Okay, so it was me. I eat too much fiber.

I hate it when the internet is right.

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Forty-six grams of fiber per day is apparently too much for me, my tummy, my everything. At least for now. From what I read, this may change as the body adapts to eating fiber-full foods. I see this as an analog to the car salesman (always a man with this one) who volleys back a “You can refinance at a lower rate after a year.” It’s probably never happening for me.

To clear the air, I’ll admit this isn’t my first vegetable rodeo. Incidentally, I went to a real rodeo once, BTW, and it was one of those memorably terrible experiences: boring and it triggered a nosebleed thanks to my hay allergy.

But I’ve been a vegetarian/sometimes-pescatarian (or a hypocritical vegetarian, as my oldest sister labeled me once, back when I tacked on the modifiers “lacto,” “ovo,” and “pesca”) for more than 35 years and even tried going vegan for 2 weeks of that, although not in a row. I also grew and birthed two kids on a vegetarian diet. So I’ve likely beeb eating a lot of fiber for decades before flirting with “vegan” … I think.

But maybe a lot wasn’t 46 bowel-blocking grams a day, the kind of thing that might stop you up or slow you down a bit if it’s just a 1-day thing but stretch it to 2 days or 2 weeks and the poo will drip out on its own when it’s ready, not when you are.

And I’ve also recently cut back on carbs because my spouse is keto currently (it’s like Jack Spratt’s house here). So maybe I was eating as much fiber each a day as I’m assuming I was.

I check my notoriously incomplete food-logging app, MyFatness Pal, but remember that I’m a terrible food diarist, tracker, logger, whatever. While I’ve been pretty good over the past year — and ah-freaking-mazing since November or so 2023 — before that, I was hit and usually miss. I’d start off each day all jazzed about logging, but once it got a little tricky, either because of a complex salad that would seemingly take hours to log in the app (or, like, a minute) or because I didn’t want to count every one of those fun-sized Reese’s I ate at work, my patience for logging everything I ate would wear off. I just estimated a lot. Fat lot of good that did.

So, just like sugar, I have no idea how much fiber I was eating each day either.

Why was I logging any food? Rhetorical question. I’m just sure it was good for me.

Anyway, I still think I probably ate a lot of fiber but maybe I ate closer to the scant 25 grams the USDA wishes we would all actually eat. Or maybe I was inconsistent: high fiber days, low fiber days, days when I ate most of a large watermelon for lunch along with some peanuts. I’m estimating 80 grams of fiber on the watermelon days, which could explain the intense stomach pains…

So, yeah, I didn’t track fiber. What normal person does? Food is supposed to be there for joy. MyFatness Pal isn’t.

However, had I been tracking my food intake honestly for the past 9 years, I would be able to look for trends in the data. But that would have also required me to jot down how my digestion from mouth to colon were feeling too, and that’s going too far.

I’m positive this is something I’ll regret saying soon too.