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I never thought of USING that before! And I guess I should chew my sweetcorn better. 
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Hi Josephine
I've done this and it can be particularly useful for getting to know how fast your system is working. However for D people it's not necessarily always accurate - for me, just putting a spoonful of ice cream IN MY MOUTH will send me running to the bathroom. I know for sure it's the ice cream that's doing it to me, but well it's not the ice cream that's coming out...  This goes back to the whole thing about the nervous system of the GI tract I think, how it all starts in the mouth etc..
Not to debunk the value of this test at all! I think it can be very useful for sure. Just wanted to clarify though that for D people it's not always necessarily what's passing through the intestines at that time that are causing the problems. 
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I'll let you know how it comes out. lol First I have to go buy some corn, I haven't tried to eat any since I started the IBS diet.
And you're right, I need to keep a better food log...what I "forget" about are the tiny tastes of something I just can't resist. Duh.
Thanks for your help.
-Sue
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Laurel, thanks for the insight about the connection between what's going in and what's coming out. I have the joy of fluctuating between C and D, and I bet some of my D episodes are more related to what I've just put in my mouth...not what I ate the night before.
Regards,
-Sue
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For me it is almost exactly 48 hours. It took a lot of detective work to figure it out but I finally did after several years. Very few foods affect me immediately, with the exception of coffee, which I have given up. So if I am going to eat a trigger food, I always look two days in advance to see what I'll be doing! If it's something important I won't eat the food. What a pain, but it works. So I think everyone is different. Good luck.
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how did you know which food was the culprit that you ate 48 hours ago? We eat all different types of food in a single day. How did you pinpoint one specific food as the cause.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I have been keeping a food diary for over 6 months and have yet to identify any one food! I am IBS-C so don't get the D effect from any food right away. This is harder to identify foods when there is not an immediate or even in the same day, reaction! Just constipation and cramps and bloat all the time.
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~ Beth
Constipation, pain prodominent,cramps, spasms and bloat!
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Thanks for clarifying that, Laurel, I agree that it's different for D and C people. I was trying to say that here:
"For D people it may be as simple as the last thing they ate. For C people it is obviously a lot harder to know."
but I didn't spell it out because I was thinking about Beth who I know is C. A trigger is a trigger, but D people tend to react fast, soon after eating a trigger, even, as you say, immediately. C people react slow and may only notice symptoms shortly before excreting a trigger.
As an A, I vary quite a bit depending on what kind of trigger it is and some other things too. I am working on trying to get some consistency by slowing things down a bit - it gives me more control so that I can experiment with IF foods without going back to complete chaos like before ...
Anyway, yes, the value of this test is to narrow down the possibilities when trying to identify trigger foods, which is probably more of a problem for C people than D people. But I think if anyone feels really uncertain about how slow or fast their system works, it is worth doing the test, just to increase their understanding of themselves.
Best wishes,
Josephine
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I know your question was for Geri, but I hope you don't mind if I answer too. First, I think it must be awful for you not to know any of your triggers - knowledge is power and it's getting to know your triggers that gives you the power to manage your IBS. So I really hope that this test will be the first step for you to start getting that knowledge.
As you are consistently C it may be easier than you think to work out which food is which. For example, if the sweetcorn transits in exactly 48 hours, you could start by assuming all your other food does too. So bloating, cramps and constipation that resolve when you go to the toilet may well be caused by whatever you ate 48 hours earlier - that should give you just one meal to focus on. It might help to simplify your meals for a while to help with this - I mean instead of cooking a jazzy recipe with twenty different ingredients, have something plainer with plenty of safe foods and only one or two suspect ingredients.
Another idea is to include something distinctive in some meals - a good helping of carrots or tomatoes usually alters the colour of the poo and can act as a marker. Don't eat the 'marker' food every day though, or you won't know which day you ate it!
Another approach is to limit the range of foods you eat for a while. Doctors and food allergists often recommend exclusion diets, ie eating only safe foods and testing others one at a time to see which are causing a problem. Heather's 'what to eat when you can't eat anything' could easily be used as the basis for an exclusion diet. Eating a limited range of foods is not to be recommended long term, but this is just a tool for investigation. Knowing your transit time will help by focussing the investigation on the right area.
I think it's vital that whatever you do, you do methodically, as 6 months of food logging without identifying even any potential triggers is just not good for you at all!
I know I am probably lucky in that I can recognise so much of what I pass. (I can't believe I just wrote that! - but you know what I mean.) But I am convinced that once you start focussing on the right time slots you will soon start to become more aware of what's going on.
Best wishes,
Josephine
It just occurred to me that there are two possibilities which the transit time won't help with:
1) if there is something you eat every day that is a major trigger;
You could only find out by excluding and reintroducing, one by one, everything you currently eat and noting any changes.
2) if there is something other than food that is a major trigger;
People with a history of EDs - like both of us - tend to attribute great power to food and ignore other important factors. I have been thinking about this recently because I'm sure there are other things in my life I need to change apart from what I put in my mouth ... Just a thought.
BTW I have taken the plunge and put my email on my profile at last, so if you want to talk more about any of this just drop me a line.
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My BMs are inconsistent. They can be 48 hours one time, and 36 the next. But mostly little bits all day. So how would I do this test when the BMs come at all different times? Would I need to eat a piece of corn with every meal or everyday? And then, I would have so much corn in me, I wouldn't know which piece that came out went with which food I ate.
Does that make sense? It's not like I go every 48 hours so I could do this and then always back track to 48 hours before. I go all over the hours. No rhyme or reason or pattern. So, one time it could be the food I ate 24 hours ago, the next time 30 hours ago, etc.
Sorry, just confused on how I can get this method to work for me. Any advice? 
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~ Beth
Constipation, pain prodominent,cramps, spasms and bloat!
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Beth, I am so sorry, I have only just seen this question you posted about three million years ago! It must have been one of the times I wasn't reading the boards regularly - I don't have access to a computer all the time. So I don't know if you still want an answer to this - I could find the book I got this idea from and copy the relevant bits if you want. But I've also read your post about delayed gastric emptying - I had never even heard of this before! It sounds as though you have already had your transit time measured in a much more scientific way than by the sweetcorn test ... Let me know if you would still like to know more, but either way, please accept my apologies for not answering you sooner.
Best wishes,
Josephine
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