Is this really IBS - or just the result of an ED?

I asked a similar question a while back. I was bulimic for 15 years, and my IBS started six months after my recovery. That was two years ago, and I've still got it! I asked if my eating disorder was the cause of my IBS, and was told that there have been no studies done, so there is really no answer. But I don't see how the two couldn't be related, because I had prevented my digestive system from functioning properly for so long. What you said was interesting, though, that this is just a consequence of the ED...like it might not permanent? That would be nice! I don't know the answer to that, but it's certainly possible. I'm sure your body is very confused right now. Congratulations on seeking treatment. You have made a huge step. I hope you have realized, like I did, that living with an ED is no way to live your life. I wish you the best in your recovery. jane

I don't know, but I was anorexic for many years and limited myself to one cup of rice and chicken and rice soup for a long time. Now that I'm happy and settled I have really bad bowel spasms and bloating when I eat too much, bummer, cuz I'm really enjoying food now. Zelnorm helps alot with the C and somewhat with spasm. When it becomes available in the US give it a try. Good luck.

Hi, ibsed and everyone else in this thread. I'm in the same boat with all of you. Started with anorexia at age 19, then to gain the weight back in the next two years, I binged alot on junk food. Then I would starve myself the next day, then binge the next day, then use a laxative the next day, then starve...etc. I finally increased my weight back up to 97 lbs (had gone down to 85 lbs), but was still underweight for a long time. My IBS started within the next couple years after that, which consisted of gas and constipation. Then I began having diarrhea more often, but I think that was because of the numerous pieces of sugarless gum that I chewed with sorbitol. Well, now I'm 39 and over the past 15 years I was believing I was pretty much recovered from anorexia, and that my only problem was IBS as diagnosed by my doctor at age 24. But, through all these years, I have had extensive psychotherapy for anxiety, depression, my IBS, and all kinds of other issues. In talking with my therapist the other day, I believe now that I have really been in denial regarding my eating disorder, and that just because I have maintained a weight of 105 (which is what I weighed prior to the anorexia...I was small to begin with) doesn't mean that all the crazy thinking around eating and wanting the food to come out has gone away. I have become so obsessed with eating, or not eating, and going to the bathroom that it has literally taken over my life. I hardly work. I stay at home alot. I haven't been intimate with my husband for at least 6 months. I've basically isolated myself and lost contact with alot of my friends. I have very little interest in really doing anything, but I am frustrated and want more from life. My therapist wants me in an intensive program for eating disorders and possibly obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'm very scared, but I'm hoping that I can obtain a deeper recovery, because the way I'm dealing with things now really sucks. I've basically centered my life around eating, or not eating, and going to the bathroom, and exercising, and my stomach cramping and my gas. Most of this time requires being alone, because I feel ashamed of all these activities. Sorry for the rambling, but I believe I was probably predisposed to IBS, because I had alot of stomachaches as a child. But I thik I just made it worse by my eating disorder.

hi folks! am using this site because of diarrohea probs for last ten years...but that's another story under 'egyptian tummy'! i by no means have all the answers yet (to many things!) but some inner sense is nagging at me, and it started as i read this page, and is at this moment not yet full born, so please bear with me if i ramble a little...i am a very recent member of the human race..although i am 44! those 44 years were spent in a very dark, cold and often lonley place..(no sympathy please...just 'hear' what i'm saying) that's all i ask of you. the reason i spent the first 44 years of my life feeling that way, have only just become clear to me...through psychotherapy. i was the product of an emotionally unstable (and schizophrenic) mother, and a father, who's emotional problems i have not (yet) fully discovered. i cannot heap blame for their behaviour upon their heads..they do not deserve my anger or the frustration i feel, at having wasted so many years of my life feeling (and believing) that i was unloved...and unlovable. most of my teens and in fact, until very recently (last week) i have taken anti-depressants of some sort....until my doctor (bless him) thought i should see a psychiatrist. the psychiatrist (bless him too) sent me for psychotherapy...yes, there is a difference! well i still don't believe in miracles...but...this is MY story...and i AM trying to write the book...no...I WILL write the book...but (then again) only one chapter of it belongs here, and i feel SO good for being able to share that chapter of it with you all. ps....i'm browneyed...&browned off (still got diarrohea!!) and I am Caroline...hello!

