Gastritis Support Group
Gastritis is a medical term for inflammation of the lining of the stomach. It means that white blood cells move into the wall of the stomach as a response to some type of injury. Gastritis has many underlying causes, from infection with the bacterium H. pylori, bile reflux, or excessive consumption of alcohol or certain foods or drugs like aspirin.
Hi all
I have been suffering with what I think is a gastritis flare up since April brought on by a combination of a huge tub of chocolate ice cream, stress and finally a cucumber sandwich which finished the job in horrendous fashion.
I am on every drug and supplement imaginable and have found it has slowly been getting better recently with a combination of PPIs, DGL, PepzinGI, Elavil and Slippery Elm, but my biggest problem is I am consistently losing weight because I just cannot eat enough.
I have been seeing a dietician and saw her today, and she is very concerned, which has got me worried now. I have always had a hard time putting on weight, requiring in excess of 3000 kcals a day to put on weight. At the moment I just cannot physically eat that amount.
Over the last couple of weeks my diet has been getting increasingly lax, eating huge wedges of cakes, biscuits, drinking water with huge amounts of sugar in it. The weight is still coming off and my stomach just can't take the diet anymore, last night I ate a huge amount and today I can tell, my stomachs saying stop.
I've tried adding a little oil to rice and things like that but my stomach seems to hate oil. Its a little more relaxed about cakes and such, but eventually it takes its toll. How am I to stop the weightloss? It's been almost 6 months now since it started and in another 6 months at this rate I'll be a skeleton.
My various gastro tests have shown inflammation and cobblestoning in the terminal illeum which could mean I have Crohn's disease, I'm awaiting the results of a full bowel camera capsule test soon to find out. They already started me on drugs for Crohn's/IBD, one of them immediately made my stomach lurch and I read the sheets and it had plenty of warnings about stomach ulcers etc, so I stopped it after talking to my GP. I'm still on a month long trial of the other which seems to cause a bit of nausea but nothing huge.
Just not sure what to do...
I have been suffering with what I think is a gastritis flare up since April brought on by a combination of a huge tub of chocolate ice cream, stress and finally a cucumber sandwich which finished the job in horrendous fashion.
I am on every drug and supplement imaginable and have found it has slowly been getting better recently with a combination of PPIs, DGL, PepzinGI, Elavil and Slippery Elm, but my biggest problem is I am consistently losing weight because I just cannot eat enough.
I have been seeing a dietician and saw her today, and she is very concerned, which has got me worried now. I have always had a hard time putting on weight, requiring in excess of 3000 kcals a day to put on weight. At the moment I just cannot physically eat that amount.
Over the last couple of weeks my diet has been getting increasingly lax, eating huge wedges of cakes, biscuits, drinking water with huge amounts of sugar in it. The weight is still coming off and my stomach just can't take the diet anymore, last night I ate a huge amount and today I can tell, my stomachs saying stop.
I've tried adding a little oil to rice and things like that but my stomach seems to hate oil. Its a little more relaxed about cakes and such, but eventually it takes its toll. How am I to stop the weightloss? It's been almost 6 months now since it started and in another 6 months at this rate I'll be a skeleton.
My various gastro tests have shown inflammation and cobblestoning in the terminal illeum which could mean I have Crohn's disease, I'm awaiting the results of a full bowel camera capsule test soon to find out. They already started me on drugs for Crohn's/IBD, one of them immediately made my stomach lurch and I read the sheets and it had plenty of warnings about stomach ulcers etc, so I stopped it after talking to my GP. I'm still on a month long trial of the other which seems to cause a bit of nausea but nothing huge.
Just not sure what to do...
I'm lucky if I can eat the equivalent to one meal spread throughout the day. If I ate the huge wedges of cake and sugary water, I'd be in the ER. My gastritis and GERD are on overdrive, so I get full easy and am very limited in what I can eat.
My weight is also dropping. At 132 pounds, I'm certainly no skeleton, but if things continue like this, I will be.
Boost has some really good nutritional drinks that are lactose and gluten free. Would that help you at all? I drank them during my last bout of gastritis. I'm going back on that to at least get the daily nutrition I need. I wonder if these drinks will keep me from losing anymore weight?
Wish I could give you more advice, but I'm in that same bad place myself. Did your dietician give you any tips for keeping your weight up?
This piece to piece eating has made it hard to stay on the Carafate. Can't get the timing right. And really, I feel better without it.
Using a lot of Ensure. I have pretty much leveled off around 83 to 84 lbs.... give or take. Doctors don't seem to be worried about it. Hope you can start gaining. Feel better!
So you not only damage your gastritic stomach by eating "cakes", but you're trying to get diabetes? You're saying you eat cakes, but you can't eat "enough" cakes? What is going on there?
If you're capable of digesting something as demanding as cakes, then you're perfectly capable of having two chicken legs for breakfast.
Aren't you?
Why not just eat boiled chicken with mashed potatoes for a while? Just a relatively healthy diet which includes meat?
