For no better reason than the box of meal replacement shakes we bought came with enough for 16 breakfasts, I stopped my liquid breakfast experiment at 16 days.
Overall, I would rate the experiment a success. Although I still felt sick during the first week, the IBS symptoms did start fading in the second week Almost without my noticing, I was sleeping better and having regular movement in my bowels. There was still gas happening, but it wasn’t as painful. And, right about now, I’m happy to settle for not as painful.
I’m going to keep aiming to drink about a gallon of water per day, because that seems to help no matter what else I’m doing. And I’m just going to see how going back to a normal breakfast does for me. I don’t want to stick with the liquid breakfast, because I’ve been burned too many times by sticking to something that seems to work.
So I stopped rather than waiting for the inevitable failure of the liquid breakfast diet, where I made a rule for myself that I would not eat solid food until I had been awake for at least 4 hours, in addition to consuming the meal replacement shakes. On days when I did 5am Crossfit, that wasn’t much of a hardship – up by 4:30, snacks allowed by 8:30. I usually wasn’t even hungry by that point. The weekends were a little more difficult. The longer I slept in, the longer I had to wait to eat solid food.
The first weekend of the liquid diet, I slept in to 7:30 on Saturday and 7 on Sunday. Waiting to long to eat “real” food was too hard, so I ended up getting up at 6 both mornings the following weekend. 10 was a much better time to wait for than 11. Though during the week when I was at work, it wasn’t that hard to wait til 10 or even 12 some days, a good 7.5 hours after I woke up. Keeping busy will make time fly.
Now starts the chaos experiment. I’m not going to get into another rut. No more than two weeks eating the same kind of breakfast every day. Of course, I’m expecting that my body will decide to work on larger cycles and I’ll end up being just as confused about what works and what doesn’t in another 6 months. But I’m going to try. I have to keep trying. This IBS thing is a puzzle and I do like solving puzzles.