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Any body else experience weight loss from their IBS

133K views 59 replies 38 participants last post by  Maudlin 
If your weight is going away when you eat the exact same amount that you eat when you are gaining/maintaining weight that is NOT an IBS symptom.Now a lot of people eat less when their IBS is acting up and that is normal weight loss.
 
Usually when people say food disgusts them they don't eat as much as they usually do. You could try any of the free online calorie trackers to see how much you need to eat every day to maintain weight.When they worry is when your appetite is really good and you are eating if anything even more than ever and still losing weight. If you eat less and lose weight that is NORMAL weight loss.Usually with beta blockers if anything they cause weight gain. But they can make some people fatigued and tired people usually don't exercise as much.
 
While the main thing with anorexia, in specific, is the feeling one is too fat, I suspect for some people the "fat is gross" transfers to also include "food is gross" and some people whose stories I have read do have a lot of feelings about about food or how they feel when they finally are forced to eat some food.That being said, it is not the one and only way people's eating gets disordered. A lot of IBSers get any number of food phobias which can lead to just as bad and mixed up of a diet as someone that doesn't eat much of anything for any other reason. Disordered eating (no matter the cause) is not good for the GI tract. It is designed to get regular inputs of food and when people don't eat for days (whether to fit in a size 0 dress or to avoid IBS symptoms) it isn't good for the system and leads to more problems. Your GI tract doesn't care why you don't feed it properly, any reason you stop eating will do the same thing, even if you stop eating because you are caught in a famine and literally have no food to eat. They have to be careful when the start feeding people from a famine zone as their GI tracts are not in good shape.Most people's food intake varies over time, even if they don't notice that they eat more or less when stressed or eat less when they have no appetite or eat more when some drug increases their appetite. I gain weight from gastritis when I get it not because it does something to my metabolism but because the pain mimics hungar and I feel extremely hungry all the time and the only thing that helps is to eat something (until I go on medication to heal the irritated stomach lining).Now if we are talking you lose a few pounds/gain a few pounds and you are always in a normal weight range for you anyway and you eat food at least a few times a day even if it isn't as much as you eat when you actually feel hungry that probably isn't enough to tip you into severe problems. However, if you notice you don't eat every day or your up and down includes weights that are low enough to be a health risk, you need to make sure you do eat even when you don't feel like it.
 
Anyone can lose a couple of pounds from water weight changes (diarrhea, sweating, etc.). If it happens to healthy people it can happen to IBSers. Nothing about IBS will cause your weight to never change for any normal reason ever again for the rest of your life. It will go up and down for all the reasons anyone else will have their weight go up and down.However prolonged unexplainable sustained weight loss that doesn't resolve when you start eating the number of calories your body requires to maintain weight or unexplainable weight gain that eating less and moving more doesn't fix are things your doctor should be made aware of and be checked out. Do not assume either is "just" IBS and nothing else.Unexplainable, abnormal weight loss is a signal something else is going on.Again, normal weight loss for any of the myriad of reasons healthy people gain or lose a few pounds will happen to people with IBS, so a few pounds here or there you can explain is not reason to get a lot of medical tests. However if you are consistently losing 5 pounds or more a month every month for months on end and never regain any of it even when you increase the amount you eat to well above what you should need. That is not IBS, that is a sign of other things going on.Now a lot of IBSers change how they eat to prevent symptoms and diet changes are one of the normal reasons healthy people gain or lose weight. So like I said normal, explainable, weight loss or gain that would happen to any person that didn't have IBS will happen to IBSers (and sometimes the reason for the normal weight loss will be something to do with the IBS, but it will be normal and explainable weight loss--or gain). The "red flag" is when there isn't something that makes sense about the weight loss. Some diseases (from metabolic problems to celiac and inflammatory bowel diseases) make it so you will lose abnormal amounts of weight that cannot be explained by I just don't eat enough, or I'm not carrying around as much water as I usually do.
 
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