Romie
There have been a lot of posts already and I've done my best to quick scan through them. Forgive me if I repeat what someone else has previously said.
I think you put out the call to people who have had digestions issues generally so I will give you a bit of background about myself:
- I found out that I had ulcerative colitis in March/April this year.
- I had been bulking (on the dirty side) for several months before hand and was eating huge portions in South Africa. I was drinking upwards of 1-1.5L/day of whole milk the month before I went to South Africa. Plenty of protein etc, etc.
- I came back from South Africa in March, saw some blood in the stool and went straight to the emergency room to get every test under the sun done (I had pancreatitis in late November 2009 and didn't get
every test run, but wasn't take any chances this time).
- Now I take a low dose of some maintenance meds which are intended to keep it under control (time will tell just how well it keeps it under control, so far so good), but I try do as much as I can personally to give the medicine the best possible chance of working (and hopefully not need it at all eventually).
Anyway I basically flared up for about 4-6 weeks and during that time had to really try work out what was causing issues and what wasn't etc etc (lost about 12kg in that time, I probably would have lost more but I pumped glutamine). Everything is going well now thankfully.
You don't seem to have something serious at the moment and it's just lactose intolerance, but I have a few comments/suggestions/tips:
- When issues start popping up, keep a food diary. Don't just eat something one day then exclude it when you have issues that day. In order to truly exclude something from your diet you need to test whether symptoms worsen with the particular food in your diet (over time, not just 1 day) and then whether excluding the food (over time etc) actually decreases symptoms. In saying that, I had a bad afternoon one day when flaring after eating something quite peppery and I haven't touched it in months. However, this highlights the reason for testing it correctly. I could be excluding an entire food group (with its own benefits) for no reason. Thankfully I don't like pepper anyway, so I've got no reason to go back to it
- Take glutamine (I believe that everyone should be taking this, period. My body was the weakest it's been in a long long time this year, yet I managed to dodge everyone's colds which they were bringing to work. I attribute it to glutamine. That and the 12kg I lost was more fat then muscle, which was brilliant - free
cut haha)
- Chew your food (digestion starts in the mouth).
- Try rice milk (I'm not lactose intolerant, but I haven't reverted to normal milk even though I'm back to 100%. It has quite a bit of calcium from what I can see. Otherwise, my friend was in a similar boat to you getting really really bad pain in his stomach, bloating etc. He switched to the smarter milk (I'll have to double check this) and hasn't had an issue since.)
- When you get back to weights, if you can't have any lactose whatsoever but you like the convenience of protein powders, don't be scared to try Pea Protein. I haven't gone back to regular protein since I got sick and have stuck with NOW's Pea Protein. 28g of protein per scoop, chucked in with a cup of rice milk, honey and cinnamon - it isn't so bad in the end, I actually really like it now (the key being honey!). As an aside, I used to get migraines and haven't really had one since I got sick. I partly attribute it to removing huge amounts of artificial colours, flavourings in all the different gym supps I used to take eg fruit punch flavoured creatine, grape flavoured purple wraath.
- Just remember that heaps of people seem to have issues with food, so it's not worth stressing about. We're built to adapt so you just learn to live with it and work around it.
Anyway feel free to PM me if you want at any stage in the future.
