My meal-time pile o’ pills
I am now a week into the protocol devised by Dr. Gerard Mullen from John Hopkins. It is sort of funny that I end up on his protocol given that when all this digestive hell began 18 months ago one of the first books I read was The Inside Tract by Dr. Mullen. That book was the first clue that maybe diet changes could solve this problem ultimately. Obviously there are times diet can’t do it all and thus Dr. Mullen developed this protocol and has studied it and proven it more effective than the standard anti-biotic treatment for SIBO.
The first day or so was a bit rough, that was a lot of new ingredients to handle. I didn’t just dive in feet first though. I did a half dose the first day just to be sure I was going to be OK, added an extra oregano oil caps the next day and finally hit the full dose of 4 ADP oregano oil, 2 FC-Cidal, 2 Dysbiocide and 1 Berberine HCL per meal (the little white pill is ALA for me feet, more below). Luckily the slight gut upset went away after the third day and I seem fine taking this handful of pills with my meals. One more week of this then I take a week off using some Saccharomyces boulardii to try and build back some good flora. S.boulardi is a yeast and not a bacteria so it shouldn’t add to the SIBO problems while keeping bad things from overgrowing. Then another round of this whole protocol for two more weeks.
It seems to be working for the most part or at least my symptoms are WAY down, we’ll know for sure when I retest in May. I am eating even more now after my food allergy test came back. This week I added back in some nightshades and seem OK with them. Counting in my SIBO app I see I am now able to eat 32 different vegetables! A year ago I could eat 2. I am going to add back in peppers this week, Venison Chili is on the menu for tomorrow. I guess next up are beets then to see if onions and garlic work for me again. I also need to try mushrooms again. All of these are high FODMAP so they will be interesting. After that there aren’t many AIP legal veggies left to try except really starchy things like taro or yucca and these are SCD illegal so I’m on the fence. I also need to try a few higher FODMAP fruits now, I’ve been avoiding those so far.
My weight is at least slowly heading in the right direction this week after giving up running and really cramming in calories, about 3400-3600 per day. Eating Paleo Ice Cream every night is nice but I really can’t keep that up long-term. I’m up a bit over 3 lbs since last Saturday but still down a few from my recent high point of 158. Something obviously still isn’t right with my absorption so I may add in some digestive enzymes to see if they help now. Every time I’ve tried these I end up feeling sick but now could be different. I’m also on the fence about adding back in white jasmine rice since I’m not allergic to it. I really would like to be able to run moderately without dropping weight so drastically and it could help. I am doing some light biking and more weights to at least be moving during this time, hoping the weights put on some more muscle mass.
My feet have been bothering me a bit more this last week for some reason which I can’t quite figure out except we had some cold and damp again or it could be tied to the weight loss I had. I’ve been doing 600mg of ALA (Alpha-Lipoic-Acid) for a month and thought it was helping. I had been a bit lax on my ReBuilder, doing it once a day instead of twice so I may go back to being a bit more diligent to see if that helps. If my feet hurt to even walk then running is sort of out of the equation.