as small as a world and as large as alone

5:59pm September 13, 2013

ivegotagutfeeling:

Can you get enough nutrition through juicing and liquid diet alone?

Eating is no longer an option. I am not able to keep it down.

Is a long term liquid diet an option?

This is in regards to gastroparesis.

Yes.

You can’t just eat random liquids though. You need enough nutrients and calories.

I got by on liquids from Aug. 2012 to Mar. 2013.  I drank Boost in the hospital and Ensure out of the hospital. Plus soups to give me flavor, if not nutrients. The sweetness of most liquid nutrition formulas gets old after awhile and the soup gave me a change from that.  You can make soup taste like nearly any food.

There are many many different commercial liquid nutrition formulas, Ensure being the most famous. Some are milk based and some are clear. Lots of people are on liquid diets, temporarily or permanently, so there’s a lot out there. 

Some are specifically aimed at helping you gain or maintain weight if that’s an issue. If you’ve been malnourished and you get real nutrition, you will almost undoubtedly gain at least some weight as you get proper nutrition.  That’s normal and healthy no matter what your weight. Like during my first big bout of malnutrition I went rapidly from 240 to 200 pounds. When I went on a liquid diet I gained weight and then stabilized at 220. The next time, I lost weight down to 193 pounds. then after getting a feeding tube I gained and stabilized at 200. So even if you are big, your weight while malnourished is going to be lower than your weight with proper food and gaining weight when you get food again is not a sign you’re eating too much. (And if you’ve been malnourished a long time it can occasionally change your metabolism slower and make you gain a LOT of weight, which happened to me after I had starved for reasons related to poverty and disability. This is also why some people weight gastroparesis experience weight gain instead of weight loss.)

If the amount of liquid diet you’re capable of eating either fails to give you a stable weight, OR enough calories, OR enough nutrients, it’s time to talk to your doctor about other options.

My other option turned out to be a feeding tube so I’ll give you what information I know.

There’s basically two types of feeding tubes that go to your digestive system. Ones that go to your stomach (G tube and NG tube) and ones that go to your intestine (J tube and NJ tube).  And there’s one that goes to both stomach and intestine called a GJ tube.  The tubes with an N In their name go up your nose. The rest go directly into your abdomen.

If you have gastroparesis, a tune going JUST to your stomach does no good. It’s just a more expensive way to stick stuff in that you will upchuck anyway.

The j tubes that go to your intestine are the way to go generally. That’s NJ tube (the most temporary one because it just slides up your nose down your throat), or j tube, or GJ tube.

Any of those will work for getting the food in but I strongly recommend talking to your doctor about a GJ tube if it comes to this. Here’s why:

Your stomach problems will not end when you stop eating through your stomach. You will still have a buildup of bile and gas due to your stomach not emptying. That can lead to pain, bloating, reflux, nausea, vomiting, and even the fluid going to your lungs and giving you pneumonia, which is what kept happening to me.  These symptoms range from debilitating to life threatening.

The g tube gives a partial answer to that. You can use it to drain out the air and bile in your stomach. It’s actually amazing. And while it’s gross, is much less gross than puking. You can either drain by hand (is called “burping”, I recommend designating a cup to burp into, a green or yellow one hides the color best and makes it less gross, and write BURP CUP in huge letters so nobody will drink from it), or into a drainage bag. A suction drainage bag works best for me. I wear it afternoons and nights.

So if you’re going to be getting a J tube anyway I recommend talking to your doctor about a GJ tube because they give benefits to GP patients beyond just feeding you in a new way. And those benefits can save your life or save you lots of discomfort and puking down the road.

The main con of a GJ tube is they’re more complicated so there’s more stuff to screw up. But for me I really really needed it and it saved my life.

There are further considerations like tube versus button, but I can’t speak to those as I’ve only had tubes.

Anyway I know that’s more info than you needed, but if you’re considering getting a liquid diet you may be closer to feeding tube territory than you thought. And hopefully knowing this will at least help you fend off anyone incompetent enough to recommend a g tube or NG tube alone without the j component. Because tube into stomach is just as bad as mouth into stomach, if your stomach is paralyzed.

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