Onset of symptoms
#157416 - 03/06/05 06:38 AM
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Suze
Reged: 02/24/05
Posts: 30
Loc: Virginia
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I'd appreciate some feedback on how long it generally takes to get symptoms after eating a trigger food. I sometimes have trouble figuring out what's zapped me because my symptoms don't seem to show up for at least a few hours...My impression is that a lot of people get them pretty quick after eating - Is that right? Is my experience different? I'm IBS-A, and it's especially hard for me to figure out triggers when I'm in a C phase, but it's also a problem for me with D episodes, too.
Thanks for your help!! 
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Hi.I'm IBS D. Mine range from exactly 2 hours or the next morning. I usually can pinpoint what mine is from but sometimes I account mine to hormonal and my time of the month. I can eat a hoagie one week then if I'm ovulating or going to get my period the hoagie can come right out 
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~~~Lisa~~~
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I don't eat really bad trigger foods anymore, but back when I did, before I started the diet, I'd have attacks within an hour of eating it - sometimes even before I'd finished eating! But it's different for everyone.
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I can get an attack from food the next morning (usually from eating too much or a bit too much fat), or a few hours later (again, too much fat, or a little bit of a trigger food), or before I've even finished eating! (a major trigger food - this is what I get from even a bite of dairy). But yeah, I don't eat any of the trigger foods any more so that helps!
Really, this is somewhere where EVERYONE is different though.
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I think it is more difficult to pinpoint a tigger food reaction when you are a C, as I am usually. It can take up to 48 hours as I have read, to react to something.
This has been a frustrating ordeal for me to pinpoint problem foods. I kept a food diary for over 6 months and did not come to any conclusions on any foods 
If you come up with a way, please share, as I have no clue as to what any of mine are.
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~ Beth
Constipation, pain prodominent,cramps, spasms and bloat!
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A bit late to reply, but in case this is helpful to anyone: when trying to identify triggers it helps to have an idea how fast food usually passes through you. There's an easy way to find out your normal 'transit' time, just take a spoonful of corn kernels (sweetcorn) - the important thing is to swallow them without chewing. They will pass through undigested and be very easy to identify at the other end!
Sweetcorn can be a trigger - it is for me - but if you don't chew them at all it should be okay. Take them at the end of a safe meal and you will get a good idea how long it took to pass through.
Obviously, different foods move at different speeds, but doing this will provide a basic timeline to use for future comparison and should make it easier to judge whether the D you get on Monday was caused by what you ate on Friday, Saturday or Sunday!
Hope this helps.
Josephine
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I just noticed what you said about it being harder to pinpoint triggers if you are C. The sweetcorn test would be particularly useful for you, because you really need to have an accurate idea of the time you take to digest food, so as to judge what is affecting you and when. The test gives you a starting point and combined with a really good food log, you should soon be able to draw some conclusions.
Hope this helps!
Josephine
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I don't get Diarrhea at all from foods. My trigger food symptoms would be pain and cramps and gas and bloating.
How would swallowing a kernal of popcorn help me to know what food was the culprit? And how do I know which food was the problem by how fast or slowly I expel the corn.
Would you mind explaining more about your method?
Thank you.
PS. plus the thought of swallowing a kernal of corn is scary! I don't know if I could put that into my GI system!
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~ Beth
Constipation, pain prodominent,cramps, spasms and bloat!
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Sweetcorn is corn-on-the-cob without the cob! The yellow stuff. What do you guys call it?
I find that sweetcorn tends to go through me whole even if I don't have D and I think this is what josephine was referring to.
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... I don't know if you call it something different in America, perhaps someone who is bilingual can translate!
Well, before you can identify triggers you need to know during what time period the culprit food must have been eaten. 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. I am A, used to be D a lot of the time, now mostly C. I can tell with a lot of things because I have the charming habit of passing food undigested - either whole or semi - and, yes, I do make a habit of looking at what I've done!
Okay, the way it works is that unchewed sweetcorn will pass undigested through anyone, giving a clear indication of transit time. Say, for example, it's 24 hours: using that as a guideline, you can relate your current symptoms to what you ate 24 hours ago, which you know because you are keeping a detailed food log. (You are doing that, aren't you - because otherwise it really is impossible to identify triggers.)
Knowing the transit time alone is not enough to identify triggers, but if you are C, or A tending to C, the transit time helps to narrow the possibilities, so instead of making wild guesses you can at least be methodical about it all.
When I have the kind of symptoms you describe, it usually ends with a marathon session on the toilet and then I feel better, so in general I think that the food I just excreted is the culprit. Then I can test it by not eating it for a while and then trying it again ... Some things cause problems consistently, others are a bit more variable, but at least I am building up knowledge about my body and its reactions which is even more valuable to me than reading about other people's experiences (although I do do that too!)
About the risks of eating sweetcorn - well, I know just what you mean. If I eat sweetcorn as part of a meal and chew it normally, the next day I can guarantee pain, nausea, headache and - eventually - diarrhoea. So it is really important to swallow without chewing - anyway, if you do chew it will be harder to see the little blighters anyway, which would defeat the purpose! Only take one spoonful and take it after a good safe meal. And keep a food log!
I didn't make this up myself - found it in a book called "Bloating" (yes, I really felt good handing that to the sales assistant!) by Susanna Olivier (I think that's her name - I am not at home at the moment.) She is a nutritional therapist here in the UK.
I hope this makes it clearer. If not, please ask again or email me if you prefer.
All the best,
Josephine
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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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