FruitMonster.com

This is post is part of a continuing saga, be sure to read Part 1  Part 2 and  Part 3 first!

So I’ve created quite the cliff hanger on this blog, leaving the story of “Becoming The FruitMonster” without closure for eight months now!  Well out of considerable care for your curiosities, I will now attempt to finish telling the troublesome tale!

Ulcers Gone!  Acid Rages On…

Last, I left you on a rather positive note. Having thrown off the shackles of pharmaceutical addiction and finding the courage to depart from the guidance of the medical professionals in my life, I had taken a homeopathic approach to healing my stomach ulcers.  Which believe me, after years of stomach pain was no small victory!  But despite my success managing my body’s tendency to develop inflamed stomach walls (I still take DGL Licorice daily as a preventative), I was still plagued with nearly constant acid reflux episodes.

Reflux Sux!

For those of you who have had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing an episode of acid reflux, you are quite aware of the absolute misery in can bring you.  The sensation of pain or pressure in your chest, the feeling of your food re-entering your throat, aches in your back and shoulders… it is quite the uncomfortable and upsetting experience.  It is particularly unfortunate when it occurs at night, where the tightness in your chest can lead to cold sweats and a night of tossing and turning in restless half-sleep.

Constant Reflux

For me, these symptoms seldom gave me pause.  It seemed that no matter what I ate, when I ate it, how I ate it … it was bound to make a caustic encore that left me miserable.  There were nearly three years of my life, where I could not eat ANYTHING without having some sort of reflux related complication showing up shortly thereafter.  From the reflux, I started to get canker sores in my throat and mouth, which made eating, talking and sometimes even breathing painful.  A year on, I began to notice that I felt resistance to swallowing food, as the food I ate encountered scarring and inflammation along the walls of my esophagus.  A few months beyond that, I developed a cough and asthma-like periods of difficulty breathing, as my lung tissues grew agitated from reflux entering them through my trachea at night.  I even noticed hoarseness in my voice in the mornings!  All of this left me scared for my well-being, as it was clear that my situation was steadily getting worse with time!

A Photo of My Hiatal Hernia

It wasn’t too long after the breathing difficulties showed up that I was headed back to the…. you guessed it, doctor.  But this time, I was not interested in their potions, I was motivated by a sincere need to know more about the state of my food pipe – was it permanently damaged? Had I developed Barrett’s esophagus or worse, cancer?  To assuage my hypochondriac-hyped concerns, I was once again forced into a butt-less hospital gown, chemically rendered unconscious, gagged with a parascope and left to perform half-conscious, incredibly humorous, pirate imitations in the recovery room.  Sigh… at least I hadn’t insulted the nurses this time around.  The verdict?  Chronic inflammation of the esophagus and a hiatal hernia.  Ah ha, or should I say, A-hai-tal!

Hiatal Hernia Explanation

So, I Have a Hiatal Hernia

All lame jokes aside, this was an eureka moment for me, one where my perpetual reflux problems suddenly made sense.  For those unaware, a hiatal hernia occurs when a portion of your stomach slips up through the space between your diaphragm and your esophagus.  This herniation then prevents your lower-esophagul sphincter (LES) from closing properly, thereby allowing food to regurgitate from your churning stomach.  So the reason for my reflux-related reprisals was a physical one, relating directly to this problem.  Armed with this knowledge, I had a much clearer insight into my inadequate innards… although I hadn’t a clue what to do about!

Fortunately for me, at that time I had just begun dating my fiance Teddi, who has quite the interest in reading and, having seen my misery first hand, was also full of the energy needed to tackle my digestive dilemmas.  So together, we began to take a full assessment of my internal health and research what to do about it.  Our basic diagnosis of my problems:  I digested my food slowly, I digested my food poorly, I had irritable bowel syndrome (i.e. morning routine:  stand, stretch, run to toilet, take a messy poop), I was vulnerable to reflux because of my hiatal hernia, and in general, the processes governing my food breakdown, absorption and elimination were way out of whack.

The next step, was research.  Together we read what amounted to a small library of books on diet, digestion and detoxification.  Despite my feeling of ‘having tried everything’ and the adoption of a rather defeatist attitude on my part, Teddi managed to convince me to try a new round of ‘homeopathic’ healing.  And boy is this little fuit-muncher glad he listened!

Toxins = Bad

A Detox Diet

First, Teddi had me complete a three week detox diet.  We followed the book ‘Clean’ by Dr. Alejandro Junger, (recommended for those of you who have not tried a detox diet before!) wherein I ate a diet restricted to certain foods with liquid meals for dinner and breakfast.  The idea was to eliminate all foods that contained toxins/irritants, so as to stop the damage that most of us perpetually  inflict upon our bodies.  With this damage stopped, we then lighten the load on our digestive system, allowing our digestive system to essentially ‘work in reverse‘ and pull all of the toxins stored within our cells out of our body, thereby, ‘detoxifying‘ us!  Over the course of these three weeks, I radically transformed my body, purging all sorts of nasties, reducing inflammation and doing some serious healing.  At the end of it, my irritable bowel symptoms were largely eliminated (pun intended)!  I also decided to adopt a vegan lifestyle (almost two years ago now!), but my reflux and slow digestion problems remained.  The detox certainly had left me much healthier, but it was not the sole solution!

