I have not been diligent in updating my blog on acid reflux and for that I apologize. I did not realize that it has been a year since my last post. How quickly time goes by. a lot has happened over the past year. with regard to my, so called, reflux, the most important thing that has happened is that I left a job that was causing me a great deal of distress.
Looking back from the perspective of three years I can now see that working in that company, for that manager and dealing with those customers was the root cause of my reflex issue. It has been over a year now since I have left that company and slowly by slowly, I have recovering from this illness and regaining a more normal life with respect to eating and digesting food.
One of the big things that has happened is that I can now eat many of the foods that I was completely unable to eat three years ago. Three years ago I could not eat tomatoes, or any part of a raw salad. Now I can eat salad, a small salad but nonetheless, I can eat a salad which is a major achievement for me. I still have difficulty with anything that has a thick skin that will be difficult to digest, such as the skin on cherry tomatoes if it is too thick of the skin of a pear or even blueberries. My stomach will simply return the skins to my mouth so that I can spit them out as if to say, "I don't know you insist on sending these thick skins to me but they are inedible so please dispose of them". It is true, your stomach does have a mind of its own!
I have developed a few key things that help me to digest food. These are the things that I learned from attending a seminar at Goodness Me in Burlington, Ontario with a local Naturopath doctor. I am sorry that I cannot remember her name but I remember her recommendations. The first one was that I needed to replace the acid in my stomach that was missing because of the damage done to my microbiome and that fact that I had my gall bladder removed which eliminated the stored supply of bile that my gallbladder would hold to help digest food. Most people have their gallbladder removed and they gain weight. I had my gallbladder removed and I lost weight.
Here are her recommendations. 1) About ten minutes before a meal drink apple cider vinegar. That is live apple cider vinegar that has a mother in it because it will provide the acid in the vinegar as well as the nutrients that are created by the mother in the vinegar. The naturopath said one of two things would happen. If you had too much or even a sufficient amount of acid in your stomach you would get the worst reflux of your life. In that case you should not be drinking vinegar. In the second case, if you did not have enough acid in your stomach, nothing will happen when you drank the vinegar. Which is exactly what happened to me. So now, I drink vinegar every morning before breakfast and I try to drink it before lunch as well. The amount that I drink is not large, one teaspoon of vinegar to two tablespoons of water. At first I would measure the amounts precisely with a measuring spoon but now I measure by eye and it works fine. Do not get me wrong, drinking raw vinegar takes a bit of getting used to. It is like downing a shot of whiskey without the beer chaser. It is a bit bracing but for me, it is worth it. It have seen the difference for me between drinking vinegar before a meal and not drinking vinegar before a meal. It is difficult to quantify the difference but I can tell you that my stomach is a lot happier after I drink vinegar.
The second thing that I learned from the seminar I attended with the naturopath was that losing my gall bladder significantly reduced the amount of bile that I had in my stomach. She recommended that I take bile pills. Bile pills are disgusting, black pills that taste like, you guessed it, they taste like bile. You can buy bile pills in any drugstore, supermarket with a health food section. I would try to buy bile bills where they list Ox bile as the first ingredient (Bos taurus). If you take a pill at the beginning of a meal it will greatly aid in your digestion. I always make sure that I have something to drink immediately after putting the pill in my mouth, it is truly disgusting but it works.
All of these things are not really pleasant but it is an old adage that if the medicine is not bitter it is probably not effective!
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