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How do you all have so much willpower and courage to stick with this diet and remembering to take all the supplements, etc.. without getting frustrated and just wishing you were "normal"? Thanks for listening!

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Well, I don't. I'll be good as gold for a while then I'll give in or slip up or say to heck with it and eat something I "shouldn't". Then I pay for it. And the paying for it means that - very gradually because I'm not good with willpower either and, apparently, I'm a very slow learner - I slip up less and less often.

Beyond that big picture, though, remember that you're just starting out. I figure I spend the first 3 months on the EFI Diet scrambling like crazy to readjust my thinking, my shopping, and my cooking habits to accommodate eating a whole new way. Grocery shopping alone took twice as long because now I was reading every label on the shelf. (And if I forgot my reading classes I had to go home empty-handed.) Eventually, though, I found a solid set of IBS-safe foods and recipes I really like so I no longer felt so harried or so hungry.

If I'd had to cope with eating out every day for a week on top of that, I'd have starved to death. It *is* difficult to eat at restaurants especially in the beginning. Now that I've been doing this for a while I have a general sense of how far I can push things, but in the beginning I was pretty much eating just rice or bread at restaurants and filling up at home either before or after. So I think you have far more willpower than you give yourself credit for to have made it through an entire week of restaurant eating without cracking and grabbing a plate of chili-cheese fries with a triple espresso mocha latte on the side.

For future trips, see if you can figure out some portable snack foods you really like and either take them with you or buy/make them when you arrive. That way you can eat your nine millionth chicken sandwich happily, knowing that you have something delicious waiting for you later. Maybe you'll discover you love Luna Bars or the Honey Snack Mix from EFI or the IBS-safe version of Chex Mix. Maybe you could make finding such a "trip snack" your own personal project. I can think of worse assignments than trying every single portable IBS-safe snack to see which ones I really love.

I hope this helps. I'm glad your trip went well IBS-wise and I promise you it does get easier.

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

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