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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Re: Onset of symptoms: Beth