During this detox diet, I had learned to make a few different green smoothie recipes, which comprised most of my morning and evening meals on the ‘Clean’ program.  Teddi pointed out to me that drinking smoothies was a way to address two of my body’s principal problems: slow digestion and poor digestion.  By making green smoothies, I essentially delivered myself a pre-chewed, ready to digest meal!  By doing this, I was able to process food more quickly and to absorb it effectively.  This realization led to my adoption of drinking green smoothies each day for breakfast instead of eating a bowl of cereal, etc.  By doing this, I noticed that my reflux was much less bothersome in the mornings!  The green smoothies also made me feel fantastic!

Raw Food, RAWR!

Raw Food

The next phase of Teddi’s healing experiments led us into the raw food movement (which is currently expanding rapidly around the world!  hooray!)  The basic premise of raw-food preparation, is that by not heating your eats above 104 F (40 C), the naturally occurring enzymes in the food are still functional.  This preserves the ‘alive’ state of food, hence the ‘raw’ terminology.  These digestive enzymes are extremely important because they break down the sugars, starches, proteins and fats that accompany them, making digestion of these items much easier on your body!

Otherwise, your inner systems (namely the pancreas) have to produce these enzymes from scratch.  In doing so, a lot more energy is required and the rate of digestion is slowed.  This is a particular problem for me, since my body was already producing too little of these digestive-juices!  So I enthusiastically made the switch to a raw food oriented lifestyle.  This meant a significant reduction of the processed foods I ate and a corresponding surge in the fresh produce I consumed!  Instead of breads, fake vegan cheeses and meats, soy milk, chips, cooked veggies, etc, I shifted my diet over to one rich in nuts, fruits and veggies!  I certainly felt healthier, and had fun eating some very creative meals (‘raw food’ is a lot of work!), but I still was suffering from slow digestion and bouts of reflux.  Even after all this change!  What was there left to do except….

Juicing, Not Just for Meatheads

A Juice Boost!

‘Buy a juicer!’, she suggested, fresh off another book and full of new ideas.  Would you believe that The FruitMonster’s first response was ‘no way, they’re too expensive‘?  Ha!  Look at me now, a juice-a-holic with a fancy website!  Well, long story short, she was right!  Juicing was just what my body needed!  My digestive tract was so tired, so beat up and so awful at doing its job, that it needed an extended period of some seriously sissy treatment.  Not that juice is a ‘sissy’, it’s powerful!  I use that term because juice is so easy to digest and absorb, entering the blood stream within minutes of being consumed.   And with enough of it, your body hardly has to do any work to get the nutrients it needs.  So what did I do?  I bought the Omega Juicer she told me to buy and I juiced up a feast!  Carrot Orange Juice, Green Grapefruit Juice, Plant Blood, they were all so delicious!  And they made me feel fantastic!  So for about 3-4 months I sought to replace one meal a day with 1-2 liters of fresh, raw juice.  The results were fantastic, with little to no reflux bothering me post-juice-monster and noticeable healing taking place in my esophagus!  And if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been hooked ever since!

So between my green smoothies, juicing and raw food oriented diet, you’d think I’d be set!  Quick to digest, easy to process and absorb, low-impact on my hiatal hernia problem and pleasant for the poop chute!  What else could you ask for?  Well I still wasn’t pleased, the juicing, smoothies and raw-foods were great, but I was still, yes, still, not digesting my food quickly enough or well enough.  Plus, I was losing weight, bottoming out at 136 lbs (61.5 kg) when I had weighed 155-160 lbs (71 kg) just a year earlier.  This gives you some insight into just how seriously dysfunctional my body was!  So what could possibly be left for me to do?

Well you’d be silly if you thought Teddi wouldn’t have read herself to the answer!  Bookworming her way through Dr. Douglas Graham’s 80 10 10 Diet, she had found that last missing link, the one piece of the puzzle that remained.

My Big, Fat Mistake

MunchReport in the Days of Excessive Fat!

The problem was the fats.  Even after I first launched this fruit-focused website, I was getting nearly 15-25% of my calories from fat just by eating a few handfuls of nuts each day!  My green smoothies were full of avocados, nut butters and almonds and my meals were accompanied by cashews, pistachios, pine nuts and even more almonds.  No wonder my digestion was still lethargic, with reflux still plaguing me!  All those fats meant my food-factory was slowed to a lipid-glazed crawl!   Well no more!  Sure enough, as I cut out the almonds from my smoothies, and ceased to cram my cranium full of nut-glory, a magical ‘lightness’ overcame my body.  Food moved through my stomach on a completely truncated timescale, the reflux was noticeably reduced and I felt FANTASTIC…wait, excuse me… FRUITASTIC!  It was amazing, the fats were the final element to remove!

