Low FODMAP Diet – Week 1
To keep myself accountable, and to give some first hand experience to anyone else thinking of trying the low FODMAP diet, I decided I would post weekly about my experience: did I break the diet, what has been hard, what has been easy, what I have learned thus far, and my favorite thing I have made that period.
(I originally planned to post every week but I realized while working on week 2 that answering these questions every week wouldn’t be that interesting. So I decided to change it up moving forward with week 1, week 2 & 3, week 4-6, and the reintroduction process.)
If you want to see the diet I am following I talk about it here.
Have I broken the diet?
Twice, both my diet and the actually FODMAP diet with the same food it turns out – Worcestershire Sauce. I wasn’t really thinking and made my pho-caesar dressing. This dressing is lemon juice, olive oil, salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, and worcestershire sauce. I made a double serving of it for salad without really thinking about it and ate it two nights. This breaks the no sugar (my personal rule), no garlic powder, and no onion powder rule. I saw no ill effects so that is good.
I also had cream cheese once because the original Stanford print out I had from the year ago said cream cheese was fine and I didn’t do enough additional research the first few days until I actually made my blog post. Now I know! (Also how sad is it that avocado isn’t low fodmap and I can’t just eat as much as I want on this diet)
What has been hard?
No garlic and no onion (^big surprise!!!). My goodness I never thought that would be so hard. It is harder than even my self imposed no sugar and no alcohol. I realized this week that because of this requirement of the diet it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to go out to eat anywhere.
Snacks, omg snacks!!!! I am a snacker. I don’t snack in large quantities but occasionally on some crackers here and there, a small chocolate, or from the Trader Joe’s mixed popcorn tin now taunting me. I very quickly realized this week that I didn’t have anything that I could really eat between meals in the house. I went out and bought some rice cakes and those have been life savers but they themselves don’t have a ton of calories so I put peanut butter on them. Oh also calories…I have been way under calorie amount this week. Which is nice for losing weight…kind of…that wasn’t my goal with this…because eating under the calorie amount you should isn’t a good idea…
What has been easy?
Surprisingly, shopping. Or maybe not surprisingly for me because I tend to not buy any pre made items anyway and have always read labels for high fructose corn syrup. I tend to be an “on a whim” shopper in the sense that I go to the store and buy fruits, vegetables, and meat that are on sale in my price point and then figure out what to do with them when I get home. I don’t tend to go to the store with a specific recipe in mind. This might have to change a bit moving forward because of the calorie issue listed above.
What I learned so far…
- Keep a food journal. This has helped me so much for two reasons – 1. it makes me write down what I am eating which helps me stay more honest and 2. if I do feel any discomfort I can record when and where and then look back to see if there are any consistencies with the food I ate that day. (ALSO OMG ISN’T THIS JOURNAL COVER THE BEST EVER ❤️️❤️️❤️️❤️️ TOTORO AND STUDIO GHIBLI SO MUCH!!! Also the avocado above…I sense a theme…)
- I need to plan ahead a little more and make more leftovers. I tend to make just enough food for one meal plus lunch for Mr. Physics and I the next day. This however needs to change because a lot of my go-to fast meals are out because of gluten, sugar, garlic and onion in them. I made two chicken breasts at once one evening and that lasted us 3 meals and was a great idea. If I don’t have something like that around I am going to eat a lot of eggs and rice for lunch…
- When I remove gluten, I eat a ton of rice. Maybe too much rice. I need to branch out and give other gluten free options a try like quinoa and buckwheat.
My favorite thing I made this week…
It may sound cliche because I blogged about it but my Peanut Butter Banana Granola. I have eaten it every morning with coconut milk, blueberries, and banana and it is making me very, very happy.
After that would be the zucchini lasagna I experimented with. It turned out pretty dang good actually and I will probably make it again slightly modified. If it gets good enough maybe it will become a blog post, who knows! I did learn it is shockingly hard to find tomato only tomato sauce. I managed to find a single can in King Soopers labeled “Tomato Puree” and that was it.
Are you doing the low FODMAP diet? How are you doing with it?
2 thoughts on “Low FODMAP Diet – Week 1”
After reading your post, I wondered what the big deal was about tomato sauce. I figured it was garlic, but then I read the small print ingredients of my Kirland organic tomato sauce and saw “organic sugar” as an ingredient. OMG I could not believe that there was sugar in tomato sauce.
Guess all my tomato sauce in the future will be made by hand on the stuff. What a pain. What do all the diabetics do?
Yup that is the biggest thing that diets like this have taught me, read ingredients because they sneak things in places. High fructose corn syrup is a big one that ends up in things you don’t expect. The main reason tomato sauce isn’t allowed on the diet, I believe, is because it usually has onion and garlic powder added in it. Every sauce I read had those in it. The FODMAP diet does allow you to eat sugar, I just chose not to on my own accord. You can find tomato “sauce” without anything added. It is usually called tomato puree though.