Changing My Health

Today has probably been the worst day I have had since about week 2 of being off the PPI's. Some of my symptoms have increased from where they were. I now have a lot of gas and bloating, which I haven't had for awhile, and I have had heartburn almost all day, which is something I have not experienced since the first week of being off PPI's. I think by getting back to my normal diet of just fruits, vegetables, and meat, it is forcing all the toxins I ate over the weekend to be removed from my body. I will have to remember this in the future so I do not consume certain types of foods again. The things I ate that are normally not part of my diet were pumpkin pie, processed lunch meat, potatoes, some potato chips, and stuffing. I blame it on being at someone elses house and not having access to foods I would normally eat and wanted to eat something, but the fault is my own as I just didn't feel like going to the store to get other foods due to the weather. I would have had to take my kids with me and it was cold, raining, and windy. I'm just hoping the recovery from my actions will only last a day or two and I'll be right back on track.

With thanksgiving tomorrow I'm hoping that I'll be able to stay on track. Over the last 2 weeks I have gotten myself to consume less meat and more vegetables for each meal. Where I used to eat a whole chicken breast, now one chicken breast will feed me, my wife, my 4 year old and 1 year old. My wife likes it because she is losing weight and I like it because it helps with the gerd. I guess we'll see how the next four days go. I'm hoping I'm able to keep control and not take in anything that will make it worse again like a couple weeks ago.

Happy thanksgiving everyone and hope all of you have a pain free weekend!

I was at usally 3 pepsid's during the day. 1 before lunch, 1 before dinner, and 1 at bedtime. Now I am down to 1 before lunch and 1 at bedtime and I rarely feel any heartburn coming on. I do get LPR symptoms after I eat though. I've been drinking alkaline water to try and help with that. The store bought alkaline water tends to help a bit but was costing too much so I got some alkaline drops to put in my tap water that we filter with a brita pitcher. It doesn't seem to do the same for me. I'm not sure if it has something to do with the other stuff in the water that the brita pitcher doesn't remove like chlorine. I'm thinking of getting an RO unit put in. But I can say that when I look back over the past few months since coming off the PPI's, things have been improving quite a bit and they continue to improve. I'm down to taking just the DGL and L-Glutamine for supplements. I'm still juicing and estimate the servings of fruits and vegetables a day is 8-10. Before I started this I was lucky to eat 2 servings a day. I'm also able to enjoy some other things every now and then that would cause me a lot of pain even just a few weeks ago such as chocolate. At this rate I'm hoping to move down to 1 pepcid a day in a month or two.

As I continue on with my progress I have just reduced my pepsid down to 1 a day and tums as needed. So far it seems to be going good but only time will tell. If I can make it past the first few days to a week then I think I'll stick with just 1 a day before bed and just take tums as needed after meals. Things still seem to be improving but more at a snails pace compared to how it was in the beginning after getting off the PPI's. I am happy that I have only taken H2-blockers since getting off PPI's and have survived just fine.

I have found that it is difficult for me to stick with a specific schedule with supplements long term. Right now I am taking a probiotic in the morning, but usually forget to take it on the weekends and the same for L-Glutimine except that it is taken mid-morning. I rarely ever take DGL anymore and have stopped all other supplements and haven't noticed any difference. I have noticed that either apples or alkaline water makes my throat feel worse but am doing some tests to determine what it is. I have a surplus of apples at the moment so I have stopped drinking alkaline water and continue to eat the apples to see if there is a change over the next couple days. If not then I will start the alkaline water up again and stop eating apples and see how I feel. I know some apples make me feel worse than others, so I'm thinking the apples are the problem. I'll just have to find another fruit to snack on if that is the case. I probably won't post another update until things have improved to the point of taking 1 pepsid with no tums or if I have to go back to 2 pepsids, which I hope is not the case.

It's been awhile since I have updated this thread with how I am doing. Since my last post on this thread I have went back to 2 pepcid a day as the heartburn wasn't going away and didn't want to take so many tums. After awhile my stomach started to have some pain so I went down to 1 pepcid a day and the stomach pains went away. I also don't have any heartburn throughout the day anymore either so I rarely take any tums as well. I just take 1 pepcid before bed. I have also stopped taking all supplements.

The only time I tend to start to get any heartburn is when I eat a lot of protein, but once I eat some fruit after an hour of eating a lot of protein, the heartburn doesn't start up. Alkaline water also helps a lot with keeping the heartburn away. I've been down to 1 pepcid a day with 1 or 2 days of taking 1 tums for about a week now. I'm hoping things continue to go down this track. If so then I should be completely medication free within a few more months.

I've also gone back to eating the not so good things a little more as well and they don't bother me near as much as they have. I can now eat pancakes without any problems. I eat hamburgers on a bun again. Desert items don't bother me as much anymore, as long as I don't consume so much. I can't believe that it's been 7 months since I last took a PPI and I haven't went back. I hope anyone else that is trying to become medication free are able to get to the point I am at. It is nice to not have to remember to take things a certain times of the day and to be able to focus on other things that make you happier.

Right now I take a tums to ease the pain. 1 tums is all it takes for me. But there's a big difference between being on the H2-blockers and the PPI's. When I first came off the PPI's, the pain was unbearable and nothing I did eased the pain, short of going back on the PPI's, but I didn't want to so I just dealt with it and it sucked a lot. I wouldn't want to go through that again. But after awhile the pain lessened and became bearable until the H2-blockers was enough to keep the reflux at bay. The biggest thing that helped overall was the things I ate. It was hard at first but things are much easier now.

