Been suffering from gastritis for some while already - 2 years ago I was diagnosed with athrophic gastritis and acid reflux.
During the last years I have developed an insomnia (fragmented sleep) due to the gastritis and the general anxiety. One thing that helps me sleep is not to eat late at night. For me eat means not to eat after 17:00, which is really tough.
I can't eat later because the food I have eaten after 17:00 simply DOES NOT DIGEST, and I have a feeling of full stomach. It does not matter how long I stay asleep afterwards, the stomach still does not empty.
1) Could it be that I am experiencing some kind of digestion "circadian rhythm" which is why I cannot digest the food in the evening?
2) How can I avoid the hungriness if eating 17:00 at the latest? I eat a lot which means that I get hungry fast.
Will appreciate if you could share your experience with chronic gastritis.
Thanks a lot.
Written by
JackFruitRob
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Hello Rob, this is my general response to help people find a baseline, it is partly copied and pasted from other responses I have given. I have had gastritis several times in the past usually treated with 14 days of Nexium.
The GI tract is complicated, but basically needs to be run properly throughout, in a disciplined way, and avoiding the temptation that we have food available all the time. All these things are related, including gastritis caused by excessive acid, which is stimulated by having food in your stomach too frequently. When your stomach is empty it has a pH around 4, which is better for healing and avoiding gastritis. You want to have three of these periods a day. Certain foods (like meat) take a long time to digest, 3 to 4 hours, and are not good as your evening meal. But, the first thing to sort out in all cases is your vitamins. Your vitamin levels affect the health of your intestines, and the health of your intestines affects your vitamin absorption, so it is a vicious circle that you have to break. Get some really good, expensive, multi-vitamins (ideally constituted for your age) and take them without fail every day before your breakfast. Get a blood test for Vitamin D and get you doctor to judge your supplement level required in IU’s. Do not get the ones with high calcium and magnesium content initially as certainly in large doses these minerals can mess you up as they consume your stomach acid, and you should get enough of these minerals from your diet. If you are on low FODMAPs, go for all lactose free dairy products to boost your calcium. At the same time, sort out your fasting periods immediately. This is normally completely overlooked by GP’s, but is critical. Your small intestine should be practically sterile, and your stomach acid along with bowel cleaning during fasting (called MMC) will usually do this. You need to fast for this to be effective, and by that I mean, ABSOLUTELY NO eating in between meals, only water, or zero-sugar drinks. Imagine that you never washed your dinner plates and just kept putting food on them all the time!, they would be permanently loaded with bacteria. You need to give your small intestine plenty of time free of food for cleaning and maintaining the factory. The modern scenario of have cupboards full of rich foods permanently available day and night is a modern luxury outside of the original design of the human being. Your stomach will sort itself out when you have got control of your small intestine and improved your nutrient absorption, and then your large intestine will improve later as nutrients are more efficiently absorbed from your small intestine. To do this, eat a good breakfast at say 7am (porridge with 50% lactose free milk) or what suits you and then a good lunch at 12 o'clock - absolutely no food in between. After lunch, no food again for at least 5 hours, and eat well again for your evening meal because it has got to get you through the night. No supper or snacks, no food or milk at all until breakfast the next day.
Seek out and try to eliminate “trans-fats”. These cause inflammation of the colon, separately to bacterial overgrowth and you will be more sensitive than most because of SIBO and this confuses what is causing you trouble. Chips, hash browns, butter, popcorn and things cooked in cheap or old frying oil as you find in many restaurants can give you colon pain directly through inflammation. It usually passes in a day or so, but trans-fats are bad for you in a miriad of ways, not only by inflammation of the colon. Ideally, starches should only be boiled, and this is enough. Red meats take a long time to digest, and also contain some trans-fats, only have them once a day, and just a light salad to go with them, not a load of starchy food or grains, as they have long digestion times. You don’t want carbohydrates being held up with these in your digestion by heavy meats.
You will feel hunger in the fasting periods, this is doing you good, and you must NOT respond to it - only with water or no-sugar drinks. This is critical. Importantly, when you are feeling better, do not resort to your old ways, you are still recovering, and you need to make a life-style change to have this level of discipline in your eating and continue with it. Do start doing some exercise if you don’t already, as this will really help with your gut motility, and your general health. It takes a few weeks at least, and you need to persevere. You then need to maintain a healthy and consistent way of eating and always keep the vitamins topped to prevent you from relapsing. In a couple of weeks, you should be able to be getting off the low FODMAP diet, and mixing back in the higher FODMAPs.
There is a lot of support for L-glutamine to help with repair of your intestinal lining; this means buying 500g of the bodybuilder powder type and having a couple of tea-spoons of this a day, one before breakfast and one just before you go to bed, and you can have this in a light cordial drink. A lot of this was taken from this excellent paper below, but it does fit exactly with what I have experienced. For the first time I really feel in control of the IBS mystery that has been a burden for years. Good luck. Please reply if this works for you.
Treatment and Management of SIBO — Taking a Dietary Approach Can Control Intestinal Fermentation and Inflammation
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