Question about digestion and working out

[The cornspiracy enjoyer]

Hello everyone,

I have been an anonymous reader of the forum for quite some time now, but finally decided to join the crew

Personally, i have been diagnosed with celiac disease 2 years ago in an endoscopy, my father has been diagnosed 2-3 weeks ago too. Sadly due to my ego i have really just started to eat completely gluten free around 5 months ago (since then i luckily had no contamination issues or anything similar due to very strict dieting and lable checking). 

I am a sportslover, working out between 3 and 5 days a week. 

Before going on a gluten diet, i had painful toilet sessions, diarrhea, cramping up heavily and no chance of absorbing nutrients. The food just gave me the cold shoulder and a drastic and nervous sprint to the toilet every morning, thrice.

In the first Phase of the gluten free diet i had the classic "inquisition" of symptoms. Being also sick with EBV during that period, so not able to do sports, my body stopped swelling, the brain fog lifted itself, my asthma literally disappeared and it really helped my digestion to the point of my stool being normal for the first time in years. Then it got worse and worse once more:

I noticed that once i did sports (weightlifting and cycling) again, my digestion became worse with every day that passed. Once more i am now in that same indigestion dilemma i was in before, yet without the pain, swelling and gluten induced issues that i had. I yet again seem unable to digest the food properly. I asked my coach and some friends, even changed diets and adapted the meal timing to not interfere at all with working out, the outcome was the same. The worst thing i can eat is carbs in high quantities, my body will spit them out without ever giving it a second thought, making me nauseus depressed and anxious after doing a dump - which coincidingly is daily and normaly in the earlier morning hours. I am not lactose intollerant, nor do i have any other food intolerance, so at least in terms of intolerance and allergy, it cant be the issue.

As for medical advice, i am kind of lost. In general, all of my childhood symptoms back in the day have been diagnosed as psychosomatic, hysteric and crying around by doctors, leaving me almost 21 years undiagnosed. When i did a blood test, my immune systems cell count and also the CRP value (value for finding infections inside the body) are -and im quoting my doctor- "outstandingly good", only having a raised bilirubin value due to genetic circumstances. The Transglutaminase antibody values were excellent too, which they werent, when at the endoscopy 2 years ago they took in a blood sample and found it positive for celiac disease.

Recovery of this digestive state takes about a week and a half, which then after 2 workout session immediately plumits into "the toilet" again...

which is why with all of this long backstory, i am now asking all my fellow sufferers for advice, since i have now gone through possible options and am too uncreative to find new ones:

 

Sure the obvious and most usefull thing to do would be to quit doing sports forever, but im an addict and its the only joy i have during these depressed times of diarrhea and going to work.

Is there any advice from you in supplementation and testing that i maybe havent done yet, that might help me out of this hell? Incurrently take probiotics and just eat gluten free. In general about supplementation, I have no clue tbh.

 

Thank you guys  

 

[trents]

So, to be clear, when you stop working out, all these bad symptoms disappear? May we ask your age?

Edited April 1, 2024 by trents

[The cornspiracy enjoyer]

Sure, im 23 right now. My sibling who hasnt gotten celliac works out this often too, but he has no issues at all. This is at least for me a sign, that it is related to celiac.

Normally the symptoms dont happen on the same day, but occur in the morning right after waking up. They include bad bowel movements, diarrhea, bloating, stomach pain and weirdly enough nose bleeding. They get better after not exercising, improving day by day. After about 7ish days they completely disappear and i dont hear from them until i start physical activity again.

[trents]

You state that these symptoms are at their worse when you eat high carbs. Have you been checked for gut infections such as candida or SIBO (Small Intestine Bacterial Overgrowth)? These are more common in the celiac population. Your heavy workouts may naturally predispose you to consumption of extra carbs.

[Scott Adams]

You mentioned that you don't have additional food intolerance issues, how did you determine this? Many people with celiac disease, especially those who are in the 0-2 year range of their recovery, have additional food intolerance issues which could be temporary. To figure this out you may need to keep a food diary and do an elimination diet over a few months.

Some common food intolerance issues are dairy/casein, eggs, corn, oats, and soy. The good news is that after your gut heals (for most people who are 100% gluten-free this will take several months to two years) you may be able to slowly add some these items back into your diet after the damaged villi heal.

This article may be helpful:

 

 

 

[The cornspiracy enjoyer]

Thanks a lot for that advice i sort of found the issues.

Im just chuging down food with water, not really chewing it at all, thus not giving my first stage of digestion any chance.

While having damaged villi, this will become a nightmare to absorb for my body... so while im spending tons of energy on working out, the already stressed vili have huge issues digesting the food. Now without even chewing it, it is even worse.

