Allergy UK beams advice from planet Mars?

February 13th 2008 IBS Blog

Muriel Simmons, chief executive of Food Intolerance Awareness, suggests that consumers should make a note of everything they eat as a method to eliminate your symptoms, although she admits that this can be a 'painstaking process'.

So according to Muriel taking a food intolerance test is a waist of cash and we should just use good old fashioned detective work and find out for ourselves. This advice is simplistic and flawed and here are my reasons why.

The NHS advise food exclusion diets should be used for children only and they take "several weeks" to collate and even if you've managed to build up a detailed log of your chomping habits you then have to exclude foods which you suspect are behind your symptoms for a month and see if anything happens. Now I dont know about you but I aint got the time to be a nutritional Miss Marple. Is this more nutritional advice beamed from planet Mars?

Muriels advice puts too much trust in our own abilities to self diagnose. Surely our insights coupled with a professional nutritionist is the sensible forumula?

Now imagine your food diary leads you to believe after three months of a "Painstaking process" (Muriels own words) you discern your favourite loaf may be in cahoots with your irritable bowel syndrome. You then exclude your favourite loaf and think you've done the right thing, after all identifying offending foods and then excluding them is what Muriel is advocating but here in lies the problem. Take a look at the ingredients of the my favourite loaf , TESCO's Wholemeal Oatbran Bread:

• Wholemeal wheat flour
• Water
• Oat bran
• Wheat gluten
• Fermented wheat flour
• Salt
• Vinegar
• Yeast emulsifier
• Vegetable oil
• Flour treatment agent

Now i might be food intolerant to just Yeast but not Gluten, an insight a food exclusion diet would have no hope of gaining. So my point is if you followed the food exclusion advice you could be unwittingly excluding your self from ingredients you are not food intolerant too and in the this example depriving yourself of vitamin B from knocking out yeast, a critical necessity of a healthy nervous system.

Rant continues...

So if you haven't got time to spend the next three months of your life writting down everything you eat, holding on to a vague notion you might be able to pinpoint what your food intolerances are with the risk of excluding vitamins then rest assured, finger prick blood food intolerance tests are available on planet earth.

Message to Zil

February 14th 2008 IBS Blog

Thank you for being my Valentine at the Ate O Clock restaurant :-) I love the way you laugh, the way you make me feel, the way you hold my hand, the way you touch me and your the best snog I've ever had. I LOVE YOU.

Sweet office addiction

February 21th 2008 IBS blog

When i was diagnosed with Irritable bowel syndrome in 2007 i knew i had to change my lifestyle, 6 months on from that insight Ive done nothing. I know I should exercise but I'm too knackered. I know I should stop missing breakfast and eating chocolate from the the office vending machine of temptation but i can't resist. I know I should eat fruit but it rots in my fridge. Office culture is the worst place place to break away from bad eating habits.

I feel trapped in a cycle I can't crack my IBS makes my guts hurt and I cant help but feel working in an office is a nutritional Guantanamo Bay. Everytime a collegue comes back from their holidays its tradition they bring back chocolates. At 11 AM a snack van pulls up outside the office laden with pasties and chocolates beeping its horn and Pavlov's dogs come trotting to the trough, breaking away momentarily from the clackity clack of their keyboards, sparking into life in anticpation of sweet relief. At 12 PM I go to lunch with the PR and Marketing manager, visit Browns sandwitch shop in Heslington. I can't resist full fat coke and a mince pie. At 3 o clock I get tired and dial 105 into the vending machine to drop me a double decker. If i'm working late I'll hit the chocolate vending machine again. On fridays we go to Millers Chippy.

Ive noticed something about myself. The more stressful the day the more crap I eat, or more specifically speaking the more sweet crap I eat. Somewhere in my psyche Ive trained myself to respond to stress with sugar. I remember when i was battling away with A levels I'd always sweeten the sour taste of Geography revision with full fat Coke and a mint Aero. Before doing an admin heavy task at work brew up a sweet tea. In fact come to think about it sugar has been my shield against lifes shades of blue. But if Im not able to crack this conditioning the chances of me getting a healthier gut will be remote.

I began to wonder why I'm so addicted and I came across a theory in evolutionary biology. Back in the days of the Flinstones when we ran around with spears and the office commute was a stroll down to the hunting plains our very survival was dependent on sourcing sweet fruits packed with micro nutrients. Once eaten a shot of serotonin is released in our head and we experience pleasure and thus we are rewarded for eating something sweet. Now whilst that was usefull back in the day when fruit was the only sweet source now its a handicap when chocolate triggers the same response.