Hi,I too am a recovering anorexic,also been hospitalized 3xs ....I asked my doctor that same question...and he said that it could be possible that I got IBS from poor eating habits..using laxatives..and all that other fun stuff that goes along with having a eating disorder....I think that we really screwed up our intestines... Nobody really knows for sure...but look how many people with a eating disorder responded to your question and have IBS....pretty strange.....keep on reading the BB it really does helpgood luck

Dear Members of the Same Boat Society:It saddens me that so many people can find no one who can implement clinically a patient specific integrative therapy program. The prioblem is that the "tools" are all available, but very few practitioners understand all of them enough to integrate them. hence the need for agressive development of Disease Managment Programs for IBS too, not just diabetes and hypertension and wound care and urinary incontnence.Fortunatley this decade will see a rise in the ability of medicine to have access to protocols which provide guidelines on how optimize "INTEGRATED therapies to patient needs.Since we are not there yet, LOL and my dats are now completely consumed by the activity of managing an organization which pursues these ends agressively and is working with more doctors every dy on this approach, let me respond quickly to some specific common issues and make a sugestion or two which can help you each and others who may read this thread. First suggestion is to try to overlook my chronic typos....I cut corners for the sake of speed and this is one of them...no time to edit (no offline production just point and shoot). ____________________________________"or am I just suffering the consequences of a long-term eating disorder?If the latter is true,I should abandon attempts at dietary therapy.At the moment I'm in a right mess because I just don't know which road to go down." ____________________________________Part of the priblem that patients and practitoners get immersed in is a desire for a clear answer as to WHY their body is generating symptoms...and why it is in response to diet, to stress, to the phases of the moon.There are books which can help with that and you have to read each in context of what the authors background is, but here is one that is a good start as he covers things on balance:IBS: A DOCTORS PLAN FOR CHRONIC DIGESTIVE TROUBLESBy Gerard Guillory, M.D.; Vanessa Ameen, M.D.; Paul Donovan, M.D.; Jack Martin, Ph.D. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-h...9085785-1742301 This pursuit of the causal basis of different persons onset of IBS symptoms is frustrating as the sum of the possible mechanisms is diversity itself.If you get the articel below, and look at this diagram in it:: "Figure 1 . Pathogenesis of food hypersensitivity induced irritable bowel syndrome. the title is a misnomer as this diagram shows most of the integrative mechanisms of symptom generation, at least for the 70% of people who have diarrheic and pain componenets to their IBS no matter how intemrittent. It shows the interraction of the top-down model or the bottom up model. here is where to get the article:Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics Vol. 15 Issue 4 Page 439 April 2001 Food hypersensitivity and irritable bowel syndrome S. Zar, D. Kumar, M. J. Benson http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/servlet/u...36.2001.00951.x If everyone could understand that simple diagram and relate it to their life and their symptom-generating events they would at least understand why "you cannot get to Buffalo without a map".There are many ways to get to Buffalo and it depneds where YOU are starting from. Thus a personla route must be drawn to get you there, and most people (lay people and medicos alike) simply do not have the complete set of map making tools. OR they simpley give the same map to everybody so some will get there some won't. OR they throw you an atlas and say go find your way...the info is in there somewhere.One thing is for sure, you must NOT give up..we must give UP on the idea that right now there is a way to find the original PATHOLOGY which is causing you to genrate symptoms as this is still indscrutable. The idea is to isolate what things PROVOKE symptoms in your life and then use an integrated plan of all the tools currently available to reduce the symptoms.As Dr. Villaneuva stated last year: ___________________________________"...it is not likely that one single treatment will help every IBS patient and many of them will need a more complex approach with multidisciplinary therapy (diet, psychotherapy, medications). " _____________________________________So