Thursday 1 June 2017

Maybe things aren't as bad as I thought

So I did a bit of reading last night because I thought my sudden lactose intolerance was more than a little unlikely. It turns out that there are certain circumstances where lactose intolerance can actually be temporary!

I read all about sudden onset lactose intolerance, its rare but not impossible but most importantly it is also likely that if your lactose intolerance came on suddenly, it will go away over time.

I then looked at causes of sudden onset lactose intolerance and it turns out that a severe GI upset can cause it because it can unbalance the enzymes and bacteria in your gut. Well guess who had food poisoning just a few days before this all started? Yup, this girl.

We had Chinese food for dinner three weeks ago and I was so ill afterwards, genuinely the most throwing up I have ever done. This went on for 48 hours. At first I didn't think it was food poisoning because having spent most of my life in the food industry before going on to become a nurse, I know that usually food poisoning takes at least 24 - 48 hours to develop after you have eaten the meal that caused it. I had become ill within a few hours. However just as I was getting better the other half started throwing up just as violently as I had been and I decided that it simply had to be food poisoning, maybe I was just more sensitive to this particular bacteria or something.

So from what I read the best thing to do is to give my system a break from lactose to let the enzymes build back up. There is no way of knowing how long I need to take this break for, its just trial and error unfortunately so I thought I would give it a week and see how it goes. If there is no improvement, I will try another week. It actually doesn't seem that hard since I don't necessarily need to cut lactose out completely, just cut it right down. I already bought lacto free milk and butter so all I really need to avoid is cheese for a week, surely I can manage that?