So now I've learnt this I'm going for once apply it and kick the habit of eating chocolate and tasting the real thing, yes I'm going to see if I can replace the snacking crap with well I'm not sure yet but I have seen some female collegues come in with little plastic tubs with dried fruit and nuts. I shall investigate and I'll let you know how I got on.

Nana's 90th Birthday

February 23rd 2008 IBS blog

Over the weekend I travelled to Scotland to celebrate my Nana's 90th Birthday. Being brutally honest this wasn't a trip I was looking forward to. I've always felt like an outsider in my clan and playing happy families is a charade I'd ordinarly miss but truth be told I didnt have a choice, I had to go.

I was born in Paisley, Scotland but brought up Grimsby but I never bonded with all my Scottish relatives so when were all thrown together in one space it feels like I'm trapped in an elevator and have to make contrived conversation with strangers.

My Nana is in a care home, I hate care homes, a place were your only entertainment is day time TV and part time carers replace part time family is no dignified way to spend your twilight years. But there we all were celebrating my Nana's 90th birthday in one of the spare "recreational rooms" of the care home (which I was told doubles up as a grieving room) .It all seamed peverse. The family standing around my wheel chair bound Nana raising glasses and toasting her health. I wondered what were we celebrating? Were we all guilty? What was my Nana really thinking?

On the drive back to England my irritable bowel syndrome was worse than ever but at least i was going home to continue my life, I felt very guilty and I pledged to my self that i'd write to her and let her feel I have not abandoned her.

IBS - I shall become different

February 28th 2008 IBS blog

Blood clear, urine clear, ultrasound scan clear. There are no signs of structural / disease of your gut, it looks like you've got IBS. That's what my Doctor told me today and its the final kick up my arse to take control of this stomach heckler and change what I eat forever. In fact I aint just going to change what I eat, I'm going to exercise, I'm going to loose weight, I'm going to drop from 11 stone to 10 by friday 11th July in time for my cousins wedding. Now you might think at 11 stone Ive got nothing to worry about but I'm 5' 5" and I want my definition back, no more excuses.

IBS is what I needed to see beyond my health myopia, IBS is my MOT failure certificate, now I'm going to repair myself and the road to recovery started today with a trip down to Morissons and purchasement of office health snacks to resist the hypnotic curse of the office vending machine. Like Jason of the Argonauts I'm going to resist the temptation of the sirens / vending machine curse by filling my top desk draw with natural snack alternatives namely Morrisons:

• Specially selected dates
• Three seed mix
• Pine nuts
• and Cranberry & Macadamia mix

Now in all honesty I aint got a clue if the above really is healthy but when you've been eating double deckers for breakfast relatively speaking, I've just been knighted by Gillian McKeith (Who coincidently is a right twat food obsessed Nazi and probably wouldnt have the strength to hold a sword but she popped into my mind so its the best example i could come up with)

So tomorrrow its no more double deckers and hello nutty nirvana. Hope the lads in the office dont think i've turned Gay.

My battle with self doubt

February 29th 2008 IBS blog

Doing stand up comedy for me is a battle with self doubt. Everytime I write something which i think is a sure fire winner the demons of self destrucion start to whisper. There so much I want to talk about, so many ideas bouncing around my my head I have exorcise them, give them flight and the only way I know how to do it this is over a microphone in front of Mancunian audience which 9 times out of 10 wants blood

When stand up goes well you feel like your flying. All those tormented angry thoughts meet peace in the sound of laughter. When you walk off stage strangers pat you on the back, hands reach out of the darkness to shake yours and you believe that one day you might transcend from a participator of life to a commentator (A far easier proposition).

When stand up goes badly it feels like a body blow. There's no dignity. No one meets your stunned stare when you exit that stage. If you meet the gaze of an audience member they'll nervously look away, worried that you failure may be contagious. Ive had around 20 gigs so far (I hat the word gig, I prefer the word attempts) 50% have worked for me so I'm still going and I have no plans to back down. Comedy is full of people saying nothing, theres no danger in what they say. But I will not walk that line. I want to talk about apathy, fear of death, celebrity obsession, my brouchure of vitriol goes on. Tomorrow I have an "attempt" at comedy in Manchester, Ive heard the venue is bear cage, good I'll like that, I need to feel a reaction any reaction.

This country used to have three lions on its shirt, they fucked off a few years back and got replaced with Ant & Dec bumming each other and Elton John jerking off over them. They say in london your never more than 1m away from a rat. Infront of my television I'm never more than 30 seconds away from a celebrity, someone call pest control. Oh I nearly forgot my IBS was non existent today, I have no idea why but I feel good.