If you upset your system be sure to add foods slooooowly once you’re feeling better. The mistake I made eating smoked brisket in August, is still affecting me. No, it’s not my imagination. No, it’s not fun. It affects my everyday life, my work life, and my social life.
That’s what ingesting gluten, or triggering an IBS, or MCAS flare can do. It can disrupt everything! The results can make familiar situations so uncomfortable you have to change your routine. And, in the case of me yesterday, they can mean you have to lie down after a meal because if you don’t you feel dizzy or too tired to move.
For the next couple of days, I will eat primarily apples, eggs, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and limited amounts of chicken or turkey. These are things my system tolerates well even during a flare. As time goes on, I’ll add squash and English peas.
The second mistake I made is, once I felt normal for a day, I rushed back to my regular diet and even tempted fate with restaurant food and a few Cheetos. The restaurant is local and uses fresh food, but still may have stretched the limits. Cheetos. I knew better.
Don’t worry, I won’t do that again any time soon. But I haven’t had a flare that lasted this long or put me in this much pain in a decade so I no longer remembered the effects viscerally.
If you try an elimination diet, make note of foods that you tolerate well when you begin adding foods back. This can become your go-to diet for recovering from an accidental ingestion of foods that irritate your system.
Using well-tolerated foods as your base, slooooowly add back foods that typically give you the least issues. For instance, I don’t usually have problems with beef until my system has already been triggered to overreact. In that circumstance, beef may cause a significant detrimental reaction.
It’s best if I don’t rush to eat beef once I feel better. If I do, I risk starting the healing process over to some degree. Not only will that bring physical discomfort, it will bring multiple levels of frustration.
Would I love to eat some chocolate today? Yes, it sounds yummy. But chocolate is an irritant I cannot tolerate in large quantities or often. Instead, I’ve gone back to the dietary basics I started with a month ago.
This is a great opportunity for me to practice patience. I will today and tomorrow, but as I begin to feel better, the temptation to eat something that tastes better will reappear. That’s when my resolve will be tested.
To entice myself to continue to eat safe foods, I can add small bites of relatively safe foods to jazz things up as I continue with the basics. Adding a little honey to my toast, a bit of goat cheese to my eggs, a bowl of rice with a dab of butter and raspberry jam to my breakfast, can introduce enough taste variety to reduce the temptation to eat chocolate or Cheetos.
There’s no set time frame for getting back to a more varied menu after a flare but learning from my mistake and not going back to a full diet immediately after you feel better for a day can prevent a lot of pain. After a flare, it’s better to add back slooooowly.
