but very good at work.

lunch: carrot, tomato, grapes, 1/2 block cheese (grazing on during the day)

(also slice of cream cake but will stop eating these)

Only 2 gasses after lunch.


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## tummyrumbles

I had a stool test and got the results today. Fecal occult was OK and I had one pathogen, Dientamoeba fragilis. Some countries classify this as a pathogen but others don't. It's fairly common in IBS though. I don't really think this caused my IBS. The way I ate during my lifetime I'd be surprised if I didn't have any pathogens. I'll have another stool test done in about 6 months to see if I still have this pathogen but I'm not too concerned about it. The low starch diet is working really well which is the main thing.

Low gas again today, about 2 at work but BMs still the same diarhhea-ish although just 1/2 an hour this morning. Maybe this improves with time as I guess the pathogens die off.

I might leave this thread for a while, and just post back if anything drastic happens.

Lunch is probably the trickiest meal. If you can't tolerate salads you'd either be eating the same thing for lunch and dinner - meat and veges, which would be very tough, or a high protein lunch which caused constipation for me. Maybe try tiny amounts of salad to start with, a square inch of lettuce with a small piece of carrot and tomato for instance and gradually increase this. I graze on salads all day and chew very carefully. Good luck if anyone wants to try this.


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## jaumeb

I already mentioned that I eat a low starch diet for the last five years. I followed the SCD diet which a very low starch diet. I eat meat, fish and cooked veggies. I also seem to tolerate bananas.


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## TummyTroubles26

tummyrumbles said:


> questions:
> 
> almonds low starch but too much fibre?
> 
> Do the probiotics make any difference?


My dietitian suggested I cut out all nuts/seeds/husks that aren't ground into an incredibly fine consistency (think flaxseed powder consistence or any nut flour). Anything less fine and it inflames the intestines apparently. Maybe that's why the almonds caused problems? Everytime I eat nuts whole I have massive cramps and bloating so now I just avoid.

xx


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## noor omar

well.. I am glad that you got a solution for this. But there is a slight problem that i dont have those foods you eat in your diet like ham or oats .. So do u have a substitute for this


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## tummyrumbles

Just updating this rather confusing thread. The underlying IBS is still there unfortunately but I'm controlling it quite well. I'm wondering if overeating was the main cause of my IBS, along with ignoring the urge to go for probably decades. I used to have GERD symptoms as well but these are improving as well. I used to have to sit up several times a night to burp, as the pent-up gas was uncomfortable. This doesn't happen so much anymore, mainly because I'm not eating late at night anymore. Overeating is so easy to do, and I didn't realise I was even doing this until my daughter told me. I'm not a big person, but this makes sense if overeating means that food isn't digested properly and just sits in your colon feeding bacteria. I try to keep meal sizes smaller, eat dinner as early as I can and go to bed before I get hungry. So all the food is properly digested. I have mainly low-FODMAP veges (the best ones for IBS) and try not to eat dry, high-starch foods like crackers, biscuits etc. I'm pretty sure I've still got the bacterial overgrowth, if I do actually have this and I can't be sure. The main thing for those with leaky gas is the complete evacuation, and this is mainly just time. It just takes a long time for many of us. If any of you have GERD symptoms as well you might be overeating. It's so easy to overeat and not even know you're doing it.


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