help!

[oss]

Really could use some help/advice/motivation. I've been following this program for 1 week...I realize it's not very long. I have eaten homemade minestrone soup, salads, brown rice, yams, cooked veges, a few small-sized bagels. I drink mostly water and may have a cup or two of green tea daily. I feel bloated, my clothes feel tighter, and the numbers on the scale has increased by 3 pounds. I also exercise about 5 days a week.

I am female and post-menopausal. I do not take any medications. I am really, really frustrated. Help........please.

[Steve]

I guess everything depends on where you are starting. I was overweight when I started. I was eating large volumes of high calorie items and went to eating large volumes of low calorie items so the weight loss was effortless. Your body needs to readjust to the diet. The healthy bacteria in the intestines need to readjust from what you were eating before to what you are eating now. Maybe that is what the bloating feeling is coming from. In any event you need to give this more than a week. I have been McDougalling for more then a decade and have been very strict for about 5 years. I am better off in every area.
Some of us have to adjust the program for our special needs. I tend to develop high triglycerides so I need to restrict the fruit in my diet, but the adjustment works. Others on the board have trouble with wheat and glutten. After a while you might want to try the elimination program that the Doctor recommends. You start using only the universal "safe" foods (no or less bloating perhaps) and then you slowly add more of the foods that casue some trouble until you find what is causing the problem. But I think it is too early to worry about elimination, unless you already suspect that you are having a reaction to a particular food. Large amount os beans can cause digestive problems for instance, but we knew about that before we made the change. Give yourself time to adjust. And please do not forget to let us know about the good things when they happen.

[Clary]

Really could use some help/advice/motivation. I've been following this program for 1 week...I realize it's not very long. I have eaten homemade minestrone soup, salads, brown rice, yams, cooked veges, a few small-sized bagels. I drink mostly water and may have a cup or two of green tea daily. I feel bloated, my clothes feel tighter, and the numbers on the scale has increased by 3 pounds. I also exercise about 5 days a week.

I am female and post-menopausal. I do not take any medications. I am really, really frustrated. Help........please.

Hi oss--Welcome to the board.

Here are some of my personal thoughts in response to your request for "help/advice/motivation":

You might consider posting your actual menus for several days, including all the contents and amounts of the recipes you use, and get some feed back from that.

What are you using for your guidelines for the program? You posted this on the Maximum Weight Loss forum. Are you following the MWL program or the "regular" McDougall program? Are your made-with-flour products made from whole wheat--like the bagels, and pastas? How much you weigh or how much weight you want to lose...

Information such as that could possibly help others here to offer suggestions. Lots of wisdom and experience available here at the board.

I would personally suggest giving the regular Dr. McDougall "12 DAY" program a really good try before going off into "specialties" subsets--unless you do know there is a specific problem you need to adjust to; and also to check what you read here on the board against what Dr. McDougall teaches if there seems to be a conflict, if you are wanting to follow his program as he teaches it. If you haven't seen it yet, check out his "Free Program" link on the opening page of his website for thorough information and support.

Sometimes people posting here on the board are not following the McDougall program, yet because of great resources here on this board, along with a lot of freedom to post on a variety of issues, they sometimes want to discuss personal experiences or agendas that are not always in line with what Dr. McDougall teaches. So in the beginning, it could be best for your success on Dr. McDougall's program to learn from his information what he teaches about his own program.

Oh, and I find that drinking at least 4 quarts of water per day often helps some who are having a bloating problem when the body is making dietary adjustments. (One of those Personal Opinions! )

Again, Welcome, and keep coming back.

[sanlee]

I second the welcome and do hope you'll keep checking in -- we can learn from each other!

When I first started the program, I also felt a bit bloated and heavier. I think it was the rapid addition of lots of fiber that did it -- I was probalby only getting 10-15 grams, then all of a sudden I was getting 30-40! As we get older, we don't adjust to dietary changes as quickly as we used to

But once the adjustment period is over, I began feeling a lot better and began losing, very slowly (again, the age thing?), but a slow loss is better than gaining or staying the same.

[Jan Tz]

How is your salt intake? Sometimes that can really cause bloating.

Those bagels aren't part of MWL, so maybe that's not helping. Does your minestrone soup have pasta in it? That, also, is not MWL. The rest of the foods you posted look fine.

When I began McDougalling several years ago, I remember that several health conditions cleared up before I lost even one pound. Don't give up! McDougalling has both science and wide experience behind it and it is very solid.

[DianeR]

Unfortunately, there are quite a few things that can cause bloating in certain individuals. Hard to tell what the problem is for you. You might try a diet/symptom journal and see if certain foods do it for you. Personally, I bloat from that dairy, egg, fatty foods (yes, these are not McD friendly -- just doing a complete list), excess sodium, large amounts of cruciferous veggies (I eat them anyway cuz I like them ), and sugar alcohols (like sorbitol, mannitol, etc.).

It is also correct that if there is a change in the amount of fiber you are getting, it can take your system a while to adjust.

[Caroveggie]

If this diet is very different from what you were eating before than I do think your body is adjusting. It might help to get a probiotic. When I first became vegan I took a Sensitive Colon Support probiotic that I found at Whole Foods and it really helped me adjust. I only needed it for about a week and then my body was fine.

A probiotic puts more of the good bacteria into your colon that digests plant foods. Once your diet is consistently plant foods you'll have enough of the good bacteria so what would have irritated you or caused bloating before won't be a problem.

If your regular diet has been the standard American diet, your lower intestines are probably full of the bad bacteria -- geared for digesting a meat-heavy diet. (This is truly bad bacteria by the way -- Dr. McDougall explains how it's carcinogenic in his Digestive Tune-up book.) Dr. McDougall has some very good articles about probiotics. You can probably do a search for probiotics on this site to find his articles where he explains these concepts better than I can.

By the way, the Digestive Tune-up is a very good book for anyone suffering from IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome), bloating, or any kind of tummy troubles. So I recommend that too; it will definitely help you understand the benefits of changing your diet and how to handle any problems you might initially experience.

Good luck!

[Janet in Dallas]

LOTS of good responses, but the way I look @ it....

Your body is saying, "So you r-e-a-l-l-y ARE serious about this! OK, I give" and you'll start dropping weight.

If anything, you'll save $$ eating this way....and you'll need the extra $$ to buy more fabulous, smaller clothes!