How to maintain IBS food diary

Suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)? Finding it difficult to recognize which foods are causing trouble? Why don’t you keep a food diary? Read on to find out how you can maintain an IBS food diary.

When you suffer from IBS, certain food stuffs irritate your digestive system. Since there are varieties of triggering factors contributing to your disturbance, it becomes all the more important to be scientific in your approach to identify the trigger foods. This will reduce the chance of unnecessarily putting yourself on a restricted diet. A simple way is through the use of a food diary.

A review article in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association labels a problematic food as that which apparently causes symptoms in a span of three days on at least three different occasions.

Time required -few minutes per day
Level of difficulty -easy
How to maintain

1) Carry a small notebook with you all the time

2) On the top of each page, write the following headings:

time
food eaten
emotional factors associated (if any)
symptoms

3) After each meal, fill in the relevant columns. Also, rate your symptoms when you list them on a scale of 1 to 10 depending on their severity.

4) At the end of each week, check for any possible common food triggers.

5) Once you have identified the possible problematic food stuffs, you may now follow the elimination diet week for 2-3 weeks. After this period, analyze if these eliminations have had a positive effect on your digestive system.

This process may look like a lengthy one, but compared to the time that you have been suffering from IBS symptoms, it’s surely nothing!

Few tips to follow while maintaining your food diary:

Try to eat smaller and frequent meals so that it controls the effects of gastro- colic reflex on your system. The Gastro-Colic reflex is the one that stimulates the movements of your intestines when you eat. When you eat large portions of meals and with high fat content, your digestive system tends to produce stronger intestinal movements (regardless of what you have eaten) leading to frequent digestive disturbance in case of IBS.
Keep a track of your emotional state and your symptoms. If you can associate the two of them, train your body with some relaxation techniques to help calm your system.

Note: It could be just one ingredient in your meal that could be the trigger. Eg-it may not be the pasta that’s giving you the trouble, but the tomato sauce in it.

Identifying your IBS symptom triggers is just one aspect. Another is to reduce your digestive system’s sensitivity to those triggers. This is the basic approach in homeopathy. Homoeopathic treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome helps to make an individual strong enough to address the stresses of life more positively.

Homoeopathic medicines for IBS significantly help reduce the relapse and recurrence of IBS symptoms. Thus, homoeopathy treatment for IBS treats the disease from the root and not just superficially.

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