No Bowel Movement Since Diet Change

[Holls]

Is this normal? (Sorry if this is the wrong category to post on.) 

It was like a switch got turned on for celiac disease. Anything would make me have diarrhea, even a drink. I recently got my genetic testing from 23&me and I paid for the health testing. I'm so glad I did bc I then figured out I had the gene for celiac disease. My question is, I changed my diet to gluten free 3 days ago, and I have yet had a bowel movement!!! Is this normal? I am not used to not having the urge to go to the bathroom after a meal. 

[Holls]

I forgot to add my symptoms started about 13 years ago. 

[trents]

Welcome to the forum, @Holls!

You say you paid for the health testing. What do you refer to by "health testing"? Genetic testing cannot be used to diagnose celiac disease but only to establish the potential to develop celiac disease. about 40% of the general population has one or more of the genes connected with celiac disease but only 1-1.5% ever develop active celiac disease.

Have you been formally diagnosed with celiac disease through blood antibody testing or through an endoscopy with biopsy of the small bowel lining?

If you could give some clarity with regard to your diagnosis we can proceed to deal with your bowel movement questions.

[Holls]

@trents The 23andMe Genetic Health Risk* Reports tell you if you have genetic variants that may increase your risk of developing certain health conditions. 

This is what was said for Celiac Disease: You have a slightly increased risk of developing celiac disease based on your genetic result. 1 variant detected in the HLA-DQB1 gene. 

Although this is not considered as professional advice nor a formal diagnosis, I am just assuming this what was wrong with me for all these years. So I decided to change my diet and my symptoms were cleared. 

I hope this helps. 

[trents]

Before you continue very far into your gluten free diet experiment, let me encourage you to seek out standard celiac disease blood antibody testing. The symptoms you describe could easily be due to something besides celiac disease and your constipation could be due to the removal of the fiber you were getting from wheat products. You could have NCGS (Non Celiac Gluten Sensitivity) which shares many of the same symptoms with celiac disease but is 10x more common. There is no test for NCGS. Celiac disease must first be ruled out. The difference between the two is that celiac disease damages the villous lining of the small bowel whereas NCGS does not. I think you owe it to yourself to get proper testing done for celiac disease so that you can have a clearer idea of what you may be dealing with. Realize that if you embark on a gluten free diet now and decide to have testing done for celiac disease you would need to go back to eating generous amounts of gluten for a period of weeks in order for the testing to be valid. Any physician can order the blood antibody tests and here are the tests I would suggest:

Total IGA

TTG-IGA

DGP-IGA

DGP-IGG

[Holls]

@trents Thank you for the info. I will look into this. This is helpful. Thank you for the time you put into my post. 

[trents]

Here is a primer for understanding blood antibody testing for celiac disease: 

The normal diagnostic process involves two steps. The first is to have the blood antibody testing done first. These can be ordered by a primary care doc. If any of the tests run turn up positives, there is typically a referral to a GI doc who will order and endoscopy with biopsy to check for damage to the villous lining of the small bowel. This is the second step of testing. It is important to continue eating regular amounts of gluten (foods with wheat, barley and rye in them) for weeks leading up to either test. Note, the several antibody tests I suggested in my post above would constitute a fuller "celiac panel" but many primary care docs are not very knowledgeable in this area of medicine and may only order the TTG-IGA test. So, it is important to be politely assertive to get thorough testing done. The total IGA test is very important as if someone is IGA deficient it will drive all IGA test scores downward and may generate false negatives in other IGA tests.

[Beverage]

While you are following the advice of the above very knowledgeable people, you might want to try adding some vitamin C and magnesium to help things move along. If you've been undiagnosed with celiacs and had intestinal issues also, you are probably low on a lot of nutrients. 

On vitamin C, docs that know anything about supplements will tell you to increase dose to bowel tolerance, i.e., increase until it gives you soft stools or diarrhea, and them back off a little until things are hokey pokey.

On magnesium, do a search on "magnesium for constipation"  I can't recall which form of magnesium works best for that, but it may be beneficial for you.

Taking both won't hurt, but I'd advise trying out one at a time and noticing results.