Okay, so this is a little embarrassing, but....
When I started the Neanderthin diet, on the third day, I had a bout of diarrhea. Didn't feel sick at all. BM's weren't all that frequent - just 3-4 episodes of diarrhea in about 24 hours. Just felt kinda like you would feel if you drank a whole pot of coffee and took some Milk of Magnesia on top of that!

Now, this is highly unusual for me. It went away after 24 hours and I only had one more loose stool after that.

Maybe it was just chance, or I ate something bad at the Fourth of July, but I think maybe it was related to the diet. Have other's here had this phenomenon? Could it be, say, a yeast die-off in the gut?

53Free

That's funny you mention that. I just found about this diet about a week ago and found this forum yesterday. I seriously started the diet on Saturday (4 days ago), and the exact same thing happened to me today. I'm assuming it's just a matter of adjustment to the new foods.

A similar thing happened to me about a month ago when I moved back to the US from Europe and my diet radically changed. That time I was eating the "recommended" diet high in whole grains though. Although that bout was a little more... explosive, to put it one way. Loads of oatmeal, beans, wheat bread... yeah.

I'm personally not worried about it. My grain intake went from extremely high to 0, and my vegetable intake went from extremely low to very high in the span of one day. I'd be more surprised if nothing happened.

Don't think so, I think it's just your stomach adjusting to the new foods. You need a different balance of digestive enzymes (in this case lipase) to deal with the extra load of fat it's receiving. It takes a while for the stomach to start producing extra bile, too.

I had the same problem and it went away after a week. But for about a week I had a few more BMs than I really wanted and felt kind of queasy.

amanda

I don't really think it was about the "new" foods, since I really didn't make that big a change in diet. I'd say, honestly, the only real changes from the way I was eating before, was maybe an extra apple a day, and 2 slices of well-cooked bacon. I already wasn't eating wheat, so it was just a matter of removing rice corn and potatoes. Since my appetite decreased I really didn't significantly increase my intake of other foods. I already ate a fair amount of vegetables.

Also, it didn't happen until about 3 days in - and was then very dramatic for about 24 hours - then resolved.

Just very odd for me, as I am "Miss Regular".

53Free

Well, I don't ordinarily say things like "detox" but since it hasn't continued perhaps it was your body just getting rid of the old stuff it didn't like. Or perhaps you had a little stomach bug. One or 'tother.

When I started eating more raw meat, I made myself some "Laab Isaan" - a recipe in Nourishing Traditions. It's a (Vietmanese?) dish that involves raw ground beef, hot peppers, scallions, cilantro, lemon juice and fish sauce. I got pretty bad diarrhea after that. Someone suggested that my calcium intake was too low - calcium helps you digest meat, I believe.

Since then I've been careful to get more calcium - lots of bone broth, eating chicken bones occasionally, thoroughly cooking greens and draining the water, and getting more of the calcium-absorption helpers - Vitamin C (sauerkraut and kimchi are great sources), saturated fat and Vitamin D. I don't know what it is exactly, but now I can eat raw hamburger with impunity. I try to limit the hot peppers, though, and only eat them when they're fermented. Sometimes I get constipated, but increasing my fat intake usually helps with that.

I just noticed you're eating apples. Apples wreck my gut. Apple juice is worse, of course. Apples are diuretic.

I agree with capmikee about the apples. Organic apples I seem to do ok on, but conventional apples send me running to the bathroom. I think it's that I can deal with the inherent gut-irritating-ness of one apple, but I can't deal with it if it's coated with wax on top of that.

Raw apples are worse in this respect than cooked.

I've heard that peeling the apples helps. But for me, at this point, avoiding them entirely is a no-brainer.

Apples are naturally waxy, btw. I don't know if they actually put wax on apples. I have a couple of apple trees and the way I know if they're ripe or not is if they start to feel a little waxy, versus kind of dry/rough.

Oh, apparently they put wax on apples that have been washed, because washing takes off the natural wax.



But my lovely, organic Anna apples are quite waxy.

I guess it's once again an example of the natural product being better than the manmade one.