Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards

I eat very little sugar on the EFI diet, and I'm fine. It takes time to figure out your balance, moreso for me because I recently had to start over from scratch -- only the what to eat when you can't eat anything diet. I think it's just a matter of the long, time-consuming, kind of annoying process to figure out what YOU can eat in the IF world.

See, for me, whole wheat bread is completely tolerable so long as it contains no milk and no artificial sweeteners. Peas are death on a plate. Broccoli is great, cauliflower can only be eaten in small quantities. Quinoa is great, barley isn't. It's an extremely personal process, I think, and the rules are good guides, but they don't tell you everything.

I started out by eating strictly, getting stable, and then slowly introducing one new thing at a time. When I was reasonably wide-ranging in the healthy foods category, still stable, (about a year and a half into the EFI diet lifestyle) I tried smaller amounts of possible trigger foods. Most of them are not okay, but I found that I personally could handle green tea (one cup, not on an empty stomach) and avocado as part of a meal.

I think that whenever I tried to cheat the diet, it was because I felt annoyed that I had to think about food so much -- all the time, it felt like, for a while. EFI isn't mainstream American eating -- it was harder than weight watchers seemed to be for friends of mine on that program, but the results -- feeling healthy, not being scared of food anymore -- were worth it.

I'd suggest getting blood drawn and your vitamin levels checked. I take B12 as a precaution, but this past summer found out that my vitamin D levels were down in the gutters -- that made a huge difference to know.

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IBS-C, D and nausea with acute attacks, stable on EFI for 3 years

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