Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: Diagnosed: Fructose Malabsorption; some questions, including weight loss issues

For my most recent vacation, I did everything I could to try and keep weight on. The trip was a work trip, and was to a place I frequent very often. Outside of walking from the hotel room down to a desk job or the pool, I did no exercise or walking. I was less active than I am at home even. For any time that I did happen to walk for more than a half hour total over the course of a day, I considered this exercise and tracked the calories and deducted them from the numbers below.

Here's a summary of how I did each week. I weighed myself at night each day. I have every food item and every ounce of exercise tracked. I really want to put this weight back on! I deducted any exercise/walking calories burned from the calorie number. I actually ate MORE calories, but simply deduct the exercise to get a net calorie number I always use:

WEEK___Weight, begin____Calories (less exercise)___Water (avg)___Weight, end

1____160____2,917____71 oz____154
2____154____2,847____69 oz____157
3____157____3,028____53 oz____158
4____158____2,985____64 oz____159

Overall, I pretty much ended up maintaining my weight on this trip. I lost a lot of weight at the beginning of the trip, as the scale dropped down consistently for the first 9 days or so. When we were all said and done, though, my weight stayed the same.

The reason this was a little disappointing to me is that, for the 30 previous weeks I had tracked where I did not vacation at all, and stuck with the foods listed in my other post (chicken, rice, potatoes, fish, etc), I averaged eating only 2,675 NET calories (around 3,400 calories/day with a ton of exercise) and was able to gain 1.4 pounds per week. Here, I ate around 2,900 net calories and lost a pound over the course of the month, while doing absolutely no exercise. This period occured after I managed to lose 20 pounds while eating the same number of calories, but from almost 100% food that I realized was making my symptoms much worse (before I found this board and had any diagnosis).

With the calories I ate, I expected to gain around 5-7 pounds over the course of the month based on my Basal Metabolic rate of around 1950. I am a bit of a hard gainer, but based on what I have seen over the past 30 weeks, I have gained 1.3 pounds per week with only eating 2,650 NET calories. The only times I have not gained were while I was vacationing, or the previously mentioned initial 20 lb loss.

The type of food is always the biggest change that happens while vacationing, and I thought it might have something to do with the weight loss/problems gaining weight.

I often times can feel a strong pulse in my stomach area. This pulse is normal, but has increased greatly in intensity in the past 2 years. When the intensity of the pulse in my stomach picks up, I can also feel it in my ear/head when I lay down on my side. It gets bad enough that I have to shift positions to fall asleep. Based on all of the tracking I have done on my 'symptoms' and how I feel, it appears that this pulse is not nearly as bad when I continually eat the good food I described earlier and have found out about on this message board. Is it possible, that the additional pulsing sensation is normal with IBS? It mimics my heart beat. When this happens, is it possible I could burn more calories than normal?

Also, I believe I have IBS-C and was diagnosed with fructose malabsorption. I very rarely have what I would consider D. However, I have started paying attention, and have noticed that foods known to be a problem with FM cause much softer stools than normal (my stools also float about 3/4 of the time if that matters). I wouldn't think it would be to the point of being considered 'D', but there is definitely a change and it is predictable.

All I have been able to determine, is that I seem to be able to gain weight while eating the safe foods for both FM and IBS, and eating around 2,700 calories/day, as well as more for any exercise at all that I do. Whenever I seem to stray from this, which is often times on vacation, I either lose weight quickly (15 lbs over 3 weeks), or stop gaining weight when I believe I should have based on the past year's worth of info. In summary, in the past 12 months, I have went from 178 lbs, to 152, back to 170, down to 155, and finally up to 160. I ate a fairly consistent 2,700 net calories weekly. The weight loss all occurred on vacation, or the initial 20-25 lbs I lost while at home eating a normal diet I was on before finding this board.

Is this normal, and have other people had any weight loss/gaining problems like this?

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Likely IBS-C and Fructose Malabsorption
Undiagnosed and going through testing process

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