By removing the nuts completely and reducing the number of avocados I was eating, my digestion sped up dramatically.  It no longer took several hours for my stomach to grumble after a hearty green smoothie meal, I was instead hungry for another smoothie just a few hours later!  The effects of cutting out the fats from my fruit based meals was awesome as well, with my stomach churning through my fruitmonstering sessions in half the time it took before!  And all this meant a substantial reduction in the number of reflux episodes I experienced, allowing my esophagus to do som much needed healing!  I felt like a new man!  But the benefits didn’t end there! My energy levels went up, my emotions were steadier, my mind was clearer and I started gaining back some of the weight I had lost!

I am The FruitMonster

Gimme All Yo Fruit!

Needless to say, my success with this new ‘fruit diet’, left me quite excited!  After nearly six years of reflux, poor digestion and all the misery that came along with it, I had finally found a meaningful medicine – a low fat diet based on fruits and leafy greens, consumed in giant green smoothies, large volumes of raw juices and sweet-fingered fruitmonstering sessions!

Armed with all the things I’d learned along the way and having been through all the worry, stress, frustration and anxiety associated with acid reflux, ulcers, gastritis, irritable bowel syndrome and lethargic intestines – I was overcome with an intense need to spread the juicy details of my newfound lifestyle in order to bring relief to a world full of people who are suffering from diet driven diseases.  It was this compassion, this sincere interest in helping others, that completed my transformation into The FruitMonster.  As a result, I’ve created this website, somehow finding myself repeatedly full of fruit-fueled motivation to spend hours upon hours conjuring up blog entries, smoothie recipes and juice ideas for your consumption.  (If you want to repay my efforts, go make a green smoothie and then let me know how delicious it was ).

So now I’ve told the tale, spread the story, espoused the epic… it certainly took me long enough!  And now that I’ve finished FruitMonster story time, I can get back to blogging endlessly about the benefits of being a fruitmonster!  Rawr!

Not a FruitMonster's Friend!

I have been blogging/posting/tweeting/yacking/droning on and on for a while now about how a low fat diet is absolutely essential to a fruitmonster diet regimen, but I’ve yet to explain why this is so!  I should emphasize that using the word ‘essential’ is probably not strong enough!  In fact, it is absolutely key to being able to eat large amounts of delicious fruits without wreaking havoc on your body with burping/reflux/indigestion, irregularities in your blood sugar levels and having downright rotten, stinky farts.  To put it plainly, you simply cannot monster your way through heaps of fruitiness while simultaneously munching on fatty food items and claim to be surprised when your digestive system hops off track faster than a Chinese train wreck.  There are a few key areas in your body where trying to simultaneously digest elevated levels of fat with a meal of fruits will produce unfavorable results.  The first is in your stomach and upper small intestine (that’s the duodenum), the second is within the small intestine itself and the third is during the final march to porcelain infamy, within your colon (aka the large intestine).

To Squelch the Belch, Combat the Fat

Fats in the Stomach and Duodenum

Problems most often start in the first key area, within the stomach and duodenum.  Shortly after an individual eats a sweet, innocent portion of fruit on asupposedly ‘empty’ stomach, they quickly will move to vilify that meal once they start burping, experiencing stomach discomfort and sometimes the ever-evil GERD aka acid reflux soon afterwards.  All too often, nutritionists and doctors will tell victims of GERD (acid reflux) that fruit is the enemy and that they should stop eating it!  Nothing could be further from the truth!  These people simply need to stop eating so much fat.  This type of backwards thinking is a perfect example of how ignorant we (and our ‘health professionals’) generally are with our digestive processes.  What is actually happening in the above case is that the large influx of fructose (i.e. fruit sugars) has hit a festering pot of nasty, fat laden, bile ridden, half-digested ‘food’ from your previous (or even previous, previous) meal.  When these two combine, the sugars in your fruit meal quickly feed into the fermentation process in your stomach, which releases all sorts of gasses, leading to bloating, burping and the habitual reach for the bottle of tums or the package of alka seltzer.  This process is one of the primary causes of ‘acid reflux’!  This partially digested fatty gunk I am speaking of often remains in the stomach for several hours with time periods of up to 12 hours or more for some people!  So even when you think you are ready for your next meal, you stomach and duodenum are still working hard to process all that fat!  We could therefore say, very generally, that fats are characterized by being ‘slow’ to digest due to their complicated hydrocarbon structures and the additional energy, organs (i.e. the liver and gall bladder), stomach acid and enzymes, needed to process and move them through your digestive tract.  Fruits, being made mostly of simple carbohydrates – that fructose I spoke of earlier – are ready for absorption in the small intestine (technically this eventually involves the liver too, but is less energy intensive)!  Considering how easy this is, fruits could be generally characterized as ‘fast’ within the digestive system and aren’t subject to the delayed holding time that fats are.  They are so fast that they can be digested and enter the blood stream on the order of minutes!.  That is, if they aren’t mixed with fats in the first place, otherwise they get ‘held up’, which has the nasty results discusses above, as well as some other negative consequences down the intestinal road.  So a general rule for a happy digestive system is to ‘not mix fast and slow’.  If we were to take that one step further and have a ‘Golden Rule’ – it would be to just skip the slow stuff altogether! That’s right, cut out those nasty fats!  Not convinced? Read on…