the key is to read a book like the one I referenced which explains to some degree whay each of these therapies , used together, will produce the best outcomes compared to any SINGLE modality, and Zars little diagram shows "why", then find some doctor or dietician who actually DOES this....then you can at least buils a personal road map (treatment plan) which addresses each of the symptom generating mechanisms within your own body and heads them off at the pass.By the way you really don't have to go to Buffalo for this _____________________________"(I should add that I am having psychotherapy so that side of things is being addressed and my therapist is very good but not a medical doctor).However,the physical symptoms still bother me very much and I would like to find way of alleviating them." ____________________________This is why patients need interdisciplinary therapeutics. Whatever psychotherapy regimen is being used, it must address your specific needs,OR it must be a regimen which has been shown to have a blanket effect on the central nevrous system, such as an HT based stress managment regimen (see www.ibstherapy.com for the one the doctors that work with us use.)THEn you must have a dietary protocol which can isolate ALL THE SYMPTOM GENEARTING MECHANISMS involved in abnormal reactiosn to foods and food chemicals, not just one or two mechanisms or an enormous trila-and-error compilation. ___________________________________"Can anybody shed any light on this?" ____________________________________We try ____________________________________"Is there really a way to control IBS ?." ____________________________________Yes. There are several modalities which are helpful alone. Combine them the right way and you improve the outcomes. Some people who were refractory can enjoy 100% remission so long as they follow their personal program. _______________________________________"I am newly diagnosed..and pretty much stay in the house except for work.. I have heard it is caused by stress..Is this true?" ________________________________________No. it is not casued by stress, stress is a mechanism of symptom generation. You can blunt the stress response several ways to reduce symptoms. You can alter your perception and reaction to stress so that DIStress becomes more EUstrss (normal perception of stress) and blunt your symptoms. You can isolate foods and chemicals which provoke your symptoms and thus casue even MORE stress and anxiety which then becomes self-fulfilling. You can do any one of these with particular methods and get some repsonse. Do them all and get the combined repsonse. It is actually simple when one understands the whole thing. Many patient still cannot get a definite underlying causal basis isolated yet for WHY their body systmes are dysfunctional BUT we can isolate that which provokes the dysfunction and avoid it. _________________________________"How do you know what foods to stay away from? I have so many questionsand no answers...Thanks" __________________________________Actually, there are answers to almost evry question a victim of IBS can ask...even this one. BUT you must speak with someone who knows the answer. I would not ask a cop in Bombay how to get to Canal Street...unless I know he has been there. He won'y know, anymore than the Market Street cop will know how to get to the nearest temple in Bombay.that does not make either incompetent...they are simply 2 different fields of knowledge. Put them together and you just doubeled the places you can get to.here is another helpful bok on the "food that make you sick" side:"FOOD ALLERGIES AND FOOD INTOLERANCE: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO THEIR IDENTIFICTION AND TREATMENT", Professor Jonathan Brostoff , M.D.. Allergy, Immunology and Environmental Medicine, Kings' College, London http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/089...6487508-3420903 But do not despair as there are answers. If you read a couple of these things it sheould help you understand that to ebtrue, and perhaps help you better isolate the right doctor or dietician for you.Also the DIET BOARD has some people who were just as frustrated with their diet problems before, and who have found various solutions which worked for them.DIET AND NUTRITION BULLETIN BOARD http://www.ibsgroup.org/cgi-local/ubbcgi/u...=4&DaysPrune=30 The thing we have to accept, and it is hard to but we must so that we can then move forward, is that there are NO pat answers...no "Brilliant Sage" who can reveal the truths about our bodies to us in one wave if his/her magical diagnostic wand. Its a process and it must be done methodically.Eat well. Think well, be wellMNL

