Illeostomy? Feeling depressed and sluggish? Try this diet.

[Shamrock4806]

This is my current diet, I have a high output ileostomy so I need to watch my food intake very closely as to reduce bathroom visits or blowouts.

I bake a bunch of chicken thighs or legs, I find this meat juicier than chicken breasts and wings have little meat on them anyway. I just use a seasoning mix and ensure as much fat drains off while cooking as possible. Removing fatty parts and even skin if it's too much as to keep the fat down, but I don't want to remove all fat. So I'll nuke up 2-3 or even 4 sometimes of these chicken pieces for lunch.

Breakfast has been usually a bowl of rice type cereal with low fat milk. But occasionally I'll go out for eggs over easy, link sausage and French toast.

I keep some orange juice around and take a slug if needed, a strawberry & banana smoothie as well. Some pickles to drink the juice if I crave it.

Dinner can be anything like spaghetti with pasta sauce (no chunky veggies), maybe some mild Italian sausage, microwave swedish meatballs in pasta cream sauce or a Salisbury steak dinner. Lasagna (small pieces) also. Soft foods, easily digestible.

The main thing is getting that chicken in for the day, it's packed with protein and B vitamins for energy. As you know us illeostomy types need to watch our B vitamins, especially B 12. Thing to watch for is no hard parts. Warning deep fired and/or brined chicken or meats can cause runaway diarrhea issues so always bake, boil or pan fry..

I've been doing pretty good on this sort of diet, just enough energy but less bag volume.

Oh and I eat something in the middle of the night as well, it could be a bowl of cereal or even a piece of bread with creamy (only) peanut butter on it.

One thing to note is pasta can be a tricky devil, it can cause a huge amount of bag output and even a blowout if one eats too much and then falls asleep. Or it can be not cooked all the way and actually thicken up output as it absorbs more water through the system.

And pasta sauce, although I love it, can be problematic as well, if mixed with bread or will thicken up output and even cause pancaking. It likes to gas, stink and stain the bag too. So I've learned to just eat barely enough to coat the pasta and nothing more.

Portion control is vital as that bag can only hold so much, but I've been sleeping better and longer in some cases because I'm not as hungry by eating the chicken and some pasta everyday. Instead of eating anything and suffering with high output volume.

I eat more at breakfast, lunch and a early dinner before 4 pm. After that I eat smaller meals.

For a treat before bed I'll eat a little mint chocolate chip ice cream, it's a mixed bag of results. The dairy causes some gas (as does the milk) and the chocolate makes for thick black sludge later. But it's usually fine.

But it's nice to finally settle down into an acceptable diet, along with bag adhesion issues my diet also has been a problem a long time trying to solve by trial and error process.