Might have to try some foot baths or transdermal nutrients to see if they’re better tolerated. Good to hear from you, thanks for your message
Good to hear from you too, and thanks for asking after me. And sorry again about your difficulties, I hope they improve. It does sound like we share a lot of the same ailments and symptoms, if I ever find anything that does help me I'll make sure to share it with you.
I’m really pleased to hear you’re able to tolerate oils and meat again - understand how frustrating it is to be on a restricted diet and still trying to get all your nutrients. Did you lose any weight on the elemental diet? That would be my fear.
Yes I did lose weight, and that was a concern as my weight wasn't great to begin with. A big component of the diet are vegetable oils for their fat content, but like I said I was completely unable to tolerate these at the beginning which apparently is common in people with intestinal damage (and seems to me to be a fundamental problem of the diet).
So at the beginning I tried to mitigate for this by just increasing the carb content (dextrose was my carb, it's usually that or something similar like maltodextrin), but this was so sickly in large quantities, it's basically sugar, so getting anywhere near the amount needed for maintaining my weight was impossible. After a while I just accepted I would lose weight to begin with, then hopefully try to add it back on with the vegetable oils when I could tolerate them, which fortunately is what happened. If you're really militant I reckon you could get there with the dextrose though, and if you have weight issues it might be worth considering adding that into your diet anyway.
Also to be clear I made my own "homemade" Elemental diet - there are commercial varieties but I reacted to everything I tried. I assume most contain some sort of ingredient I'm intolerant to, and by making my own I could at least just add everything separately so I could see what I was having issues to, and this was key for me in checking which vegetable oils I could tolerate (turns out I have a massive problem with coconut oil and olive oil which I assume are due to salicylate content, another common problem for people with damaged guts).
This was the formula I used, from the website
www.siboinfo.com, which has videos explaining the diet and stuff. It seems to have been referred to a fair amount online from what I've read, and there are two options, one low in fat and the other high, presumably for people with problems with fatty oils. Even now that I'm back onto chicken I've still kept up with some homemade Elemental formula as it seems to be a good way of maintaining my weight and getting more nutrients.
Another thing about the diet is it's not cheap, neither the commercial nor homemade varieties, and from what I gather this is mainly due to the amino acid content. For some reason these seem to be really expensive, and you need a pretty good amount to meet protein requirements.
Like I said, I'm still not out of the Herx I experienced from this diet but if I start to see any benefit beyond the improved tolerance to foods I'll be sure to let you know.
Also did you end up seeing that new practitioner you mentioned a little while ago? Or perhaps it was a clinic you were talking about, my memory is struggling.
Well remembered, yes I had a consultation with a mould doctor a few months back but she basically said that to properly fix mould issues the gut has to be in a healthy state, or else the mould problem will just recur. Which makes sense I guess, and this was another reason for my decision to change focus to the gut.
My goal now is basically to try and heal the gut as much as possible, then if & when I've managed to do that to reassess, and if I'm still having issues and my mycotoxin levels are still high then I can go back to the mould. But my instinct tells me the core issue is with the gut and not mould (in my airwaves or elsewhere), and that my mycotoxin levels were probably caused by Candida (which the Elemental diet should have gone a long way to starving out).
I've got a consultation with a gastroenterologist coming up in a couple of days who seems very on-the-ball, if I learn anything from him about this diet or whatever I'll be sure to impart it here.