I am a psychotherapist who specializes in the treatment of eating disorders, and I also have IBS. (However, my IBS came from a bacterial infection . . . I've never had an eating disorder). From my 20 years' experience in treating eating disorders, however, I can say that it is my belief that long-term eating disorders is related to IBS, and some other digestive disorders as well (i.e., GERD). Although I am the "D" type of IBS, I have had women in my practice who were the "C" type. They have had very good success with fibre supplements (i.e, Metamucil, Citrucel, etc.) and I have also improved dramatically since beginning this regimen. Of course, you should check with your doctor. But my understanding is that the fibre can loosen your stool, as well as firm it up . . . depending on how your system operates. Also, drinking huge amounts of water is a must. But I think that there are psychological issues involved. Once you can and do eat normal-size meals, with a wide variety of foods . . . that is a very different mentality from avoiding food. Also drinking lots of water may raise the fears of "water weight". In order to have good digestive health, a person must eat a healthy, full diet . . . and of course, that path conflicts with the former path of trying to deny food. And then we all have to resolve the anxiety we may have about our symptoms flaring up in public. At any rate, stay on that road to health and eating, and good luck . . . I suggest the fiber supplements to go along with the psychotherapy!

This is a good thread indeed as MEDA-THERAPIST rasies some points which allow for expansion of the discussion to some important IBS concepts ofetn not addressed.Time being of the essence, I will be blessedly brief": ______________________________"Once you can and do eat normal-size meals, with a wide variety of foods . . . that is a very different mentality from avoiding food." ________________________________Indeed there is a population of patients whose clinical food hypersensitivity is a secondary mechanism to some primary dysfunction, the so called "top down" etiology", as opposed to a "botom up" etiology secondary to either primary cell-mediated hypersensitivity reactions to foods or chemcials in the small bowel, or mucosal immunocyte responses (alergic and pseudoallergic), or comorbidity of both.If we approach the entire population of so called IBS patients objectively, and look at the literature and clinical therpay integratively, we see that IBS is quite a bit like COPD was before we understood each of the underlying disease entitties which overlapped to varying degrees, presenting a variety of clinical presentations with variance in the symptom sets.Patient seleection is what I am driving at.Indeed several studies over the years have suggested a high probability, clinically, of pateint preselection in treatment seeking and wildly variable selection in investigatory efforts.What happens is different investigatorsd and therapuists alike tend to either study or work with populations that are to a degree preselected by symptoms sets, to be those which are better suited to the primary approach to the condition of that practitioner.So, if we are aware of this tendency, we can form conclusions in a vaccum. There is, for example, a subpopulation of IBS patients whose symptom generating dysfunction is primarily top-down. They will thus respond as a group with better overall outcomes to a regimen which is primarily related to psychotherapeutic modalities (CBT, HT) and their symptom set and wuality of life assay will improve with this form of treatment as primary.On the flip side is a supopulation of patients whose primary symptom generating mechanisms are focused on aberrations of various specific types in immunologoic and non-immunologic reactions which occur with the locus in the small bowel and microvasucalature as primary, and their behavioral changes are secondary both to biochemical mediators released in the process and their systemic effects, as well as learned behaviors as a consequence of living with this primary symptom generating mechanism.It is possible, with careful clinical assesssment using all the tools available, to assess the probabilities from the patients clinical presentation and history.You can separate with reliability, if you have all the tools, those who fit each group in probability. Plus, as mentioned earlier, there is in reality some natural preselection amopnmg those who seek care or are referred for care from primary care.So eating a wide variety of foods will be possible during therapy for those who suffer a top-down problem, and neeedlessly intolerable to those who suffer primary aberrant inflammatory reactions in the gut (loss of oral tolerance)...psychotherapy must them attenuatye response to the chemical mediators thus is less effective as it does not address the primary problemconversely, if a patients primary problem requires primary behavioral therapy, and the loss of oral tolerance experienced and aberraant eating paterns are secondary, if the only therapy is dietary therapy you are once again chasing the horse after he is out of the barn by trying to attenuate the secondary reaction.So protocols which either are highly reliable in segregating the populations are needed to optimize the outcomes. or integrative therapies which include both modalities are needed to get the best overall outcomes.Most practitioners are not prepared to do this as it is a nacent science (the "Disease Managment" approach) for IBS. But the method ahs been shown to have a dramatic impact on outcomes in such conditios as diabetes and specific heart conditions so far. _____________________________"In order to have good digestive health, a person must eat a healthy, full diet . . . " _____________________________Indeed as a genral rule this is true, but when we are treating the patients in the IBS-d category especially, this can be anathema to health of the bowel...if we persist in introducing foods or chemicals which result in inflammatory activation of various types (form mast cells to t cells to platelets) we persists in compromising the whole function of the body intraintestinal and extraintestinal, hence the need to isolate and remove that which provokes this reaction set.In which case the diet is balanced to be healthy absent the offending foods food additives or naturally occuriing chemicals to which the patient has lost oral tolerance.Combine that with a behavioral modality that te patient will actaully adhere to and you have enhanced the outcomes. _____________________________....and of course, that path conflicts with the former path of trying to deny food." ______________________________Indeed, and this is undesireable in a patient who suffers from, in simple terms, a top-down etiology. IBSED: ____________________________________"Unfortunately,we are not all able to get access to this integrated approach you advocate.I have felt I have needed that for YEARS but I just can't find a doc. who sees things that way." ___________________________________Ah this is sadly true BUT you CAN do it yourself with a reasonable degree iof success IF you have good instructons and are highly self directed.Keep in mind ED that allergy and hypersensitivity assays are TOOLS whic provide the clinician who knows how to use them with SHORTCUTS to the optimal diet, and CBT administered by a therapist is notthe only form of behavioral therpay which is effective.HT is an effective symptom attenuating tool and when combined with proepr instruction on dietary intake and symptom moniotoring with dietary modification, over some time you can achieve much of what woudl be achieved if you HAD access to a disease managment program.Take a read on this book:IBS: A DOCTORS PLAN FOR CHRONIC DIGESTIVE TROUBLESBy Gerard Guillory, M.D.; Vanessa Ameen, M.D.; Paul Donovan, M.D.; Jack Martin, Ph.D. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-h...9085785-1742301 which includes some tools to help guide you thjrough intake analysis, then get a copy of an NT program like Dr. Weinstock & Lipsitz atwww.ibstherapy.com or see Eric to discuss Mike Mahoneys program and decide which suits you.Combine the tow into a self-directed lifestyle program (the instructuons are there) and you can get much of the benefit of this approach. It is not easy becoming your own master, but the bbenefits are great. Eat well think well be well. Edit my typos for me I gotta goMNL