Diary of a Croh’s Flare: Feels like Feasting

(This entry covers the week of Saturday 3/29 through about Friday 4/4)

Well, it feels like feasting compare to how I have felt recently.

Saturday 3/29 I got up, ate 2 waffles, drank an Ensure, and a cup of coffee.  Then I went shopping.  After 5 hours of errand running, I got home and spent the rest of the day seemingly eating everything in sight:

What I actually consumed over the rest of the day:

Brunch

• 1 pancake
• 2 pieces of bacon
• 2 eggs

For the rest of the day I had:

• 1 Ensure
• A sleeve of Girl Scout cookies (thin mints)
• a large bowel of mango sherbet
• another scrambled egg
• 2 hot dogs (mustard and ketchup only)

I’m not certain about the calorie count but that was the most I had eaten in a day for quite a long time.  I probably consumed more calories than I burned through the day – for the first time in weeks.  Later in the evening I suffered a terrible bout of gas.  I’m not sure what caused it but I suspect it was the hot dogs.

I also had good days on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday on which I think I ate more calories than I consumed.  However, on Wednesday I had another bad day with lots of painful bloating and a complete inability to eat anything after breakfast.  What I realized on Wednesday evening was that the pants I wore on the good days were much looser fitting than the pants I wore on Wednesday (none of the pants were actually tight fitting).

Since the start of these eating problems, I’ve noticed that eating anything at all causes my abdomen to bloat.  My hypothesis is that the bloating causes the pants to constrict my gut and it is the constriction that leads to stoppage and pain.  Based upon the observation and hypothesis, I rewore my looser fitting pants on Thursday and Friday and both of these days were much better than Wednesday (though I still had some issues on Thursday).

It looks like I have a path forward with the digestion problems.  I’ll be wearing much looser pants now.  One irony is that although I’m the lightest I’ve been in 15 years, I’ll be wearing the largest pants I’ve ever worn (size 36 waist).  These pants are so loose, that I have to constantly pull them up so they don’t fall down.  However, so far this has worked very well for me.