Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards

No, there was definitely no immediate "better" feeling for me. I should add that I have severe anxiety problems - my biggest IBS trigger - and so that was a factor in things taking so long to work. (The general principles of the diet also involve a complete lifestyle change... the diet won't work well alone if you don't take care of anxiety/stress/depression problems also, and vice versa.)

I think I'm a little confused by your post.

You've been doing the diet for 18 months? Or are you saying that you've been unable to eat much of anything for that long because of IBS? If you've been following the diet, without cheating, for 18 months - that's a darn long time - I would say that it's not working for you. However... I'll stress the usual things here... no cheating, adding more foods back into your diet, getting exercise, managing stress/anxiety/etc... it's a whole package. Missing one of those elements could screw up your efforts royally.

I'll explain a little more what my experience was like, and you can see if anything compares. I started the diet in May 2004. The diet alone didn't make me feel immediately better, but I definitely did not feel any worse, either. It wasn't a matter of my body "accepting" it so much as things were just SO irritated and flaring up that it took a while for my system to calm down.

The D did start to slow down after a couple months, come to think of it, but I was still so nauseous and crampy. Once I started on medication for my anxiety problems AND started adding foods beyond the "breaking the cycle" part of the diet, things started to slowly get better. Emphasis on slowly! I was still having attacks every week for a while.

I considered myself stable last July, when I had finally bumped down to 2 or 3 attacks a month. I figured that's as good as I was going to get.

Now I have *maybe* 1 a month, if that - usually hormone-related.

I don't know if any of this babbling is helpful! Not knowing exactly what you meant by the 18 months, I can't really answer your "grin and bear it" question. To some extent, yes, you do have to do that - when you're in full flare-up mode, EVERYTHING will freak out your guts, and you just have to keep eating well and have faith that, sooner or later, things will calm down. On the other hand, if a food in particular seems to bother you every single time you eat it, that would be a good indicator that it's a trigger food for you.

I'm sorry if this is confusing. I should have just waited for you to clarify what you meant before I took off rambling! LOL!!

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