Have i made myself ill?

Alfie Noble · May 2011

A few months back i started following a nutrition plan that has been put together by a pretty well respected personal trainer. It centers around the theory of Alkalizing the body and requires you to drink a green drink (wheatgrass, alfalfa etc) and alkalizing salts mixed with water every morning. I was eating mostly raw food, loads of fruit and veg, cut out caffeine and absolutely no processed foods of any kind when possible and no dairy, with one cheat meal per week. I wasn't following this religiously but it was a very simple set of guidelines and i was sticking to it as best i could. As well as this i was doing two rides a week of 20-25 miles. After about 6 weeks I lost a stone and was feeling extremely good, my riding was progressing and i was starting to plan which hills i was going to ride rather than which hills i was going to avoid!

I started getting a little lazy with the diet and was buying coffee again, i noticed i was getting quite bloated after drinking it, in fact most of what i was eating didn't seem to be sitting properly. I was still following the diet pretty closely and went for lunch with some mates and decided i'd have a goats cheese salad, this turned my whole world upside down, massively bloated, stomach pains then eventually diarrhea. Everything gradually settled down after about a week but was still getting bloated after every meal. For some reason this weekend it has flared up massively again. Really bad stomach pains earlier today and still not feeling comfortable now (btw i am going to book an appointment with the quack on monday). It is almost like i have developed IBS or something.

Is it at all possible that changing my diet so drastically has caused me to develop some intolerance to certain foods?

Sorry for the long post but writing it all down helps me work out some sort of timeline to tell the doc.

Herbsman · May 2011

So why exactly did you decide to follow this fad diet? Did you not think you could lose weight and get fit while eating a normal diet and simply riding your bike? What 'alkalizing salts' are you talking about exactly?

Alfie Noble · May 2011

i don't really see it as a fad diet. The idea is 80% 'Alkalizing' foods and 20% acidic, fair enough the theory behind the whole alkalizing foods idea may be a load of bullshit, but the fact is it's 80% fruit and veg and 20% everything else. I decided to do it because i wanted to lose weight and a couple of friends had got really good results. I'm not going to tell you what the alkalizing salts were, Google them.

danowat · May 2011

Just sounds like another reason to reinforce the idea of a decent, NORMAL healthy diet to me.

Those symptoms do indeed sound like IBS, try some Buscopan

Herbsman · May 2011

Alfie Noble wrote:

i don't really see it as a fad diet. The idea is 80% 'Alkalizing' foods and 20% acidic, fair enough the theory behind the whole alkalizing foods idea may be a load of bullshit, but the fact is it's 80% fruit and veg and 20% everything else. I decided to do it because i wanted to lose weight and a couple of friends had got really good results. I'm not going to tell you what the alkalizing salts were, Google them.

Well the first thing that came to mind is sodium carbonate, but you're not going to tell anyone (no offence but don't you think that's a bit childish?), so why should anyone bother to google it?

Eating a lot of fruit and veg is a good idea, obviously that's a no-brainer. But unless you were suffering from acid reflux, drinking solutions of alkali salts sounds very faddish to me. To lose weight your best bet is just to eat better (which you obviously have been doing), and eat less. No need for potions or concoctions.

Headhuunter · May 2011

So if I'm reading this right, you went to a respected nutritionist who designed a diet to address whatever problems you previously had... You stuck relatively well to this diet, started feeling better and healthier, the cycling improved and then you started to drop the specifically designed diet and started to eat and drink sh!t again and now you feel ill, yet you are blaming the diet that made you feel better in the 1st place?

Firstly this is a problem that nutritionists constantly face. People have some kind of diet issue, be it upset stomach, overweight, underweight etc etc, they go to a dietician or nutritionist for help, get the help, start feeling better and then because they have lost weight, feel healthier etc etc, scrap the diet that made them better in the 1st place and returrn to their old eating habits. Nutritionist designed diets tend to be designed for you to more or less stick to in perpetuity, not for you to dip in and out of as you feel bad. That's basically typical yo-yo dieting.

The symptoims you describe indicate that you have some kind of food allergy. Many people have them and choose to ignore them. They manifest themselves by making you feel sluggish, bloated, by upsetting your stomach and in many other ways. Most people just live with the symptoms rather than doing somethuing about it.

My advice to you would be to go back to the diet which you were specifically advised to adopt by (I assume) a dietary professional.

What's more I can't believe that some peope here are advising you to go back to a "normal" diet, which is clearly making you ill!!

Headhuunter · May 2011

danowat wrote:

Just sounds like another reason to reinforce the idea of a decent, NORMAL healthy diet to me.

Those symptoms do indeed sound like IBS, try some Buscopan

I should think that the reason the alkalising diet was advised in the 1st place was because the OT had excess acid in his digestive system or body in the 1st place( due to allergies or whatever) and to avoid having to rely on acid reflux medication. It's certainly not advisable to eat a "normal" diet (ie fatty ready made meals) and then rely on medication to sort your body out!

danowat · May 2011

Headhuunter wrote:

(ie fatty ready made meals)

Certainly not my idea of a normal healthy diet

ut_och_cykla · May 2011

Goats cheese sallad reaction - could be the goats cheese had listeria infection - ie a tummy bug - or that you have become milk protein intolerant. Try cutting out dairy for a few days and then reintroduce it - if symptoms disappear and then return it's likely - but you should also see a doctor to rule out other problems.

To be honest using l alkalising salts and eating loads of fruit and veg sounds a bit cray - stomach acid is there to digest stuff, provide an acid environment for protein digestion and kill bugs. Knocking it out completely with alkalis just means a whole load of un/part digested food getting into your large intestine to cause havoc.

Personally I'm not sure about the acid/alkali ideas - a healthy body usually keeps things in balance very nicely by itself and only kidney problems or lung issues upset the balance.

bompington · May 2011

danowat wrote:

Just sounds like another reason to reinforce the idea of a decent, NORMAL healthy diet to me.

Those symptoms do indeed sound like IBS, try some Buscopan

The symptoms may sound like IBS, the diet sounds like BS. As for food allergies, while they definitely exist and can be nasty, I always remember fondly the study a few years back that showed that people who believe they had food allergies were, when tested, less likely to have a real allergy than the population at large.

Have i made myself ill?

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