Avoid the Lipid Lockdown

Fats in the Small Intestine and Blood Sugar Regulation 

After the several hours required by the stomach and upper small intestine to mix up fatty foods and cover them with the necessary digestive juices, the broken down pieces (still full of undigested fats) move along, deeper into the small intestine.  In this 7 meter long tube (that’s 23 feet or so!), continued digestion is taking place (thanks pancreas!) along with the all-important process of nutrient absorption!  The small intestine is covered with little finger-like protrusions called villi which you probably learned about in grade school health class.  In case you forgot, just think of these villi as little portals to your bloodstream.  In the small intestine, your food (hopefully) finishes the process of being broken down into its most basic elements, is injected into your blood and then carried off to the various places in the body that are in need of those nutrients.  Now, I am surely oversimplifying the process, but this basic model is good for the intuitive level of understanding required to conceptualize how those evil fat globules mess everything up!  Those pestilent lipid laced punks hang around in this area of your body for up to 24-48 hours, coating the inside of your small intestine and blocking those blood stream portals!  It’s kind of like Stargate, except the nutrients are Kurt Russell and the stupid gate that won’t open because the evil egyptian speaking fat cells closed it off.  Speaking of aliens and other slimy creatures, all of us have experienced the slimy, greasy nature of fatty things – take your cooking oils for example.  If you spilled some on your counter or got it on your skin, you wouldn’t just wipe it up with a rag because it would still have a slippery, nasty film on it.  Instead, you would naturally reach for a bottle of soap to finish the clean up!  Well, in the absence of soap dispensers lining the walls (or Kurt Russel to save the day), our intestines have no choice but to put up with a film of fat covering every fold, turn and crevasse of that winding, twisting gut tube and coincident elevated level of fat molecules within the bloodstream (nasty!).  This coating of fat has the effect of drastically interfering with the absorption and the digestion of the ‘food stuff’ that is present there.  This is critically important when you consider a high fruit diet, because this film of fat a) prevents the body from correctly regulating your blood sugar level and b) prevents digestive enzymes from reaching this partially digested stream of food.  Focusing on part a), this interference in the blood sugar regulation mechanisms can lead to the types of unhealthy spikes and frantic insulin responses that eventually cause Type 2 diabetes.  The simple explanation is this:  in the absence of that troublesome fat coating, sugars can easily enter and exit the bloodstream, making a high fruit diet a healthy, easy, efficient and awesome way to fuel your body!  However when the fat intake is not kept at very low levels, that troublesome sheet of fatty slime will causes large influxes of fruit sugars to be absorbed and regulated incorrectly.  This helps us to understand why ‘low fat’ is such an important component of the fruitmonster diet!  But wait… there is one more component.  Yes, that ‘part b’ I mentioned…funny, what timing… wait, what’s that smell?  Errr.. sorry, the FruitMonster ate some peanuts yesterday and now he’s paying for it…

Poot Propulsion

Fats in the Large Intestine (Colon)

Yes, so we’re on to part three, focusing on the processes that occur within the large intestine, i.e. colon, and the problems that farts…oops, I mean ‘fats’…cause in the poo tube.  For those of you who are ill-informed, the large intestine is where your poop is made, and I, the FruitMonster, love to make jokes about defecation.  There is pretty much nothing about the pooping process that isn’t humorous, from the grimaced faced abdominal squeezes, to the accompanying acoustics, from the olfactory aromas, to the ever pleasant and awesome ‘plops’ of the finale, taking a dump, as well as mocking the process, is full of flatulent fun.  And if you are one to consume fats and fruits in concert, well… your rear-end will play you quite the symphony.  This all relates back to the ‘fast’ versus ‘slow’ problem and the way that fats inhibit digestion.  When you eat fats before or with a fruity meal, you are surely destined for a ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ moment with your co-workers or an extremely embarrassing/tremendously satisfying (you choose) episode in a crowded elevator.  The sources of your gaseous vexation are the same as those which lead to the burping/bloating/reflux issues dealt with in the first trouble zone – the agents of fermentation.   Since your delicious, fast moving, easily digestible fruits were broken down and ready to be absorbed much more quickly then the accompanying fats, they were also surely ready to ‘get the heck out of you’ much sooner then they will be allowed to, having been held back by the loathsome lipid layers and godless lard globs.  Additionally, some small portions of food may have also been completely prevented from digestion/absorption, which putrefy in the bacteria rich colonic environment.   So the ‘fruit stuff’ (although hardly fruit anymore, we’ll entitle it according to its origin) begins to literally rot inside of you, which leads to off-gassing, including the release of pockets of methane and the coinciding seat-rumbling vibrations that expel them.  These joke ridden, pull-my-finger prone moments are not just temporary blights of all-that-is-holy, they are also a sign that toxic and nasty things are happening inside of you that you would be much better off preventing!  No one wants rotten, toxin exuding chemical processes occurring inside their bodies, and only a sinister select few enjoy the ‘crop dusting’ opportunities that result.

The Low Fat Diet is Essential!

