IBS Help! It seems my love of veg is a problem!

[RosesandMoonshine]

Recently discovered my IBS is often triggered by veg, especially when I combine different ones (asparagus, rocket, tomato, peppers, etc). I love a good veg or salad heavy meal and tend not to eat anything processed.

Can anyone advise how much we 'really' need, in a health context, because I am concerned about losing vitamins if I reduce my intake. I can handle something simple like salmon, oil drizzled potatoes and carrots - but a lovely, healthy, tasty mixed veg meal is NOT helping my gut.

I don't eat bread or pasta, so don't have much else I can fill up on.
Any ideas? Can I get away with only eating minimal, less exciting veggies and still keep healthy?

A list of what I can eat without triggering IBS:
Avocado
Potato
Carrots
Spinach
Mushroom
Chilli peppers
Cucumber
Lemon
Nuts/white meat/fish/eggs
Broccoli
Cress (god i love cress!)
Celery
Pesto/mustard/greek yoghurt in small amounts.
Cream cheese.
I am also ok with most herbs.

Can I make decent healthy meals out of this minimal list? Any recipe ideas or tips? It's gonna take some getting used to as I normally go really heavy on the stuff, so maybe I just need to calm down and approach it like Buddha

I think so if you balance it out carefully, make sure you're getting enough iron & B12, you might need a calcium supplement. If you have the money I'd see a dietician for a qualified opinion on what you need to eat and how often from that list.

I'd do this basic diet for 3-6 months till your IBS settles down then do challenges to see if you can add back other things. If you're IBS is bad your bowel can be reacting to foods that you can actually tolerate once your IBS settles down. You could look into the Fed Up/Royal Prince Alfred diet and FODMAP for ideas on how to do this and what food groups yours having issues with. FODMAP was designed for IBS. Alternatively a good dietician should be able to help with food challenges too.

This doesn’t help directly with your question but my IBS stopped with good probiotics (with the right low sugar diet and sounds like you’re on track with that anyway as it needed whole foods for good prebiotics too). My gut used to bleed with the wrong things eg wine /coffee would irritate it and now copes so I just hoped that is worth mentioning in case helpful here

Sorry I'm late to reply, and thank you for the tips. I absolutely get enough calcium so not worried about that, and I do take a multivitamin most of the time.

I'm just worried about consuming LESS veg, as there are usually over 6 or 7 varieties on my plate. I know realistically I don't need that many, but when I asked a pharmacist about eliminating some veg for a month he replied telling me to only do it for 3 weeks as it would be 'dangerous'. I mean WTF?
Why is having only a few veggies per mean 'bad' for me?
It all sounds like overkill, and I can't understand how we survived before tons of imported veg, when we had to make do with local stuff.

I am sure that a moderate amount of veg isn't unhealthy, especially for my own gut. Everything else I eat is fresh and healthy. The pharmacist acted like I was freewheeling into diabetes :(

Oh and my IBS never stops unless I reduce complexity.

A few strawberries and a handful of blueberries with a dash of cream and I'm good.
A full tub of the stuff and I am in pain.
Reducing complexity seems to keep me well.

In the past I have reduced and eliminated bread (no change), gluten (no change) and dairy (no change). So for a while I put my IBS down to stress, which is a factor, but there are some ....unpleasant reactions when I mix many veg together.

Sadly never saw any change with probiotics and the Kefir stuff made me worse.

Have you tried fermented veggies, sauerkraut etc?

You really need to go on the FODMAP elimination diet

U was going to say fodmap. It teaches u also about stacking ur foods which may help u.

I was going to say this. It won't be all veg (very unlikely) and it will help you nail down what group it is. Then you can just avoid it limit those and not everything.

I completely cured my terrible IBS with the FODMAP diet. And luckily for me I can now eat pretty much everything I just take a digestive enzyme first as it appears I am missing the digestive enzyme to process galacto-oligosaccharides.

Hey - you need 30g of fibre a day. One thing that might help you is chewing. We're meant to chew our food 30-50 times and while you might be experiencing this with trigger foods, it also might be that you're not chewing enough to give your digestive system a chance. (Might sound like no big deal but what we eat is important but HOW too)... (also eating on the go, distracted can cause us to not chew enough - you might like this article:
www.gutwealth.co.uk/blogs/care/reduce-bloating-by-chewing

You might want to consider something like irish seaweed/Irish moss for a nutrient boost.