Fermentation Adventures: Overdoing the Sauerkraut and Detox Symptoms

In my over excitement over a successful finished ferment, I went a little too hard on the sauerkraut, guys. This is a pretty common thing among new fermenters, as they chug their home brewed kombucha and eat their fermented veggies with enthusiasm reaping the benefits. There is a such thing as too much of a good thing with ferments and I think it’s important to talk about that, so all of YOU can avoid this during your adventures.

I didn’t really experience it with kombucha partially because I don’t drink soft drinks very much, and when I do I generally only consume a small amount before my body tells me to stop. So I didn’t experience these symptoms in the same way when I started consuming kombucha just because I didn’t introduce as much of the bacteria as some people do.

To put it in perspective, I drink less than 6 oz daily of kombucha, whereas some people have a hard time stopping drinking it consuming up to 32 oz in some cases, often leading to the intense detox issues I was dealing with last night. Detox is normal, but what happened last night is not good for us.

So here comes sauerkraut, a childhood delight that’s different in it’s actually fermented form, not like the pasteurized vinegar based stuff available in stores that I grew up on. I honestly didn’t feel I was eating that much and actually had cravings to consume more, so I did. And I ate John’s leftover kraut too. It’s that good, watch yourself.

A few days of this and my tummy was BLOATED last night. I also consumed some sweets which wasn’t helping. So I went to bed with the impression I could sleep it off like I usually do.

But I woke up like an hour later just not feeling good, like I had to go to the bathroom. So I did, and I felt pretty nauseous too, enough to spend the night carrying around a bucket just in case. Eventually I thought I got things to calm down enough to sleep, so I did. For like an hour until I woke up and just had a ball of lead feeling in my stomach. After avoiding getting out of bed, I basically stumbled to the toilet where I struggled not to throw up for a LONG time.

I’m not known for throwing up on a regular basis like my mom was, although I was as a baby. I’ll be honest when I say I’ve got a bit of an irrational fear of throwing up coupled with the fact that I have terrible jaw pain for days every time I do. The only times I’ve thrown up within the last five years where when we were on the run and freaking out. I spent the next three days with a migraine that almost made me sick again.

Long story short it was a long crappy night to say the least. This morning I got into doing some research to find out exactly why I felt so bad, and it all fell into place. When I looked it up I found its a common thing and the reason it was honestly so severe was the fact that I had a bunch of sweets in my gut. When you eat sauerkraut and sweets, your gut kind of gets overloaded and causes a bunch of gas and discomfort. It’s like you put half the amount of starter necessary for a kombucha recipe, just asking for mold and other not good things. The probiotics cannot do their work when you couple them with a sort of poison.

I’ve been following lots of groups about fermenting stuff on Facebook to learn all I can about this stuff and one of them sticks out in my memory with the things I was dealing with last night. It was a group ran by Jillian Mai Thai who claims that the best way to detox is violently, using a morphed sauerkraut recipe. The idea is to induce what’s referred to as the waterfalls but is really just diarrhea. Nausea and vomiting is also apparently welcome to flush toxins, candida yeast and parasites.

I’ve followed this group passively for awhile reading the testimonies from people trusting this random woman and consuming these ferments. I read accounts of people spending all night on the toilet to try and treat just about every illness in the book. She’s an incredibly religious woman and often refers to expelling the parasites and candida as expelling demons. By her opinion, we’re unhealthy because we’re possessed by physical demons, candida and parastites. Being an athiest, I had a hard time with this and looking more into the protocol, I’ve got a bad feeling about the whole thing.

The idea of the protocol is to overload your body with probiotics like I did last night, on a constant basis using the ferment and protocol diet until you’re “better” but from what I can tell the only ones getting any relief are often pretty obese or just so unhealthy that anythings going to be conceived as good. Now she claims that this is the ONLY way to really purge all candida and parasites and I just don’t buy it. If you believe what she says, she can even cure downs syndrome with this protocol and regrow a uterus removed in surgery.