So to sum it up, a low fat diet is very important for fruitmonstering!  It prevents the issues that arise with burping/reflux by maintaining a fresh and healthy stomach environment which is free of festering fat pools.  It allows for the rapid digestion and absorption of your fruit meals, smoothies and juices, while allowing your body to quickly and easily regulate your blood sugar levels.  This efficient blood sugar regulation is the way your body was designed to operate, making it unnecessary to worry about consuming ‘so many carbs’/'all that fructose’ as many doubters of the fruitmonster way will surely protest.  There are no ‘sugar highs’ or ‘crashes’ on a low-fat, high carb, fruit driven diet and no need to pay heed to those dreaded ‘glycemic indices’ everyone seems so worried about (assuming that your sugar intake is in the form of fruit, not refined sugars!).  Lastly, a low fat diet will prevent you from getting ‘fruit farts’, as you avoid the processes causing fermentation and rot inside your body, allowing you to fruitmonster your way through a mountain of mangoes or a pile of peaches without having to sacrifice your social life due to the ‘silent but deadly’ syndrome.

So eat your fruits, skip the fats and discover for yourself what being healthy truly feels like!

More on the ‘fat’ topic later!

—–

*It takes about 48 hours for all the fats to be eliminated from your body, so if you want to try a low-fat, fruit based approach, you will need to give it a few days of effort!

**”Low Fat” implies getting less than 10% of your calories from fat… try our nutridiary.com to track your fat intake, you will be surprised how much you are eating!

This is part 3 of ‘Becoming The FruitMonster’.  If you haven’t read part 1 or part 2, be sure to read those first!

Yeah, so I’m back to the stomach stuff…. Greeeeaaat you may say, but I promise, this will get somewhere useful!  Mainly onto how I discovered this crazy fruitmonster diet!.

Nope, Sorry Doc, Try Again

The Joys of Prevacid

Last I left you, I was diagnosed with duodenal and peptic ulcers and prescribed a prevacid panacea which was to eliminate all of my problems right?  Eeeeehhhhhh!  Wrong!  (That was my attempt at a “you got it wrong” buzzer). Forget fixing things, how about just diving further down the mystical rabbit hole that is the human digestion process?  Do you know what prevacid even does?  It uses chemicals to damn up your digestive juices.  It’s known as a PPI or proton-pump inhibitor, which stops your body from producing the acidic soup in your stomach.

This has all sorts of great results in your body!  Yeah, like making it extremely hard for your body to digest the food you eat… your body produces that stuff for a very good reason: you need it to live!  The result?  My energy level,  emotional vitality and my very passion in life were leeched from me.  I was irritable, tired, felt weak and came to deserve the title “FartMonster” rather than the self-titled tweet-world alternative.

In a PPI Phunk

Sometimes a I would feel nauseous and vomit a few hours after I ate:  my food would come up looking as if I had just eaten it.  All of this because my digestion was no longer working correctly!  You take it for granted, but your digestive tract and what you put into it are the basis of your very life force.  Another joyful side effect of this delightful drug?  An overproduction of the gastrin hormone in your body, high levels of which are linked to increased rates of cancer!  Great, don’t take it, get esophageal cancer, do take it and get colon cancer or worse.

A Lose-Lose Situation

Pop 'Em Like Skittles, Pink Skittles

Between a gallstone and a hard turd, I found myself.  These symptoms all seemed to grow worse as I continued on for a year, waking up to the same routine:  alarm -> pretty pink pill -> shut down an essential life-giving process -> internal chaos and despair.  The best part?  My stomach still hurt!  I continued to have acid-reflux and stomach ulcer symptoms!  The doctor’s solution?  ”Oh, it must not be enough.  Take another pill before dinner time.”  Naturally, I obey like a good pharma puppet, and I’m left to pop prescription like three year old with a bag of Skittles (pop? try straight pounding prevacid to the face with that analogy).

We are now into winter quarter of my senior year of college in beautiful Athens, Ohio  and I’m fed up, not happy and ready to embrace another solution.  A friend of mine at the time had given me a well timed birthday gift, a book:  ”Ulcer Free“.  I believe I read nearly the entire book the first day I owned it.  Between that book and a lot of personal research I did on the Internetz, I felt both frustrated and confident enough to start down a new path, a whole new holistic and hopeful one.

Pharmaceutical Addiction

So I cut the prevacid cold turkey and started trying a slew of new things:  DGL Licorice, Aloe Vera, Omega 3 pills, Vitamin this-that-and-the-other and a funky little chemical combo called zinc-carnosine.  Now cutting a PPI drug off usually leads one into a stage where their body overproduces acid and serious pain endures.  One must wean themselves off of a PPI a few days at a time, or they can do some serious damage to their insides.  So, after a year of damming up my acid factories, you’d think my body would do the same… but it never did.  That’ because my digestive capabilities never fully came back; in fact I believe that taking prevacid permanently damaged my body’s ability to produce enough stomach acid and sent my body into a dsyfunctional hormone balance.

Essentially Addicted

Obviously, I cannot prove this to you, but I can tell you that prior to taking it and after taking it, my stomach operated in very different ways.  In fact to this day, I still endure digestive weakness and poor motility (thats gut motion for all you stomach-stupid folks ) which I believe to be correlated to my year of taking 1-2 of those worthless, life-long drugs.  Oh, did I forget to mention that part?  Prevacid, Nexium and all those other PPIs:  people don’t usually ever stop taking them.  Sounds like a great way to make money, kind of like cigarettes, in that pharmaceutical addiction is exactly what this is.  However, not of the same mother as a nicotine fix, this one is addictive because it DOES NOT SOLVE PROBLEMS, IT TREATS SYMPTOMS and that is a process that does not end my friends.

