Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: ?s bout what I bought

I'm pretty regimented about meds, so I did/do this:
I started with 1/2 teaspoon of acacia every day. After 3 days, I went up to 1 teaspoon; another 3 days, 1-1/2 teaspoons; another 3 days, 2 teaspoons... You can see where this is going. I'm up to 8 teaspoons now - it did take weeks - and plan to go to 10, which is the max dose Heather recommends. I take 1 teaspoon first thing in the morning in about a half-cup of applesauce and another 1 teaspoon last thing before bed in another half-cup of applesauce. The closer the applesauce is to room temperature the better the acacia dissolves. However, even if it doesn't dissolve all the way, it has no taste or texture that I can discern so it doesn't bother me to eat it even if I can still see it in my applesauce. The other 6 teaspoons I dissolve in 24 ounces of water in a water bottle and drink some of it with every meal. Set this up the night before you plan to drink it and the acacia dissolves completely overnight.

Once you're taking acacia, it's very important to be sure you're getting enough water during the day. Heather recommends a minimum of 128 ounces. I never make that, but I can usually get in about a hundred.

Unfortunately, I don't like the taste of the fennel tea, but I plan to keep trying to get used to it. As for the peppermint caps, my doctor is trying me on Bentyl and pointed out that if I took both the Bentyl and the peppermint caps and felt better, I would never know which one - or both - helped, so I'm waiting on the caps until I finish my 2 weeks of taking Bentyl 3-4 times a day.

I was a reluctant cook who for years had prepared basically the same 6 or 7 dishes and I, too, found Heather's "Eating for IBS" overwhelming at first. I actually started with recipes from this site since some of them seemed simpler and didn't call for ingredients I'd never heard of.

I've begun to try some of the recipe from Heather's books and have found some of the breads to be wonderful. They look complicated to those of us who aren't natural cooks, but they're really not. Once you start making them, they're all really the same idea, just different ingredients. My favorite is the pumpkin apple spice - try that and you'll get big time rewards for not a terrible amount of effort. Also, the Chocolate Silk Pudding is to die for - I was so proud of myself for actually mastering a double boiler.

I also love Heather's mushroom/rosemary and BBQ chicken pizza, but I don't make my own crust. I buy the Pillsbury Classic Pizza crust in the tube and follow the directions on the can for baking (on a cookie sheet), but use Heather's toppings (the BBQ sauce is fabulous and very, very easy). Also, nothing could be simpler than Heather's Herb Baked Chicken Breasts. They go great with the Skinny Mashed Potatoes you'll find in the recipe index.

As for stress versus food, Heather's diet and the SF have stopped my food related attacks, but my stress-related ones are still there. I think, though, that now I'm on the diet, it takes more stress to kick off an attack.

HTH.

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[Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate. - Sandra Boynton]

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