She’s actually the only person talking about this stuff that I’ve come by that tells you to overload like this. Most of the fermentation blogs and health blogs talking about ferments warn you to pay attention to your body to avoid overdoing it and I think this is great advice. There are few things more unpleasant than being made ill from something that’s supposed to be good for you.

Now there is ground to the idea that flushing out your gut flora and replacing it with new one, via probiotics like kombucha and sauerkraut, along with a better diet. As I have found first hand, it does no good to detox then retoxify yourself with a bad diet. The thing here is most people, myself included, don’t understand what being on a decent diet is like so we fall back into patterns after these things.

And honestly, I know for me specifically, that sort of detox is just too much. Becoming healthier doesn’t mean you need to feel like you’re dying for a few months. I found my lingering detox that I went through with kombucha annoying but it was so in a way that made me understand just how messed up my gut is. This was just too much, too quick and my body is paying for it today.

I’ve felt exhausted, have a bad headache and am achey to the core. I couldn’t get comfortable when trying to sleep last night or even this morning because of abdominal pain. The fact that John wasn’t experiencing any other symptoms than excess gassiness lends to the theory that I over did it.

So as a part of a sort of public service announcement, I suggest you exercise restraint when it comes to going hard on the probiotics and ferments. I know the urge will be to consume as much as possible, but that’s not always the best way. If you’re not used to them at all, go very slowly and do not be surprised if you still experience symptoms like upset stomach, or really any flu like symptom.

For me, part of the point of all of this is to detox myself but I’m finding there is value in moderation. I’ll say I was somewhat comforted by the healing symptoms I was dealing with when I started drinking kombucha. This is because they weren’t that bad, but were just enough to show me I was actually doing something to help. The fact that I could get nausea to go away with a small sip of booch was a bonus, for sure.

But this was different in a bad way and I didn’t even do the protocol, as I honestly didn’t want to. The difference between that ferment and sauerkraut is that there’s more water and salt, making it into a sort of flushing juice instead of a tasty side dish like sauerkraut can be. With how I STILL feel from just my regular home fermented sauerkraut, I’ll say for sure I’ll never bother with that protocol.

With kombucha, I kicked myself out of a sort of crappy health funk. Things were bad when I started brewing; I couldn’t eat anything without feeling sick. Kombucha did for a time make me feel worse in some ways with everything from histamine responses to headaches. But as it made me feel worse in some ways, I felt a lot better in others and those symptoms subsided after my gut got acclimated to kombucha.

There’s value in a sort of kick start like that to start detoxing, which anyone that’s actually done it will tell you it’s HARD. But there’s an issue when you’re continually wrecking your gut flora in the protocol. There’s no reason I had to feel the way I did last night to feel better, no matter what anyone tells me I know that’s true. I feel had I actually done myself some good, I’d feel better today. But to be honest I’ve only taken small sips of water today for a reason; I still feel terrible. That’s not the goal here.

So just be aware of where you are at in your healing journey and pay attention. If you notice stomach pain or bloating from ferments, lay off for a few days and allow things to get back to normal a bit. The nice thing with ferments is that as long as they’re stored properly, they stay good for as long as you need them to.

And if for some reason you do overdo it, remember this post. Take whatever time you need to to feel better and approach with caution. It’ll say I’m staying away from my kraut for the next few days, but I’ll revisit it again in much smaller portions, like a small bite here and there.

It’s worth saying here that everyone is different. I specifically am not a model to compare yourself to as far as gut health is concerned. Despite my skinny appearance, things are a lot worse than even I expected in there. I say this to let you know that you probably won’t experience what I experienced, but I will say that anyone really stuck on the American diet is going to have some issues, even if they’re minor.

So I’ll keep on fermenting but with more caution in the future. I’ll say even with how crappy I feel today, I don’t feel as bad as I did 6 months ago and that does mean something. I’ve learned a lot through this experience about my body and my health, which in many ways has been the most valuable part of these experiences.

So watch out, take it slow and keep on fermenting!