DGL Licorice – The Defender

Stomach Pain? Stomach This Solution!

Hopping off of my soap box and unbunching my panties, I voyage on into a lighter subject of sorts.  The holistic path had actually been quite helpful!  I had found my own medicinal manna:  DGL Licorice.  DGL has that funky acronym in front of it because it needs to be … let me get this right, **reaches into desk drawer for handy pill bottle** Ah yes, Deglycyrrhizinated (double, triple checked for spelling, scout’s honor).  That means that a critical component of licorice that produces ultra-high blood pressure has been removed (extra good for me, I already had that problem).  But the basic benefits of licorice remain:  when licorice is mixed with your saliva, it encourages your mucosal membranes to produce extra mucous!  That may sound *snort, hock, spit* a bit disgusting, but mucous is actually what keeps your stomach from eating itself!   This makes licorice a great natural remedy for just about ANY stomach pain, because it shields your stomach wall and all those nerves from the dangers of HCl.

So my new solution?  Taking two chewable DGL Licorice tabs before every meal, drinking aloe vera juice (yes you can drink it and if your stomach ails you, you should too!), making sure I was up on all my vitamins and taking Zinc Carnosine*.

Zinc Carnosine – The Healer

To the Rescue!

Zinc Carnosine… a strange name for something to be popping into your body.  Well not that strange if you really start reading about what the traditional American ingests.   Try reading the ingredients of your next meal:  If you know what more than 90% of them are, congrats, you are one of two things:  a) a really healthy eater, go  you!  or b)  a chemist.

So don’t be scared of its rather pre-historic title, it is, in fact a powerful combo of stomach-wall-healing-goodness.  It is two things:  Zinc (the mineral) and L-Carnosine, a dipeptide bond composed of two essential amino acids, L-histidine and beta-alanine.  Yes, I read that from the book.  Take it to say:  it literally adheres to stomach sores and encourages them to heal.  This is supported by multiple scientific studies and can be verified by yours truly.  THE STUFF WORKS.  (*Disclaimer, Zinc Carnosine is NOT vegetarian and I was not a vegetarian at the time I was taking it!)

Although it took me well into my first year of graduate school, by pounding those delightful DGL  chewables and religiously taking the Zinc Carnosine twice a day, I was able to free myself of my ulcer pain!  If you’re interested in trying this, you should take DGL every 2-4 hours or so, before your stomach starts hurting and then also whenever your stomach feels upset (post jalapeno popper fest 2011).  This, in addition to cutting out things that I identified as trouble foods (well except beer… I loved me some beer back in those days), I was able to heal my ulcer problems completely.

Whoopee! Ulcer Free!

Hooray for Holistic Healing!

To this day, I am indeed “Ulcer Free” – thanks Georgie-Porgie! If you or someone you know has ulcer problems (or any stomach pain at all), buy them some DLG and Zinc Carnosine (Swansonvitamins.com Rocks!)  and tell them to read this (and my other) posts.  They don’t have to suffer anymore and neither do you!  Start the healing today!

Now, cutting away from the info-mercial crapola I just pulled (Swanson referral code #47AB3 include my name in the referral section of the order form, that’s N-I-C-…. haha, no seriously, I’m just kidding) you might be fooled into thinking that the story ends happily with my ulcers forever vanquished!  Well, it turns out, for all the progress on my stomach pain, I was still suffering from daily bouts with acid-reflux and generally slow (and coincidently very fragrant… I have cleared rooms people and I have a reputation, be glad this is the internet and blogs are not smell inclusive) digestion.  No, unfortunately these problems continued to worsen, down a slippery and likely esophageal-cancer-ridden slope.

But, alas!  Never fear, my fiance is here!  It just so happens, the love of my life is the reason I’m doing this whole little face-book-food-freak0ut-and-blog-o-twit-ter-sphere thing.  Because it was her that helped me realize the key to managing my cranky-chronically-complaining-craptastic stomach issues… but that my friends, is for next time….

Part 1

Part 2

Part 4

This is part 2 of ‘Becoming The FruitMonster’.  If you haven’t read part 1, be sure to read that first!

In my previous post, I let you in a little secret of mine:  how terribly I treated my digestive system during my freshman year of college.  When you hear about the way I used to eat, it’s not really that surprising that I have some problems with how my general gut function behaves.  Pounding four hamburger patties at a time… ridiculous!  The human body was not meant to eat the way I did, and although a lot of people could get away with eating in that manner, I was/am unfortunately of poor genetic quality in the digestive realm already.

