Thunderbump! That’d be a good name for a band.
Since starting this thread many moons ago, not a huge amount changed until recently. I have used glutamine, probiotics and digestive enzymes with fairly limited success, however lately I have added a small amount of resistant starch to my evening meal and things have gotten interesting.
IN DEPTH BOWEL MOVEMENT CHAT NOW BEGINNING - BE WARNED
So for pretty much my entire life my morning BM has been loose as all hell slightly more than 50% of the time. I recently turned 29, so that’s a long time to have such a symptom. Nothing really helped. Psyllium helped for a day or two then made things considerably worse. After hearing a bit about resistant starch from various places, I decided to try it. I heard that if you have gut problems you need to start out very slowly, so I started at half a teaspoon a day, and tapered up half a teaspoon every week.
When I got to two teaspoons, something magical happened. I had a diarrhea free week. Consider the significance of that for a moment. I went from having diarrhea 3 or 4 times a week for 29 years to having my first ever diarrhea free week!
I still get the occasional flare up, but things are looking good. It’s not all smiles and sunshine though - if I go above 2 teaspoons a day then the results are - ahem - explosive which seems to indicate that my gut flora is all fucked up. The studies done on resistant starch say you really need 3 tablespoons a day to really get the awesome benefits, but if I tried that I honestly think my bowel would rupture!
It’s looking like I may in fact have Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO) which is where bad bacteria get all up in your small intestine and wreak havoc. The solution to this is to destroy those evil little fuckers. Apparently a decent SIBO protocol should have:
-An antimicrobial. Chris Kesser (whom I love) recommends monolaurin which is apparently a good natural one that doesn’t fuck with your gut flora.
-A biofilm disrupter. Very sci fi sounding. Biofilm is like some crazy force field bad bacteria surround themselves with. There’s a few supps you can take for this but the one I like the sound of best is N Acetyl Cysteine because it has about a zillion other benefits (google it if you’ve never heard of it. Seriously schmexy stuff).
Another really interesting thing I’ve learned about SIBO is that it is actually best to AVOID PROBIOTICS! Apparently lactobacillus acidophilus, which is the most common ingredient in probiotics, can actually contribute to the SIBO. Soil-based probiotics are supposed to work great but good luck finding them.
There is a medicinal treatment in the form of rifaximin which, as antibiotics go, doesn’t actually wreak too much havoc on your good bacteria, so it’s something I may consider eventually, but not until I felt I’d exhausted all of the natural remedies.
So, my current gut health plan is:
-monolaurin
-glutamine
-resistant starch
-N Acetyl Cysteine
I’ll try that for a month or so, and if I don’t see an improvement in symptoms, I’ll try the Intro Diet of the SCD diet that I mention in this thread:
After I do that, I’ll continue with the monolaurin, glutamine and NAC for a month or so, and if everything seems kosher I’ll start back on the probiotics and try and slowly build my RS tolerance up to the 3 tablespoons recommended.
If my protocol fails, and my intro diet + protocol plan B fails, then I’ll have to bite the bullet and go see a doctor, requesting some rifaximin.
Is it too much to ask just for consistently normal turds? I can’t help but think that if I got it all fixed then I’d make way better gains in the gym as I’d actually be absorbing and benefitting from all the nutrients I eat.
Time will tell. I’ll report back here with results.