Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Complicated Question about IBS-C

Please bear with me as I try to explain this...

I used to eat all of the wrong things--whole grain bread and pasta, tons of cheese, tons of raw fruits and veggies, etc. I had (have) constipation, bloating, and gas problems, with pain and cramps once every week or two. I knew that alcohol had me doubling over the next day but I couldn't identify the other triggers.

Now that I have the information about the IBS diet, I can't understand why I didn't constantly have cramps. Plus, if I was eating all of those triggers, why were my bowels so sluggish?

Then this morning I was looking over my Eating for IBS book (for the hundredth time) and I noticed a sentence I hadn't really noticed before. It was something to the effect of bowels "shutting down" in response to previous stimuli and thus leading to constipation.

Ah, another piece to fit into the puzzle! So now I'm dying to understand more about this shutting down response. Is that what was happening before when I was eating triggers constantly? I think this might be very important to finally understand and thus identify my personal triggers and tolerances. Hopefully other IBS-C folks could benefit from a discussion down this path as well.

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