Genetic Grievances

Somwhere in There. It Says 'Weak Stomach'

There are a number of digestive issues on both my mother and father’s side of the family.  Most notably my father, who is on Nexium (evil stuff! stay away! I want him off of it!) and has weekly, if not daily bouts with acid-reflux and stomachaches and probably does not posses the healthiest colon function (but who honestly talks to their father at length about droppin deuces anyway?).  Also my mother’s father and sister are both victims of poop-poor (as in piss-poor?) genetics.  The prior has always had a sensitive stomach, and can’t eat certain “trouble foods” (if you have digestive problems, you need to identify which are yours!) and the latter who has a very hard time with her lower digestive tract.  It doesn’t end there!  Both my dad’s mother and sister have had gallbladder removals and, most unfortunately, my brother and sister have both, in the last year, began to exhibit acid-reflux symptoms and general food-factory malaise.

Wince, Exclaim, Moan

So I’m screwed from the start right?  I have all sorts of digestive ailments in my family that I’m doomed to realize in some form or another in my life, from BOTH sides of my genetic make-up (imagine a sperm popping two tums and an egg cell doing a uterine inspired version of the pepto-bismul dance during my conception).  And THEN I go off to college and eat like a freakin’ maniac. GREAT.  Smart move fruity-pants, no wonder why your howlin’ about your bowels to the blogosphere.

The First Signs of Reflux

So we exit freshman year, and I leave the generously stocked Jefferson Dining Hall for a summer of home-cooking.  I was a lifeguard during the summers at that time, spending a lot of time outdoors in the heat, working and burning a lot of calories, and also, not eating nearly as much as I did in the prior months.  So what did the sudden drop in calorie intake do to me? Well it left me in a state of over-production of stomach acid and lead to my first symptoms of acid reflux.  After about a month of time at home, I began feeling pain in my chest like I needed to burp after I ate.  My dad of course suggested I ‘try some Tums’, but those didn’t really help me much (if you know anything about stomach chemistry, you’ll know that medicine like Tums actually spikes your acid production after the initial drop), instead I found refuge in the pepto-trio (pictorially defamed above).  As the summer went on, the problem just got worse and by the end of it, I was visiting the doctor.  And what did good old doc doctor me up with?  A little pestilent purple pill called Nexium.  Thankfully, I only took them a handful (pun?) of times, where upon not realizing any positive effects, I stopped taking them.

So, into my sophomore year of college, the reflux continued to get worse, first only bothering me during the day, but then also slowly creeping up my throat at night.  It wasn’t enough to bother me into going back to the doctor, but it sure was a nuisance.  During this time, I was also right back into lifting and eating heavily (an eat-o-holic?) again, eager to put back on the 15-20lbs I lost over the summer. Although, it was definitely a tamer version of what I had been doing as a frosh (considering Jared, my lifting buddy, was recovering from shoulder surgery – due to an injury incurred while we fervently were pumping iron the year before.  I have I mentioned we were stupid?), but it was certainly still enough to torture my stomach further.  Throughout that year, my bouts of stomach pain became increasingly more frequent and my reflux symptoms more intense, a trend that continued (sparing you too many details ) into the autumn of my junior of college, where it finally reached a tipping point… and I was headed back to the medicine man.

So, What’s Up Doc?

It's About as Fun as It Looks

This time my doctor was in Athens, where I went to school.  He was an older man, probably in his 60s, and was “by the book” kind of guy who didn’t really analyze his patients as individuals, but instead viewed them as problem sets in his med school books and a test subjects of his research journals (a gripe probably applicable to most medical professionals out there).  What did he recommend?  Well to begin, an upper endoscopy, which is where they knock you out, wheel you into a cold dark room half-conscious, shove a tube down your throat, light up your insides, and then leave you to puke on yourself in a recovery room while forcing you to leave earlier than your ability to sit-up straight and reason coherently returns.  Sounds wonderful eh?  Well I have now done this twice, with the ONLY upside to this predicament being the follow up review of the hilarity  of my anesthetized antics.  I say it’s the ‘only’ upside because A) it SUCKED and B) both times I have done this, I have gotten bad news when I was done.

This time, I was diagnosed with duodenal and peptic ulcers.  Meaning that while food was sitting in my stomach and as it emptied into my small intestine, hydro-chloric acid was running over open canker-sore-like wounds on my insides.  No wonder why I was in so much pain!  Also, as a double whammy, I was also exhibiting the initial symptoms of erosive esophagitus (aka, my stomach acid was doing a caustic tap dance on my swallow tube).  My response “Thanks for making my day doc! Now what?”  His stupid suggestion?  Prevacid.  A proton-pump inhibitor which, when taken first thing in the morning would stop the secretion of my gastro-intestinal digestive juices.  In theory, this increased stomach pH (less acidic!) would allow those ulcers to magically disappear, my insides would be wondrously healed and I would smile just like the actors lying through their falsely whitened teeth in the television commercials.

Pretty Pink Prevacid Pill, 30mg

So of course, being brought up believing “Doc knows best!”, I took those pretty pink pills every morning, religiously.  Because I sure as heck wanted to feel better!  Little did I know that I was dooming my body’s ability to ever digest properly again, but I will save that one for post 3.  Gotta take it easy on this stomach talk, or I might give someone an ulcer

This is part 1 of ‘Becoming The FruitMonster’.

So, yes, I eat “strangely”.  Although, I would argue that, given the evolutionary history of mankind, that it is actually the general populous in the developed world, that eats strangely.  I’m the one trying to eat in the manner that my body was designed to, rather than in the extremely messed up way that Americans are eating in this day in age.  Did you know that a statistic came out last week that 1 in 2 Americans will have diabetes by 2020?  The way we eat in this country and the rest of the developed world is a serious problem, and it certainly is not getting any better.

