First, congratulations on your first day of following the diet! If you ever feel stuck or bored, I recommended checking out Sand's post on Exuberant Eating. I hope you start seeing results and feeling great soon!

Actually, on the EFI diet, if you eat a safe meal, you can have a square or two of chocolate and even a glass of wine (wine seems to be the easiest for most of us to tolerate). ALthough, you'd probably want to wait until you feel that you're stable.

from the Diet FAQs:

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How you drink as well as what you drink could make quite a difference here. A single glass of wine enjoyed after a high soluble fiber meal may be very tolerable for you, especially on an occasional (instead of daily) basis. Judging by reader feedback on this topic, white wine may be safer for IBS than red, and beer seems to be particularly problematic. Having a drink when you're feeling relaxed instead of harried can make a difference as well. On the other hand, a double martini on an empty stomach after a stressful day is practically guaranteed to cause trouble.

If you do decide to take a chance with alcohol, please make sure to have at least one glass of water for each alcoholic drink. Alcohol is very dehydrating, and becoming even slightly dehydrated can seriously impact constipation and bloating.

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There's another aspect to portion control that has some happy possibilities for IBS. The risk of trigger foods can be tremendously minimized if they're eaten in tiny quantities following soluble fiber. In this regard, it is as much how you eat as what you eat that will help you manage your symptoms. While this is most important as a tool to allow you to incorporate all those healthy insoluble fiber foods as often as possible, it's also a means of treating yourself to a "mini-splurge" every once in a while. Let's say you're well-stabilized and just dying for a Snickers. Eating a full-size candy bar as a snack when your stomach is empty will likely wreak havoc and send you into an immediate downward spiral of attacks (why? because it's sky high in fat and dairy, and has very little soluble fiber).

However, if your symptoms were well under control and you instead decided to treat yourself to a snack-size individual Snickers bar (a tiny portion equals a tiny quantity of fat/dairy triggers) for dessert, immediately following a nice low-fat, high soluble fiber meal, you'd likely do just fine. I eat solid chocolate almost every day in this manner. (Of course, this may just be sheer willpower because as God is my witness I will not go through life without chocolate, but I think this is probably the less likely explanation.)

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How's it going for you eating wheat?

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I was doing pretty ok for the past couple of days but I'm bloated today. I think it's because I was eating large quantities of chocolate (I'm an addict ) over the past few evenings (it was just chocolate and no SF). So I've been really good yesterday and today so hopefully my gut will settle down soon. Not that that will really help since I have my CAT scan on Thursday and have to drink all that yummy, gas causing barium again.

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IBS-C, bloating, cramps
pregnant

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! That's really great! So are you just sticking to Heather's diet as it is, or are also wheat free? Because I think that's the most conflicting info I've gotten - to wheat or not to wheat ! I'm really having hard times figuring this one out on my own because I just get sick from many different things so often (like chocolate) that I have no idea what makes me sick in the first place .

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