Fiberlicious!

Yesterday I felt like I had eaten my weight in fiber so I decided to log my eats for the day and tally up my fiber totals. I have to admit, I cheated toward the end of the day only because I didn’t want to overdo it, but for the most part, I ate as I normally would have. However I didn’t think about taking pictures of my food, so bear with me. I will list the amount of fiber in parenthesis. I looked up the fiber contents online if they didn’t come with a label.
And here we go:

Breakfast: Oats.

• 1/4 cup steel cut oats (4 grams)
• 1/2 cup Almond Breeze plain milk (1)
• 1/2 banana (1.2)
• 1 tbsp. ground flax (2)
• 1 tbsp. PB (1)

Green Tea Latte (not from Starbucks. I buy the matcha tea and have my favorite barista make it for me.)

• 1 tsp green matcha (1.1)
• 8 oz. Vanilla Soy (2)

Ok, so this was just breakfast. I consumed 12 grams of fiber just at breakfast. I should have stopped right there.

Lunch #1 (I ate this at around noon and stopped because I wasn’t all that hungry. Then I walked for about 45 minutes and came back to eat my soup)

• 2 slices toasted Bread for Life Almond Meal bread (4)
• 1/4 cup 2% cottage cheese (0)
• 1 tbsp. PB (1)

2 hours later, lunch #2:

• 1 cup Curry Lentil Soup. I’m assuming that this serving had about 1/4 cup of lentils and 1-2 servings of veggies with the tomatoes and zucchini. The lentils alone have 10 grams of fiber. So I’m going to guesstimate at 12.
• 1 really tasty and very ripe peach (1.5)
• 1 package of Alka Seltzer as a precautionary measure (it helped from having to unbutton my pants as I did yesterday)

Dinner: This is when I decided I needed to lay off the fiber. Breakfast tortilla with fresh salsa

• 1 Bread for Life Rice Flour wrap (2)
• 1 egg, 2 egg whites (0)
• 1/4 cup Daiya Mozzarella cheese (2)
• 1/4 freshly made, kick-ass salsa made by yours truly (~2)

I gave myself 2 hours to rest and headed out for a run at around 8.  I ran 4 miles with 4x400 meter sprints. It was hot but it felt good.
When I came back, I took a shower and snacked on the last of my Puffins Cereal. As I was shoving the spoon in my mouth, I read the box and saw “High in Fiber!” right on the box. Awesome. Good thing there was less than a serving size left.

• ~1/2 cup plain Puffins cereal (3ish) One serving size is 3/4 cup, which contains 5 grams of fiber. I’m being very conservative with my guess here
• 1/2 cup Unsweetened soy milk (1)

OK so here are my totals for the day:

Breakfast: 12
Lunch: 13.5
Dinner: 6
Post run snack: 4

For a grand total of: 35.5 grams of fiber.

And that’s with cheating at dinner. I originally planned on having a Southwest Veggie burger with salsa,  a little bit of my leftover potato salad and some warm arugula salad (I just cook it a little with a small bit of olive oil and garlic bc it’s easier for me to digest) but the Sunshine burger has 9 grams of fiber all in itself! So I went with the eggs instead. I would have been at or over 40 grams of fiber had I went that route!

Now here’s the deal. You’d think someone eating this much fiber is running to the bathroom 8 times a day. WRONG! If I go once a day I’m lucky. This is a huge problem. I’m sure this is part of the reason why I’m always so bloated. However I will have to say that I still firmly believe that I feel better after giving up the gluten, even if I’m still dealing with some issues. My constant headaches have gone away, for one. The summer time is prime migraine time for me (the humidity triggers my migraines) and I have yet *knock on wood* to get one. And this has been a HOT and sticky summer. That’s enough to keep me off the gluten.

I’m trying to look back and see if I’m eating more fibrous foods since I’m not eating gluten anymore. I have to do a little more research on that because it honestly could be. I’m wondering what kind of foods vegans eat to keep from eating so much fiber. In my research I saw that meat and dairy products contain very little to no fiber, and the eggs are what saved me today.

Let me know what you think. Is it normal to eat upwards of 40 grams of fiber a day? Do you have any suggestions of lower fiber meals that are gluten free and not necessarily meat or dairy related?