The reason why I wanted to get off the PPI's is because they just didn't seem to be working anymore. My dr. wanted to up my dose and when I did some research, I didn't want to do that. So I decided to make some major changes to my eating habits. I haven't had a dr. visit since I decided to take matters into my own hands. Through my research I have found that a lot of drs. know what drugs do what, but very little of them know how to find the underlying problem and fix that instead. If I could, I would find a naturopathic dr. and see what they would recommend for me to do. But I have searched for one in the area I live in and can't seem to find any within a reasonable distance. The only ones that I can find are doing most of their business as chiropractors. I have talked to a chiropractor that my wife sees every once and awhile and I seem to be more knowledgeable in this area than she is, even though she also teaches about good health and things like that. So far the only side effects I have had other than the heartburn from rebound is some IBS and LPR symptoms. They seemed to be more severe in the first few months but now I don't really have any symptoms of either. It is common for me to go 3-5 days without any heartburn now. I just have to watch how much of the bad stuff I eat. If I don't eat too much, then I don't have to worry.

I did try them but they didn't seem to help or make things worse so I stopped since it wasn't worth the effort of remembering to take them when I ate protein. Due to the fact that heartburn can develop due to not enough stomach acid, HCl tablets can help in those cases. It may bring some relief as well during rebound due to if you take them, your body may not produce any acid as it senses that it has enough to break down the food. The same thing applies if you take apple cider vinegar as well. But everybody's body is different so the only way to know for sure if it helps is to try it out.

I think the best thing that worked for me was sticking strictly to fruits, vegetables, and meats for food. I was eating about 2-3 servings of fruits, 5-8 servings of vegetables, and 1-2 servings of meat a day in the beginning. I also stopped cold turkey and was ready for the worst. I cut out all grain based items which included breads, pastas, and cereals. I didn't eat any heavy starch fruits and vegetables such as bananas and potatoes. I stuck strictly to the paleo approved foods so no corn, green beans, or peas. I made everything from scratch, just used fresh foods, nothing frozen. At first for meats I stuck strictly to chicken, turkey, and fish. Always fresh, never frozen. I have learned through research that sometimes frozen fish is better than fresh depending on how things are handled. Fresh from far away tends to lose a lot of value while fresh from local will most likely be best.

Juicing may be an option that could help as well as when you juice, everything is already broken down so your body needs very little to no acid and you'll get a boost of vitamins and minerals. If you need some sort of carbs, the thing that I am able to eat with little to no problems is white jasmine rice. I stay away from the brown jasmine rice as it contains things that are bad for the body based on research done by the paleo community. It is also probably best to eat any heavy carb items with a good fiber source so it will lessen the chance of insulin spikes.

Something that may help you understand what your body is going through is that your body produces something called gastrin. Your gastrin levels determine how much acid your body needs to produce. When on any acid suppressing medication, your gastrin levels go up which tells your body to produce more acid. Because the acid is being suppressed, it thinks it's not producing enough to break down the food. When weaning off, some people may find it difficult, or nearly impossible to deal with the pain due to the extra acid because as you start to wean off, you are actually producing too much acid due to the high gastrin levels. If you hang in there, your gastrin levels will drop down as your body determines that you are now producing too much acid so it regulates itself. With me at least, when I first came off the PPI's, nothing stopped the burning. I tried a lot of different things but nothing even came close to helping. I was going days on end with non-stop heartburn. I never went back to the PPI's though because I knew that my gastrin levels were still too high and had to just wait it out until they dropped down. I gave up after about 3 months and started taking H2-blockers but I was able to get relief from them vs. no relief from anything when on the PPI's.

One thing to note though is that everybody's body is different and reacts different to supplements and medications. But it does take time for the body to heal for everyone. I know that in order to continue down the path of becoming medication free, I need to keep on the eating habits I have now and can never go back to the way I used to eat. That's something else you need to be ready for. I don't eat pasta meals anymore because they caused me a lot of problems. I used to eat some sort of heavily processed desert almost every night. Now it's down to maybe once a week. I used to eat a lot of processed boxed/bag meals like hamburger helper or frozen food items. I now prepare and cook all food fresh. Grocery bill is still the same as well so for me food cost was not an issue. What it comes down to in the end is what is more important to you, the foods you eat or the quality of life you live? You will have to make sacrifices either way. I chose to sacrifice foods I enjoyed in order to live a better quality of life and am happier for that. Based on my experience I can't tell you if there is a pain free or lower pain path for you or not, but I do believe if you make the right choices and stick through it then you will eventually get to where you want to be. I was worried about things like Barret's and cancer but through some research I found that it can take years of acid exposure to the esophagus before these can become a problem. I figured a few months of acid exposure was worth the risk if I can stand the pain.

From my research I have found a lot of the problems may stem from our eating habits. Once you start to understand the effects different foods can have on you, you can then start to take control of your life and get back on track to a better quality of living. I hope this information helps you. I spent countless hours of researching what may be the causes of my problems and trying different things to fix the underlying problems. If you haven't, you should read through the first parts of this book. I think it does a good job at explaining some causes of acid reflux along with some other digestive problems. It helps with understanding why we have some problems and it makes sense to me. If you have a prime membership and a kindle, you can check it out for free, although I think the information is worth the price.

I hope some of this information will help you.