Once i exhaust my glucose saved inside the muscles by working out, i am not able to replenish it because my stomach just cant function, because he is simply lacking energy and bloodflow after an intense workout.

This in turn leaves me exhausted and with too little strength to digest, considdering the state of the vili. Causing a cycle of malabsorption, until my storage is up to a normal level again. 

 

To fix this, I just got back to the basics, obv eating 《healthy》, but also supplementing digestive enzymes and chewing chewing chewing the food until it is literally liquidish, but not because of chugging it down with water. After doing this for 4 days, i have had no issues ever again with digestion up to today and I have been doing this for a week now, constantly working out.

This came to shine, when I was talking to my doctor and mentioned, what Trents asked about SIBO and candida. When you chug your food, bacteria from it is possibly not killed of in an acceptable amount, also possibly leaving to an overpopulation of the gut. While this is normally quite harmless in terms of infection, your body uses a mechanism to 《flush》this overgrowth out, increasing the malabsorption and stress on the gut tenfold.

So what fixed my problems?

Literally going back to the basics, like the idiot I am and chewing food properly, giving myself more time than 10 minutes to do so.

I also received an all covering vitamine supplement and one that covers trace Elements, to cope with the malabsorption issues.

Before the sport session, i also put some sugar/dextrose into my system to warm it up to the tension that I expect of it, works wonders now. No dizzyness afterwards, no D...

Thanks a lot for the help guys, i will now lurk in the forum like a ghost from time to time answering questions and definitely looking into the research of digestion through saliva

 

[trents]

Very interesting! Thanks for getting back to us with what you discovered. I have long suspected there is too much emphasis on hydration these days. All the "health experts" are urging people to drink 64 oz. of free water (that's in addition to what is in our food) daily. That's a huge amount! I have always wondered if it has the effect of diluting the nutrients we taken in from what we eat.

[The cornspiracy enjoyer]

1 hour ago, trents said:

Very interesting! Thanks for getting back to us with what you discovered. I have long suspected there is too much emphasis on hydration these days. All the "health experts" are urging people to drink 64 oz. of free water (that's in addition to what is in our food) daily. That's a huge amount! I have always wondered if it has the effect of diluting the nutrients we taken in from what we eat.

Yeah that topic is going through my head right now too.

I think the emphasis is quite right, hydration is important in fighting pretty ugly things like kidney stones.

At the same time we rarely see people who eat healthy chugging a litre or so in water down their throat while eating. So i do think thebdosis makes the poison. Interesting would be to find studies about the resorption of water, like how fast we can absorb it and if adequate amounts of it may be diluting digestive juices. And if it does, how to time it the best, but that I will look up or self experiment, im not confident about it. Personally I think we just use water to wetter the food, so we can trick our brain into thinking, that the food has already been processed and can be swallowed. Some water is necessary for example to clear the throat from someone rest of what we just swallowed. I will create a thread in the future though. For now i already found that being in animal mode is the best and most healthiest way of digestion:

First smell the food (yes i know this sounds stupid), so you prepare your subconsciousness for the intake of good food, this is literally the first step. Then chew it until its liquid, swallow and then optimally rest 30 minutes so the digestion can do its job. If the vili god is blessfull with you, everything will work out just fine then  

I also realized, that this sort of eating completely rewired my sense of taste, smell and craving of food. If I eat schär bread or chicken this way, the taste of it changes with every bite i take, leaving my sense up to 100 different tastes. The weird thing is, that doing that with chocolate, especially white lactosefree glutenfree chocolate, the longer i leave this in my mouth with this method, the less i enjoy eating it. Earlier i just chugged it down, leaving just a small fraction of this junk to tell my brain "meh this is gud". Now that I really chew it into a liquid, the taste is just too strong, i really want to either swallow it to forget the taste or spit it out. 

I know people sound sometimes obsessed with that sense of "becoming one with your food", but now properly giving myself tthe time to enjoy it, has really changed my perspective on this. Food is not just a necessity to sustain life anymore, no. Everytime its time to cook, im preparing myself thinking about what I can make the tounge feel now, chewing through all the biomass, that produce different receptors on my tounge.

I think we celliacs shouldnt forget that fact. Sure we are sort of restricted inthe things we can do and eat, but that doesnt mean we should see food as a "medicine" that we chug down and will then repress the issues we have, but as a feeling that makes us more creative about different ways to eat and more importantly, taste. It takes about 15 bites until we can really taste the food, lets just give ourselves the time to taste what does us good and what doesnt. 

 

[RMJ]

Glad you’ve found a solution!

Smelling your food probably gets your salivary glands going.  Saliva contains an enzyme (amylase) that starts breaking down the starch that you eat.