On the road to digestive health. Step two.

In my previous post I wrote about my quest to get off the prescription drug pantoprazole. I’ve been taking this for years now. I have never stopped taking it because of the severe rebound effect it, (and other proton pump inhibitor drugs), has. I am going to share with you what I have done, and am doing, to help the process along. I was going to wait two weeks to update but I’m making progress so I will go ahead and post now.

In the first few days off pantoprazole I sporadically took ranitidine 150mg (Zantac 150). These can be bought over the counter and are a different type of acid reducer than the proton pump inhibitors. These are good for 12 hours compared to the 40mg pantoprazole tabs which last 24 hours. So that was step one for me in breaking up my stomach’s dependence on a drug 24 hours a day. I would take a ranitidine and then go longer than 12 hours before taking another one.

Next, once I began to go some time in between, I would use regular ole’ Tums when I was feeling any discomfort. I also began to chew up DGL 20 minutes before eating. DGL is deglycryrrhizinated licorice, combined with saliva it stimulates the natural protective factors in the digestive tract, so that is why you chew it up. I can tell you, although there is the remote taste of black licorice in it, it is not an enjoyable experience chewing this up but I can definitely tell when I don’t take this, so for now, DGL is a keeper.

Then, right before eating I take enzymes. I’m pretty sure these are helping too, but I may try some different formulas and brands for settling on which helps the most.

Currently, I am adding ginger. Ginger force is the brand I bought and I haven’t taken this long enough to give any feedback at all.

Next, I will look at taking some kind of probiotic.

As a further note, I have cut my running back and added lots of cycling and some swimming for now. The reason for this, is that running is tough during this weaning off stage because of all the up and down movement of the stomach while running. There have been times I thought I’d throw up in the first 15 minutes of a run because of it. (Even on an empty stomach.) I’ve found if I slow the pace down a few minutes it works itself out but it’s tough for the first minutes of the run.

I’m not officially in the middle of a training cycle for anything so even though my running mileage is cut I’m happy with running, cycling, swimming and resistance training sessions. I’m feeling overall fit!

Thanks for stopping by.