Stop obsessing with the weight differential and just eat healthy normal food!
If you can't graduate to eating boiled chicken, then you should slowly raise yourself on the scale of food difficulty:
white rice
oatmeal
mashed boiled egg
boiled chicken/baked salmon
If you can't eat chicken, then try a mashed egg 3 times a day after oatmeal. Eventually try oatmeal, 30 mins later followed by a carefully chewed chicken leg.
Be disciplined. Use a system. And drop the cakes!
I understand very well the loss of weight and the fear attached to it. My theory fell somewhere between trying to eat the healthiest options and eating ANYTHING I could safely eat, be it cakes, biscuits or fruit. Has your dietician mentioned a protein supplement? It was my saviour as I clawed my way back. I was happy to stop losing weight. That will balance out and weight gain will happen. Can you eat eggs, cheese and/or yogurt? They are great as they have protein and fats.
Don't beat yourself for your current eating habits. It is probably comfort eating and lord knows with this nightmare we need that now and then.
- shihonage - in life we get more with sugar than vinegar. We are here to support one another through difficult times.
Kindness has its uses but its not a panacea.
I don't mean to be mean, Andy, but you need to snap out of it, for your own sake.
CindysRain, sorry to hear you are having a rough time of it, I was like that a few months ago and basically had to force myself to eat despite the pain. Now I'm a bit better and can at least eat sensible foods without too much discomfort, so hopefully you'll see improvement like I did.
Littlemart, I was on carafate tablets and like you think they actually made me worse. I stopped them and felt no different but when I took one again I got a burning in my stomach. I find Slippery Elm much better for coating the stomach, though it tastes revolting.
I bought some Soy protein powder (I dont eat dairy) and have been having some of it but it makes me feel a bit nauseated. I tried mixing it with a little oats and sugar then making it into bars and baking, which seems to better for nausea though I get a little stomach pain after it.
Shihonage, I don't just eat cakes, I have at most one wedge a day but that seems to be enough to set back my healing after a few days of it. The problem is my girlfriend keeps bringing them home and I just can't resist when its sitting in the kitchen. I've told her to stop though so hopefully wont be a problem now.
The rest of my diet is pretty bland, I have gluten free bread and an egg or some chicken for breakfast, lunch is either sandwich, home made fish stew with potatoes or rice and fish, and something similar in the evening. For snacks I've been having soy yoghurts, cakes, banana bread, biscuits, protein bars, gluten free bread. I think the snacks is the problem but without them I'm not getting enough calories. I've tried oatmeal in the past just made with water but it makes me feel nauseated, I've done a lot better since sticking to a lower fibre diet.
You WILL have many occasions when you're near tasty food which you should not eat, and if you eat it you will set yourself back by weeks.
You have to start being serious about discipline and using existing experience of other people who've been through this.
If you can eat fish and chicken everyday, then you can slowly raise the quantity of them until it's normal. Baked salmon can taste pretty good and is pretty safe. Plain boiled chicken tastes acceptable. Mashed boiled eggs.
Cottage cheese (tvorog) with some sugar sprinkled.
If you can eat these things, plus rice, bananas, baked/thoroughly microwaved potatoes, then your diet isn't so bad. After a couple of weeks of this you should be able to eat them in normal quantities and start adding SANE ITEMS to your diet.
Not cakes or protein bars, not ice-cream, not energy drinks or sodas, not tomatoes, garlic, onions, spicy foods...
You don't have to taste slippery elm. You can buy it in capsules and it still works.
I just don't get what's happening with you. If you have enough hunger to eat snacks, then you can also be hungry enough to eat aforementioned chicken, fish, eggs.
If you eat those things in normal quantities, as long as you manage to quench your appetite, the weight loss doesn't matter. If your body gets the majority of what it needs, it will give you the energy you need to function.
If you have a sugar craving that just doesn't go away, try eating this, but only after meals:
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Valley-Chewy-Trail-Forty-Eight/dp/B001IMUHCU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412435417&sr=8-1
This used to be my relatively safe "Snickers bar replacement" for a long time. It's not perfect by any means, and it won't "fill out your calories requirements", but it is tasty and sweet and much easier on the stomach than protein bars or cakes.
When you're stuck on a plain diet, which after a while can feel pretty disgusting, things like that, or aforementioned cottage cheese+sugar combo, can be the much needed "sanity snacks", and palate resetters.
Not sure how these protein powders will work on my stomach. I saw one that has high potency B12 which I'm concerned about.
I actually had a good day today. No more cucumber sandwiches for me! I love raw veggies, but they tear my gut up.
Wanted to tell you that the boiled chicken and mash potatoes Shihonage talked about really does lay well on my tummy too. I think they are both relatively safe foods. The BRAT diet, or bananas, rice, applesauce (no sugar added) and toast has always been safe for me too. I love applesauce on toast (no butter).
I keep a food journal and document everything I eat and how my tummy felt after. Even though we all suffer with the same thing, one of us can eat something, that someone else cannot handle.
Hang in there!