Recomp is going well. Scary well, and I think it has a lot to do with my finally getting a handle on my digestion.
Anyone who remembers this thread:
(Ah the rds years. A simpler time)
Will know that I have struggled for years with my digestive health. Without getting too far into specifics, my digestive problems can essentially be reduced to diarrhoea. All. The. Fucking. Time.
Through a shitload of self experimentation, I’ve identified the following suspects:
-fibre
-chilli (fresh, for some reason not powder)
-dairy (although not cheese which I don’t understand)
-pork
-sweeteners
-legumes (I think it’s the fibre)
-pasta (but not bread - wtf?)
-tomatoes
-red meat
And that’s just the ones I can be arsed to type. I suspect a few other culprits. I know, right? Fuck me.
But I don’t know for sure which of those is definitely what’s fucking me. Sometimes I’ll eat a shitload of food from that list and feel fine. What gives? So I decided for the rest of the year just to think fuck it and eat the most restrictive diet ever. No more worrying about what the trigger foods are; just eat the same shit every day you know you can tolerate.
This diet has been:
-Turkey
-Rice
-Spinach
-Berries
-Avocado
-Olive Oil
-Beef dripping (or tallow it’s sometimes called; we call it dripping here)
-Lamb as the occasional substitute for the turkey.
Elimination diet aficionados will notice that I’m pretty much just staying on the elimination diet indefinitely, but it’s not quite as simple as that. The elimination diet calls for 3 weeks of nothing but the approved foods in order to reduce inflammation before you start adding back the potential allergens. Food is far too important a part of my social life for me to spend 3 weeks only eating restricted foods, so I’ve not done that.
But here’s where things get interesting. It seems that although once (or sometimes twice) a week I am eating a food that should cripple me, it’s not doing it anymore. It’s like there’s a level of inflammation that my gut reaches where it can’t handle anything, but if you keep the inflammation low enough it can handle everything.
It’s hard to explain. Like, I can tell straight away when I wake up in the morning if I’ve eaten something that’s fucked with me the day before and I’m going to have a bad time on the toilet that morning. My body retains a shitload of water when I’m having a reaction to a food. A shitload. If I am holding the water and my stomach is feeling bloated and I eat something on the forbidden list, then it gets way worse. If, on the other hand, I wake up feeling tight, dry and not bloated, I can eat a small amount of whatever, as I’m keeping the inflammation below the threshold. When I’m bloated or watery I’ve already far exceeded the threshold so the slightest allergen’ll fuck me right up.
And you can make it work. A couple of days ago I ate a pizza that had so many trigger foods on it I was really pushing my luck. Normally it’d have crippled me for two days, but because my intestinal inflammation is way down just now, I didn’t get bloated or hold any water, let alone the crippling diarrhoea I would normally expect. Had I then had another pizza the next day, or something else verboten, I have no doubt the inflammation would have reached critical mass and I’d have had to contend with my usual symptoms for a couple of days, but I just go straight back on the restrictive diet for a few days and it’s like nothing ever happened.
But you want to know the really cool thing? My waist is down by 2 inches! 2 fucking inches despite eating in a calorie surplus. Strength is way up in the gym, sleep quality is better, and not feeling like you could shit your pants at random points in the day is a pleasure money can’t buy.