Belinda,
I'm very grateful for your post and it resonates with my own experience and philosophy with diet and healing. I agree with you on the organic issue - practically everything I buy/eat is organic and unprocessed. Thankfully I live in a place (San Francisco) with every imaginable food alternative within easy reach.
The other confusing aspect of this is that I'm quite sure there's something going on in addition to IBS. This all started with a bad case of parasites and dysentery and I'm not at all convinced my intestinal environment is free of pathogens. Another possibility, one suggested by my current doc (a specialist in this area), is that the prolonged stress of having a parasitic infection has severely weakened my immune system and so I am now dealing with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia as well.
The diet he suggests for healing the immune system (and he has some authority in this area, backed by a lot of research) is very different from the IBS diet in some ways. He basically suggests no flour and no sugar (fruit is okay), with high doses of protein to increase body cell mass, anaerobic conditioning (weightlifting), pharmaceutical-grade vitamin/mineral supplements, etc.
The problem for me has been that a lot of the foods that are "healthy" (i.e. veggies, beans, fruits, other insolubles) really irritate my gut. The foods that don't seem to irritate my gut (white rice, white bread, bananas, etc) make me feel tired, foggy-headed and bloated. They are also the very foods that my doc (and many others) consider to be "unhealthy", at least for someone healing from a chronic illness.
I often feel overwhelmed and confused by the incredible disagreement about nutrition, diet and healing - even for one particular condition like IBS. At the end of the day, I guess the only thing that matters is what works for each of us. But that can be very difficult to figure out, and takes tremendous patience and willingness to experiment with diets and programs that are often severely restrictive and labor intensive.
Guess this has become a bit of a rant... probably needed to vent. I've been feeling really helpless and kind of desperate lately.
Chris
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Re: "Breaking The Cycle" questions
