I’ve been wanting to do a thread about this for some months now, but so little time, nor did I want to jump the gun in case it came back. But I really want to shout this from the mountaintops in the hope there is a good chance that it could possible work for others too! I realize we are all different, I’m sure it won’t fix all of you, but still feel like this will help quite a few if the effort is made. This is going to sound like a testimonial for some infocommercial, but I assure you I’m not selling anything, nor is there anything for you to buy from anybody.
First a brief history from me. I’m now 58, 5’10" and most of my adult life my weight has been in the 150’s, so slightly on the thin side. I suffered and was diagnosed with GERD in my early thirties which was due to a hiatal hernia and espogitis. I was still one of the lucky ones, the 20% of GERD sufferers, that didn’t suffer from heartburn, and never had any problems lying down. But boy, when I ate my meals, without medicine, there were some times I could reflux for hours, up to about two quarts of liquid stuff coming out of me. Certain foods helped set it off even more, in particular barbecue or certain sauces.
So my doctor prescribed 30 mg Prevacid at the time of diagnosis, and I hated taking it, but could never go more than three weeks without taking it before it came back in the worse way, and episodes of refluxing for hours before it would subside. Still though, over years, I learned to cut back on my meds to a small extent, but more days than not I took it are else it would come back hard on me.
When the 15mg Prevacid OTC was available, a few years ago, I thought I’d double up on it to make it 30mg, but figured, let’s just start out with the 15mg capsules. This certainly improved my situation, and I wondered during all of those years if my doctor had been overprescribing me all of those years.
Two years ago, I bought a parcel of mountain land in CO with a old log cabin project that I choose to tackle. Well, there is no getting in the car and grabbing a bite to eat out there. And with no electricity and kitchen set up yet, I brought my own food in, but it was kind of limited, and after eating the same stuff for weeks on end, besides putting in a lot of physical labor, my weight started to drop a bit. First few times out, I’d gain it back when I came back to TX. But kept doing this every other month, and eventually decided something was happening with the weight loss. After losing 10-12lbs, and keeping it off, I decided to phase out the 15mg Prevacid pills sometime in August of 2016. As I was saying, I could never go more than three weeks without the acid reflux coming back on me not being on the meds, but this time a month passed, another month, and now some nine months later, still not taking medicine, and acid reflux free. Not only that, I’m eating foods that used to give me a bit of trouble if I didn’t have my medicine. Now I’ve had a few hiccups, a few in the fall, and I believe my last one was in January, but now don’t even have those anymore. I suspect when I had a few hiccups it was due to my weight started going back up around 146 or so again, so I made the effort to get it back down to low 140’s again, generaly I shoot for 141 or 142 for morning weight undressed.
So even though I was already slightly thin, for me, anyway, I concluded my body just wasn’t suited for that weight, and my morning weight undressed of low 140’s definitely agrees with me. I had no idea that something so simple would have solved my problem, but it did. If only my doctor would have told me, “you know, John, there is a good chance if you’ll lose 10lbs, you won’t have this problem any more, nor will you be on this medicine.” But he didn’t, I guess because, they really don’t have all the answers by a long shot, and just because it was my answer, doesn’t mean it will be for others. I realize that. We did discuss surgery, but he really felt like this medicine for life was my best choice. Of course, they all say, avoid certain foods, avoid certain liquids, in my case, they told me to avoid any weight gain, don’t recall them saying I needed to lose weight because like I said, I was already slightly thin.
But for me, that’s all I had to do. Other things I have done from years past was give up cola’s. I’ve been off of them for a little over four years now. That didn’t help my acid reflux. I drastically reduced my milk (skim milk) consumption back in November, but I’m convinced it was the weight loss that did it. Even the 5 lbs loss, I noticed improvement, but not near as much as what the 10-12 lbs loss did for me.
Looking back, I wished I would have made the weight loss connection sooner, or somebody would have made this suggestion. It would have saved me a lot of agony. Not sure this will be your answer, and perhaps you’ll need to do more weight loss to get the result, or maybe it won’t even work for you. But hoping there are some out there who will consider this and give it a try and it does for you what it did for me.
Best of luck.