Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards

You need, need, NEED to also be eating INsoluble fiber foods. Especially if you've been on the diet for that long, you should be starting to work some roughage back into your diet. If you haven't started doing that, you're not really following the diet - or, rather, you're only following it halfway - and it's not going to work for you.

Introduce insoluble fiber foods - gradually, but keep working at it. Expect that you might be gassy or bloated at first, but it will even out. Basically, you need to keep increasing the IFs until you're eating as much of them as you can humanly tolerate. For me, for example, that means that probably 75% of what I eat in a day is INsoluble fiber.

Also, keep increasing your soluble fiber supplement. Three teaspoons of Benefiber a day is good, but I *think* that's nowhere near the recommended 12-15g a day that Heather suggests. You can easily go higher than that.

For me (granted, I'm an A, not a straight C, but still), it's not so much that "soluble fiber makes me go". That's not really the point of the diet. The point is that your guts need the soluble fiber to "cushion" all the other foods, so what you're really trying to do is strike a balance between the 2 types of fiber. (The bonus, by the way, is that it's extremely healthy for your entire body - this is how we humans should be eating!)

You also need to pay attention to some non-diet aspects of this, too. If you're prone to a lot of stress or anxiety, do what you have to do to manage that, because you probably will not stabilize if you don't. Exercise is also key, especially for C'ers, as is drinking a LOT of water.

Finally, you do need to be patient. This isn't a quick fix. It took me over a year to stabilize, but I have to say it was TOTALLY worth the trouble.

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