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That's very interesting. Thanks for posting.

After decades of crippling stomach cramps I was recently diagnosed with diverticulitis, which means I have multiple pouches in my digestive system where food can get caught up in and lead to infections.

I am supposed to avoid foods that do not break down in the body, like seeds, tomato skin and popcorn.

When I feel the symptoms coming on I am switching to a liquid diet for a few days to help flush it out.

I'm not doing it for long enough to lose much weight, but I actually quite like the meal replacement shakes, and I'm feeling much better.

It's tempting to do a week on the liquid diet to see how it affects my weight, but I don't know if I have the will power for that.

Yeah repeating that you should get the advice of a dietitian if you can because most meal replacements are garbage. They're almost certainly going to say "no" to a full regimen of meal replacements but will help you work out a tasty easy and cheapish diet that involves them.

So I've ventured into the dark world of Soylent and this seems similar. Glad it's working out for you in more ways than one!

I still have a really hard time resisting terrible things like fast food and pizza, which I need to be better about. If I can ever fully let those go I think it'd really make me a lot healthier. Which is why I fully embrace our dark liquid-food future.

I have been on and off over the last few years with Optifast which I get through Chemist Warehouse (not sure which part of Aus you are in, but in Syd they are very common). I was instructed to do 2 meal replacements and then eat a regular dinner. My results when I am following it strictly have been similar to yours. I lost ~20kg the first time around over the course of 3 months starting around 130kg. Right now I am hovering around the 115kg down from 130.0 in late January.

Been dealing with a crohn's flare up for a couple of months. Down about 30 lbs. Can't say it's worth it, but I'll take any win at this point. Hope you get some relief duder.

I have type 1 diabetes and some kind of undiagnosable stomach illness and your story sounds really interesting. I have been advised to try probiotics but not looked in to diet replacements. Not sure how viable it is for me with the diabetes but I'll ask them.

Congrats, duder. It often seems the case though that something that will work for one person won't work for another. Seems pretty rough sticking to shakes but if you have the discipline for it as you do sounds like it works really well and it most likely will for others. Everyone has crazy different opinions though! Personally been on low carb/ostensibly keto (not strict enough about it admittedly) since July of last year and just got to my lowest weight since 2004 and it's probably the easiest diet I've ever maintained. Granted I am down from eating fast food 2 or 3 times a day with various chips/candy/etc all the time so that definitely helps. Still feel pretty exhausted sometimes which I should probably get checked (hopefully diabetes or something had not set in before I changed my lifestyle). But overall it worked for me.

I know someone who went through something similar. I don't know if their dietitian had them strictly on shakes, but it was an incredibly limited diet. They lost weight at a reasonable rate and it really did them a lot of good.

Of course, the real challenge is sticking to a diet that will keep you in the weight range you and your doctor decide is healthy for you. Wish you the best of luck duder.

I dealt with colitis (the bastard cousin of Crohn's) for 15 years. Can 100% confirm weight can and will fluctuate while dealing with it and it's usually because your body is failing to absorb needed nutrients. If you ever need to vent, @troll93, I'll listen and have probably dealt with something similar to what you're dealing with.

I'm a dietitian, there are two possible problems with this (none applying to you obviously). First, depending on where you live, these nutritional drinks are created and therefor also sold specifically for people with some type of ailment that warrants its use. Meaning you need to ask permission from a doctor or dietitian to use them, which again depending on where you live, they cannot give you because insurance will not cover it unless there is an ailment to speak off, which includes your bill for the dietitian itself. Furthermore, in some places can't order these without diagnosing a specific illness to begin with, so for this to work you'd have to pay the dietitian yourself and then they have to lie about who has an illness or ailment. It's a whole thing.

As you said, commercial market nutritional drinks are not up to standards and are often unhealthy alternatives. Fortunately for others though, in some places the official purpose-designed drinks are quite easy to get.

The more obvious second problem with this, is sticking with it. These nutritional drinks are actually mostly used with people that don't or barely have any desire to eat. Think of people in chemo, the elderly, people with severe swallowing problems and so on. It ensures that these people have an easy way to get the nutrients they require. But if you do have a lot of desire to eat, this often doesn't work and in fact makes things worse, because people will just drink these on top of their regular eating habits which they usually fall back on within a couple of weeks. Obviously, you managed to stick with it so it works for you.

I'm not trying to discourage anyone from trying this, because different things work for different people. But the data shows that this often doesn't work for the reasons I mentioned which is something to be aware of before you are completely sold on trying something (these nutritional drinks are definitely not cheap if insurance won't cover them).

@zevvion: Props on being a dietitian who isn't super dogmatic. The three people I saw when I was younger were incredibly down on anything but their own system. The third lady literally told me that skipping her planned meals on a Sunday breakfast was basically suicide. Turns out two eggs and some grapefruit wasn't fully lethal.

@danishingact: There is quite a serious problem with reasoning when it comes to dietary advice. Everyone thinks they are right because something works for them or they think it does, and some dietitians don't see past this either. In general, most dietitians are best at treating people with specific ailments or serious illnesses because nutrition is an exact science and in order to treat people with such illnesses you need to prove you have followed additional education and gathered the correct information from proper sources and are capable of treating these people. Your degree isn't good enough.

But for general health advice, heck, you don't even need a degree. Someone who has no knowledge whatsoever is by law allowed to guide anyone he wants. Dietitian is a protected title, but you only need it for situations where wrongful treatment is potentially dangerous. Getting someone into a sham diet that doesn't work is only dangerous for their wallet, so you're allowed to do it.

This also means that basic general advice is not the focus of a dietitian. They can say whatever they think is correct and won't get in trouble legally if what they say is nonsense. Whereas if I mess something up in hospital care all hell will erupt from the very floor on which I stand.

When there is no drawback to being wrong, people are often going to be wrong while being convinced they are right. The truth of the matter is that we know there are different bodytypes physiologically as well as people's digestive systems working differently on top of some evidence that some of this may be heritable.

Anyone who ever tries to claim 'this is how it works' is wrong by default because there is never only one way that something can work and some things may not even work at all for different people.

To be fair though, I have no idea what your dietitian told you precisely, but she likely had a reason why she said what she said that she just didn't explain. I always make it a point to explain why I am saying the things I'm saying, but plenty of dietitians don't do that because they don't like to repeat everything a gazzilion times a day. I don't think this helps because if you look at my previous comment the crux of what I said was basically 'this usually doesn't work'. But that sounds rather dismissive and is too focused on statistics which is something I do not think you should do when speaking to individuals, so when you read my entire comment it doesn't (or at least it shouldn't) read like it.