Kids These Days...

My recent tweeting of my dietary habits and my posts on this blog have naturally lead people to question the way I eat.  And believe me, I can understand why many of you are curious, especially my close friends, because not even they really understand the extent of the serious digestive health issues I have suffered from over the past 6 years.  It is these digestive health issues that I have lead me to create this website.  This entry, and the others that will follow it (this is has become quite the saga!), will hopefully shed some light on the mystery that surrounds “Nick’s stomach issues”.  I have tried to explain it all to an inquisitive friend from time to time, but the story has so many twists and turns, that it is difficult to hold someone’s attention for the length of time required for me to elaborate fully.

The Foolish Frosh

The Freshman 15, But of a Different Sort

The story begins with me as a freshman in college, set out to gain his freshman fifteen.  That’s right, what every eighteen year old girl fears through giggly thigh nightmares, I dreamed happily of.  I wanted to hit the multi-million dollar, beautiful Ping Fitness Center at Ohio University with a muscle driven fervor.  In short, I wanted to get jacked.  Jacked and tan.

You see, I had always been self-conscious about being a thin guy.  Worrying about my body constantly in high-school, comparing myself to the other guys around me, who all seemed to have more athletic physiques than I.  At this point in my life, embarking upon my collegiate journey, I probably felt that if I had bigger muscles, I would be more attractive, assertive and well… happier.

So my buddy Jared and I hit the weight room.  But not the way that every other foolhardy freshman frat-tast did, showing up for the first two weeks and then disappearing, we were in that place religiously, like the grey-hairs at the local diner breakfast.  Pumping iron a solid five-days a week, with routines customized for us by a personal trainer.  Our work-outs would take an hour or more to complete, and we would be sore for days after pushing our bodies to the limit each session.  Sometimes we would even spend our Friday or Saturday night there, to beat the crowds.  This was some great bonding for the two of us, and probably kept us out of a lot of trouble (but definitely not out of trouble entirely ).

Dining Hall Monster… Not as Catchy

Jefferson Hall...Where it All Began

But building up your body is not just thrusting weight plates, lactic acid and sweatbands, it also involves a LOT of eating, especially if you have a naturally fast metabolism (yours truly).  Lucky for us, the university dining halls just happen to offer a plethora of choices when it came to chomping calories, and boy did I ever chomp.  I POUNDED food, I’m talking facing eats by the plateful.  Returning to the buffet line thrice routinely.   And what did I eat?  None other than protein son!  Plenty of it.  But please, hold the carbs.  I would stack my plate with breaded shrimp, creating a mound of peeled off carb mush when I was done.  Breaded fish or chicken? Same story.  What it’s wok wednesday?  Give me double beef and go light on the teryaki sauce.  You could even catch me stacking hamburger patties three or four at a time on my burgers (suck on that cholesterol total Big Mac!).  Oh, and for breakfast time, you could find me gobbling up scrambled eggs galore, with mounds of bacon and sausage. Dr. Atkins would be delighted… but he is too dead to share in our elation (yeah, from a heart attack… what a great doctor!).

Shaker of Death

What’s worse, each meal, I would eat until I was STUFFED.  When I was doing this, I was unknowingly putting all sorts of bad pressure on the junction of my stomach and esophagus, creating some seriously bad mojo (which will be an important thing to remember later – part 4!).  All in the name of the gun show, ladies.  Man I was an idiot.  But I’m sorry to say, it gets worse.  Jared and I, we were slamming down double protein shakes of 64 grams of protein a piece.  Not once, not twice, but three times a day.  7 days a week.  We would get these in between meals, after workouts and before we went to bed at night.  We were such dummies that we bought two 50 pound sacks of chocolate protein powder to meet this savage demand for whey, never once considering how terrible this was for us (especially our heart health).

I Gained Weight, A lot of It!

Me at 174lbs - Jacked, Tan and Unhealthy

You may ask, “Well Nick, did all this hard work and binge eating pay off?”  Well, yes it did.  When I first went off to college, I weighed about 145-150 lbs.  But by spring break of freshman year, I had packed on almost 30 pounds, clocking in at 173-174 lbs.  During this time, I had put on some extra fat, but most of it was muscle gains.  On the outside, my body looked great.  Although, the most interesting thing about the whole process is that I was never satisfied with the amount I had gained (how’s that for psychological head games!), and was always anxiously asking for additional additions to my digital scale reading.

However, by the end of my first year at Ohio U, my digestive system was in the process of breaking down.  I had overwhelmed it with a ridiculous influx of calories, on the order of nothing my body could have anticipated or properly dealt with.  My pancreas had been red-lined producing all those extra digestive enzymes, along with my stomach being stretched beyond its capacity at every meal, and my intestinal tract being asked to work extremely hard and without any chance to rest (believe it or not, fasting is amazingly healthy for your body!).

It was during my first summer home after freshman year that I began to experience the initial symptoms of this break down.  But I will save that for part 2. Told you this was a long story

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4