Finishing up break week this week and it hasn’t been as easy as my last break week was. This time I took S.boulardii 2x a day and as the week has gone on I’ve had an increasing amount of gut distress.  It started out a few hours after dinner mid-week, I figured it was the sweet potatoes I ate for dinner that night since the are a bit on the risky side.   Next day same thing even though I stuck to true low FODMAP AIP.   By yesterday it started after lunch and by an hour after dinner I was not feeling well at all and the gut churn continued until I fell asleep and was still going strong at about 1 a.m. when I woke up.  I’m stopping the little yeastie beasties today in hopes that they will start to clear out of my system in over the next few days.

There is a decent chance this is the cause of my grief and that the SIBO hasn’t relapsed.  I have one friend that got a bit of overgrowth from it and another whose doctor told her not to use it at all since it would cause her more problems.   Oh well, I tried and now I need to rethink my next break week strategy.  I could try a much lower dose of it or just skip it altogether and hope bad bugs don’t grow in the void left in my gut.    Regardless, tomorrow I’m back on ADP, Berberine HCL, FC-Cidal and Dysbiocide for another two weeks and I’ll see if these symptoms clear up by Wednesday or so.   Still 5 weeks until my next test.

My weight is still hard to maintain.  I dropped this week again, about 2 lbs. down to 153.8 and I really wasn’t doing anything to cause the drop and have been eating a ton of calories per day.  Earlier in the week it had seemed I was staying steady around 155 but the last two days were a steady decline.   I was tracking all my calories per day to make sure I pumped in 3400 a day but stopped just because it was so tedious but continued to try and cram in as much as I could.  I’ve even been eating 1/2 c. of cooked white jasmine rice every few days and that would be putting weight on anyone else but not me.   I actually seem to drop weigh the day after I eat the rice, how is this possible?    Not sure if there is anything else to do here except hope that once (if) the SIBO clears and I can heal my gut then this will all sort itself out, otherwise I think I’m destined to be struggling with maintaining weight for a long time.

Sleep, aside from last night, has improved greatly over the last week and even last night I fell back asleep and got my 8+ hours.   I’ve been sleeping sound for 7-8 hours most nights this week.  One thing I tried is to have a small snack, half an Epic bar, just before going to bed.  The theory being that “If you are waking between 1:00 and 3:00 am, your liver may be lacking the glycogen reserves needed for conversion by the adrenals to keep the blood glucose levels high enough during the night. … To help counteract this have one or two bites of a snack that contains protein, unrefined carbohydrate and high quality fat before going to bed…”   Well, the Epic bar fits that description and it seems to have helped, thanks to Shari for the tip.

In other good news, we began work on our new studio spaces this week and it is exciting.  Our outbuilding is soon to be a combined art and yoga studio space, we will hopefully be done sometime in June.   I will be ready for the 30-Day Art Challenge again this fall.