Originally Posted by
booklifter
The money thing is hard, but are you taking any digestive enzyme and probiotic supplements? I think these (especially the protease) represent some of the most underappreciated/overlooked supplements across the community/sport/whatever-we-are. Some will say that when you eat real food in a normal diet, you naturally get enough enzymes to be able to digest your food. They're right, but our diets are far from normal and it's not enough just to be able to eventually get it through our systems - we need to break it down fast (if for no other reason than to prepare for the next meal), and absorb as much of the nutrients as possible. Throw in diet-skew like protein powders, isolated from their parent plants and animals and treated, sanitized, spray-dried, instantized - suddenly you're getting a whole lot of protein with absolutely zero concurrent proteases. Some of the mass gainers and regular protein powders claim to include supplemental digestive enzymes, and they do, but if you actually look at the quantity provided it's about 1% of what you really need with that 'meal' (and what you'd get from a single dose of the dedicated supplement). Similar principle with real food - it's not as dire a situation regarding a lack of natural enzymes, but because it's real food with real weight and volume, you want the enzymes that much more to ward off indigestion.
Anyway, you may already be doing this, but just in case you haven't tried it, something to keep in mind whenever you are back to bulking.