Frida and I have very different consequences of eating food we do not tolerate, but still there are many parallels in everyday hassle between having IBS and being addicted to food/sugar.
Sugar addicts and those suffering from IBS all have their individual triggers that either hi-jack the digestion system or mind (or both). For different individuals It can be completely different food that cause problems, but we all need to relate to the food based on what the body can tolerate.
Triggers are something both sugar addicts and those with IBS have to relate to all our lives and though it at times might seem easier to simply stop eating food at all, we have to get our three meals a day, every day, to get nourished. This so that body and head can cope. Common to an active addict and blooming IBS is that it is very easy to get nutritional deficiencies because we eat wrong and/or the intestine is not able to absorb the nutrition on offer. On top of that, many sugar addicts also struggle with IBS.
One of the eatables that is really tricky for both is the potato – here we have something that we really need to consider twice.
It is not the most starchy product, but freshly cooked, it quickly turns into sugar. Therefore, as a sugar addict, freshly boiled potatoes often have to go, simply for that reason.
What about us with IBS? well, that really depends. If starch is one of your intolerances, you have to be careful with it and if you react to solanin, you’ll have to avoid it completely.
How do you know if you are reacting to starch or solanin or both?
Simple – for hypersensitivity to starch, try to exclude as much starch as possible from the diet i.e. remove all kinds of bread (even on buckwheat, cornflour and more) and skip eating potatoes, pasta and rice. A good hand rule is to read the nutrition info and the higher the carbohydrate amount – the more starch and sugar it contains. Try excluding starch from your diet for a week – if you feel a big positive difference, you have probably found a cause to your problem.
Hypersensitive to Solanin – here it is also a matter of trying to remove potatoes – along with tomatoes, eggplant, bellpeppers and chilli. If you react to strong food, you might have an idea that this is the right way to go. Trying to minimize these foodproducts for a few weeks – and if this made a positive difference to your wellbeing then you’ve found your problem here.
If you do not have problems with solanin and would like to eat potatoes at some point, I recommend that you DO NOT eat it freshly cooked.
Instead, do this:
- Boil small potatoes with peel on (20 minutes)
- Drain the water and allow them to cool completely and store in the fridge until the next day.
- Now take the potatoes out of the fridge and place on a baking tray with baking paper
- Press each of them with a fork, so the potatoes are crushed, but not so it breaks into pieces
- Season with salt
- Drizzle plenty of olive oil over
- Into the oven at 225 degrees celcius for 30 – 40 minutes, until they look nicely roasted.
- Serve directly from the oven
When the freshly cooked potato cools of, some of the starch is converted into what is called resistant starch. That is, our enzymes are unable to do digest the starch and leave it as food for our gut bacterias instead. Therefore, if you eat it cold, you get a good portion of resistant starch instead of something that turns into sugar in your body. If you heat it up after cooling of, the starch of the potato is transformed from glucose into something our gut bacteria take care of or even better.
As a sugar addict – if the mere thought of potatoes are triggering your mind, it’s probably something you have to leave for now, If it’s something you can eat at rare occasions, without getting cravings several days afterwards, this is a great way to prepare the potato to remove as much triggering options as possible.