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In your shoes, I would start with say 200mg per day, spread out, and then work up to your bowel tolerance level, whatever that is.
Alternatively, you can make more of an effort to get Mg-rich water and foods in your diet. I told my friend to try more nuts and seeds, which are very rich in magnesium, too. There are problems with this "delivery form", too, though, but I didn't have time to tell her about soaking nuts and enzyme inhibitors and the like!!!
If you still have trouble, then you might need to start looking at food intolerances. I thought my diarrhoea problem was related to my supplements and tried all sorts of things to try and get my body to absorb the stuff better but nothing seemed to help, I still had the mild diarrhoea problem...
It turned out in the end that I was gluten-intolerant!!! Now that I'm off the gluten, I can take 400mg per day no problem, no problems with the BMs at all!!! So before you blame the Mg supplements, see if ditching gluten helps, or try to locate any other food intolerances - dairy is another one that often causes problems, either casein or lactose. Of course, that might be the case with my friend, too, that she has a food intolerance that she doesn't know about, but I felt I should pass it on.
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Thanks again Amanda for taking the time to provide such detailed information! I have been gluten free since May 2006. I went dairy free in Dec. 2006 but still consume dairy occasionally, more lately since I seem to have a little more tolerance. The bowel problems started, as a guess, around spring 2007 and continued until I stopped taking magnesium in April 2010. I think a probiotic was contributing to the issue as well but it wasn't until I discontinued the mg that things reverted to normal. After 3 years of nearly constant problems you can see why I'm hesitant to go back on magnesium, but I have. So far so good!
I went to a nearby health food store a few days ago to look for magnesium citrate, taurate, glycinate, or malate. They had only one variety in stock at a too-high dose and the salesperson suggested I look elsewhere for a 100mg tablet and gradually increase. He also said some people are very, very sensitive to the laxative effect in mg--guess I'm one of those lucky ones!
I'm looking back through Protein Power Lifeplan and the Eades recommend mg citrate, malate, or aspartate. These are all chelated magnesium products and it's been helpful to me to reread the description of chelation: chelating agents make the mineral more absorbable and less likely to stimulate diarrhea. "In the process of chelation, amino acids, the subunits of protein, grab--in clawlike fashion--onto mineral ions, joining their structures together to form a cage around the mineral. Wrapped in this protein cage, the mineral ion can bypass the ion channel by masquerading as protein and be absorbed by the intestine as such. Once inside, the body disassembles the cage of amino acids, liberating the mineral. The danger of using a chelate, however, lies in the fact that all chelating agents don't work equally well with every mineral. Wihle some of them work like a charm, others can fall apart too soon or resist disassembly at the appropriate time to ensure adequate absorption. When you purchase a magnesium chelate, look for the words citrate, malate, or aspartate, all of which we've found work well with magnesium." They go on to explain that in listing the miligrams labels often list the total weight of the mineral
plus the chelating agent so you need to look at the percentage of RDI. The RDI for magnesium (at least when the book was published) is 360mg. They recommend patients take 300-400mg of actual magnesium; those w/problems associated w/insulin resistance bump up the dose to 400-600mg if they can tolerate w/o diarrhea and have no other medical reasons for not doing so.
I started out taking mg citrate after I read PPLP but the bottle I have in my medicine cabinet is chelated magnesium oxide. I buy most of my supplements online at one particular store so my guess is at some point during a reorder someone at the warehouse pulled the wrong type of magnesium off the shelf and I never caught it. Since I haven't had time to go anywhere to seek out mg citrate etc. I'm cutting these 250mg pills in half and taking one daily. I've been fine so far. And, to follow the Eades' calculation instructions, my bottle says 1 tablet contains 250mg which is 63% of the recommended dose. That means each pill contains 158mg of actual magnesium and I'm cutting it in half so I'm getting 79mg. I'll continue on w/this until I get a chance to find one of the other varieties. I haven't had any improvement of leg weakness but I'm hopeful that will come eventually.
I also recall taking a list of all my supplements and meds to my pharmacist a couple years ago and asking her to tell me if I was spacing them out correctly throughout the day. I believe she told me minerals should not be taken with some prescriptions (for me that was thyroid medication and prednisone).
Christy