The picture in the heading was taken from near the top of Flattop Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park. We went for a snow hike/snowshoe up there two weekends ago. It is so nice to get away to the outdoors when things are stressful especially in these recent political times. Get out and enjoy and support our National Parks and other public lands. They are truly treasures that we must cherish.

Hiking all the way up over thousands of feet uses a lot of energy so snacks are necessary. To stay fodmap friendly I brought Trader Joe’s Mochi Rice Snacks (which I am kind of obsessed with at the moment), assorted nuts, and Unflavored Pedialyte (Yes I know, the one for babies. I don’t like that Gatorade and things like that have coloring and artificial flavors. I much prefer the unflavored, uncolored version I can get with Pedialyte).

Now on to the three week answers to my low fodmap diet questions series.

If are just joining me you can see the diet I am following and why here.
I talk about the first week on the diet and the questions I am going to answer here.

Have I broken the diet?

Yes. You could call the first breaking of the diet this past two weeks a “planned break”. Mr. Physics and I had bought tickets for a beer and food pairing for Black Project Spontaneous and Wild Ales Third Anniversary party about a week before I decided to go on this diet. Thus I decided that since 1. the tickets were already purchased, 2. Black Project has all spontaneously fermented beers so they must have good bacteria to cancel out drinking more than one glass (right???), and 3. the menu seemed decently ok for the diet, that there was no reason not to do it to be strict on myself. Plus it would be a good test to see if anything really bothered me. Also Black Project makes freaking awesome “sour” beers and I really wanted a chance to try them. If you like sour beers I highly, highly recommend you check out there tap room if you are ever in the Denver area. They do bottle some of their beers to go but they are in limited quantity and difficult to get.

The pairing combined four Black Project beers with small plates of food made by Brewed Food. The pairings were (from top left to bottom right) a kimchi pancake with bbq sauce and mayo (okonomiyaki style) paired with 2016 Oxcart, a smashed potato and four different toppings paired with Silverplate (a dry hopped tart farmhouse), pork belly with mustard and fennel/tarragon salad paired with Supercruise: Cab Franc, and finally a passion fruit dessert of some sort paired with Kalmar Spontaneous Gose. Excuse the pictures, lighting was tough in there.

I really enjoyed the dinner. The amount of food was small but it was totally worth the $25 price to attend.

The only big break, besides drinking more beer than recommended on the diet, was the kimchi pancake. The compromises I made to stay as much on the diet as I could were that I only ate the one topping with the potato that was low fodmap friendly and I only had a single bite of the dessert. Considering this was my first experience eating in a non controlled environment on the diet, not bad!

I also broke the diet again this past weekend with beer. We went to a bottle share for the Super Bowl and, though I was very reasonable in how much I drank, I know I had more than 1 glass total all day. That being said all I ate food wise was carrots, some corn chips, and low lactose cheese and said on diet. I am pretty proud of myself for that.

What has been hard?

The fact that I can’t eat out is still really hard. It seems almost impossible to eat out without getting some garlic or onion in something. If anyone has any tips on this front let me know!!!! I really miss being able to go out to the occasional social meal with people.

Also it isn’t easy to explain why you aren’t eating in a social setting. At the Super Bowl party people kept asking me to try things and I had a really hard time trying to explain that I couldn’t eat it. By the end of the night people understood but it still wasn’t fun and I got some questioning looks but I also got a lot of interest in the diet as well.

It was also hard telling myself it was ok to “break” the diet for the beer pairing. I felt really bad about it going in because I was working so hard on other days to keep it. In the end because I let go I really enjoyed myself. I am glad I did. This is a low fodmap diet not a no fodmap diet. I need to remember that moving forward past the first 6 weeks.

What has been easy?

Forcing myself to expand my repertoire. These two weeks I challenged myself to stop eating a ton of rice and come up with other options and it actually turned out really great. I was much more creative in what I ate and I am excited to expand even more next week. I plan to make something with polenta and try cooking with quinoa for the first time.

What I learned this week…

This hasn’t been as crazy difficult as I thought it would be. It is actually been much harder for me to remove sugar completely from my diet than it has been to eat low fodmap friendly. There are lots of options on things to eat out there and it is really fun to be creative in the kitchen thinking up low fodmap recipes.

I went through all the recipes I had pinned on pinterest and created a low fodmap pinterest page for quick reference for myself. Turns out not a lot of the recipes I have previously pinned are low fodmap, however many of them could be easily modified to be so. Time for more experimenting!

I also learned that this diet does make me feel better. These past two weeks have been great. My gut feels great, I feel like I am less tired, and I have been sleeping better. These things might not all be related to the diet but I will take it!

My favorite things I made these 2 weeks…

These past two weeks had a lot of really awesome foods in it modified to be low fodmap friendly. My top 3 were:

1. Cornmeal Pancakes – I blogged this recipe because they were so good! I made them three times last week and ate them both for breakfast and lunch in many different ways. They are so fast to make that you can make them for breakfast even on a week day.
2. Jajamen – a japanese pork, cucumber, and udon dish. I made it without garlic or onion and with rice noodles rather than udon. We ate this for 3 meals and I already want to make it again.
3. Whole steamed fish – for Lunar New Year I made a full steamed fish with sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger, and the greens from scallions. It was SO GOOD! Also discovering that the greens of scallions are fodmap friendly was a great discovery.

Half way there!

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