I'm still, thankfully, feeling very well on my current IBS regime, but I'm now at the stage where I'm trying to tweak it a little bit just to find out which bits of the regime are actually helping me, and which bits are just there out of habit. This situation comes about because I tend to try two or three things at a time, because when your symptoms are bad you just want them to be over, but then you end up not knowing which of the two or three things caused the change in your symptoms, or whether one of them is helping and the other two are just cancelling each other out, or what the heck is going on in general.
My basic treatment at the moment consists of: a gluten-free diet, Normacol fibre twice a day, Celevac fibre twice a day, magnesium citrate tablets 150mg in the morning and 300mg at night, and a Vitamin D capsule 400IU per day. For any new readers of the blog I should tell you that I am mainly an IBS-C person, although I get occasional dramatic D attacks from time to time for added amusement.
Now, the gluten-free thing is fairly sacrosanct, as that has been tested a few times and I do seem to do better in a gluten-free zone, so I don't intend to mess with that. But do I really need to take two types of fiber? And could I reduce my magnesium dose a bit?
I did try stopping Celevac altogether, just to see what would happen, and what would happen wasn't really very pleasant and I seemed to get more sensitive intestines and (look away now if you're eating) looser bowels, so that didn't seem terribly productive, and so I went back on it and felt fine again. And it is good to know that something is actually having an effect on your body, and you can actually change the functioning of your intestines by swallowing different things.
One the aspects of IBS which I have found most difficult to deal with over the years is the feeling that you have absolutely no control over your symptoms, just because you cannot figure out which foods are helping, or which drugs, or which supplements, because the symptoms seem to be so random. And without this cause and effect link, you have no idea how to change your habits for the better, and therefore no control.
So it would be nice to know exactly what effect each of these products has on my body, and in an ideal world I would stop taking them all and then just take each of them one by one, but of course I'm far too scared for that as it might bring the symptoms back, so I'm going to do it the opposite way and stop taking one thing and then reintroduce it if needed. I would very much like seven or eight clone copies of me to use for testing purposes, so I shall ask for those for Christmas. But until then this will have to do.
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