***I AM IN NO WAY AFFILIATED WITH ANY PRODUCTS OR DOCTORS SINCERELY JUST HERE TO SHARE MY VICTORY AND ENCOURAGE OTHERS***
Hey you,
I want to share my journey of healing from SIBO/IBS, going from hopeless to eating anything I want. I hope I can offer hope and inspiration to those facing this debilitating condition.
My struggle with IBS began at the age of 4.
As a child, the joy of indulging in candy quickly turned sour as sugar left me feeling unwell for days. At least it kept me healthy and cavity-free, I guess lol?
When I was 12, a bout of vomiting after eating spaghetti led to a generic diagnosis of IBS and was told it was impossible to cure. The solution offered was cutting out gluten, which helped somewhat but didn’t remove all of my symptoms. It felt like random foods, like random brands of peanut butter, would cause pain. Allergy tests revealed no allergies, leaving me frustrated and lost.
Symptoms: gas, bloating, sugar sensitivity, histamine issues (mosquito bites would blow up to softball sizes), chronic fatigue, constipation, brain fog, intestinal inflammation & pain, and well yeah depression and anxiety…( gut brain connection amirite? gut 24/7 tells brain….”error, error, error”)
I sought help from a highly regarded gastroenterologist in LA who follows the Pimentel papers, supposedly the gold standard in SIBO care. They diagnosed me with a lactulose breath test as SIBO methane dominant. I also tested negative for CSID, a rare sugar intolerance, and tested negative for parasites. (note, lactulose speeds up digestion so its actually advised to monitor your sibo gas rising score after 60 minutes instead of 90)
This GI promised I would get to eat at restaurants and live a normal life like my friends and prescribed me a round neomycin and Rifaximin antibiotics. (that cost almost as much as my car)
However, my symptoms immediately returned when I finished them. “That’s odd,” they said and gave up on me.
In my desperation, I was about to resort to the last ditch “SIBO treatment” COMPLETELY liquid diet for many more weeks than recommended until I stumbled upon Dr. Dinezza and started to work with her (at an expense, rip my credit cards but healing gave me my life back so yolo).
My path to recovery was multi-pronged, and I had to go in order(!!!!!!):
- Fodzyme Enzyme: This doesn’t help to cure anything, but I used the Fodzyme enzyme initially to help digest FODMAPs before I started healing my microbiome. This provided relief and allowed me to move away from the restrictive low FODMAP diet, which I hear can harm your gut over time as it starves the microbiome, and the bacteria can start to eat your intestinal walls leading to worse leaky gut.
- Prioritizing Health Basics: Managing sleep, stress, mental health, vitamins, minerals, micronutrients etc. – essential aspects of health. You can’t build a healthy body by skipping the basics. I made sure I was tracking all of these in https://cronometer.com/ for free. This app doesn’t suck and actually shows what foods you search for. Can’t heal your body without giving it the building blocks needed…….. think about the broader implications of this it’s mind blowing okokok. Also note: don’t track indefinitely, your goal is to become a normal person again haha so just do it for a few weeks and check in periodically.
- Taming intestinal inflammation during flares with resveratrol, turmeric, omega 3, vitamin D, magnesium, and ginger (a yummy antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory friend) and controlling endotoxins with activated charcoal (careful with this with other medications, it absorbs everything, but it really helped my endotoxemia/brain fog (LPS is found in elevated levels in the blood of those who are depressed, a toxin released by bacteria constantly dying off). update: taking ashwagandha for about a month has done wonders to relieve my body of the chronic fight or flight state it was in, it deeply rewires the body’s response to cortisol. I feel NORMAL.
- HCL Supplementation: I learned I had low stomach acid while doing the HCL challenge cuz I used to pop Tums my entire life. Gross lol. What do you plan on digesting with low stomach acid? Not much. (For the test, I reached up to 7000 milligrams with each meal with no reflux but felt better right away after eating using that, so I stuck to that instead of going higher.
I’m now down to around 1000 mg and often skip it entirely, and I’m ok.Update! I am no longer taking any supplements! (except multi vitamin, magnesium and vitamin D as everyone should be) - Digestion dominoes – Smelling your food, salivating, and chewing properly activate your digestive juices. I’m used to holding my breath while eating because of bracing for pain, but I’m still trying to unlearn this. You can taste food when you breathe while eating!!!
- Prokinetic + motility : Identifying the right prokinetic for my unique body (everyone reacts differently to every brand, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer for you here!!! try 12! if thats what it takes!!! they can make you feel worse if it is not a good match!!!) And getting moving every day. Yoga alone has shown to be as beneficial for symptoms as doing the low fodmap diet:(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10036984/)
- Diverse Diet: Adopting a diverse diet, incorporating at least 30 different prebiotic plant sources a week. This is the scientific standard (https://zoe.com/learn/30-plants-per-week) for a healthy, diverse microbiome, and I feel it’s inspired by the dietary practices of nomadic tribes when we were picking random berries off trees, haha. I aim for a daily fiber intake of 50g-100g. This includes nuts, seeds, fruits, and any plant skin. Plants = fiber. We need to expand our definition of fiber beyond products like Metamucil. 🤢🫠 I could NOT tolerate this this until sorting the HCL out. IMPORTANT: any food is low FODMAP in tiny quantities! So you CAN eat anything, but its the quantity that makes the difference. THIS IS LIBERATING. If 10 cherries bothers you, try one 😉
- I treated Candida with Caprylic acid and bid farewell to my lifelong chronic fatigue and sugar problems in about three days. Life = changed. (If you treat candida and no improvements happen… you don’t have candida)
Prebiotic fiber from food/plants became the key to feeding my gut bacteria and restoring a diverse ecosystem. Prebiotic, not pro. Pro is cool, try it, (I got flu like symptoms from one because of the gut/immune connection before I started this healing journey), but it doesn’t regrow anything.
I repeat: SIBO is dysbiosis, a disruption of this delicate microbial ecosystem balance. It’s not an “overgrowth,” but opportunistic bacteria thriving when the ecosystem is out of balance, when the good guys are too low in the pie chart. You can not “add” more bacteria to your SIBO by taking probiotics by the way.. /endrant
What about carnivore? Its basically an extreme fodmap elimination diet and it could make you feel good temporarily like I did prepping for my sibo test but long term it can’t regrow the microbiome.
(I eventually traced my SIBO back to numerous rounds of antibiotics administered for chronic ear infections during my childhood. These early rounds wiped out my developing microbiome and left me on the toilet in pain my entire childhood up until now.)
The result?
I now live free from food restrictions and eat any FODMAPS I want. I just learned I can also enjoy gluten, dairy, and desserts, although since I haven’t had them for so long, I don’t really want them. update – sugar is addicting LOL.
Now, I’m pursuing my dreams instead of dreading eating and being sick every day. I’m finally enjoying food and learning to cook.
In conclusion, I want to offer hope to anyone grappling with IBS. My success story proves that conquering this challenging condition is possible with determination, the right guidance, and strategy.
All in all it took me 90 days to eat all FODMAPS, and about a year to really say I feel completely normal. An analogy I was taught was that your body “went off a cliff” at some point, and we are removing the blocks in your backpack you’re carrying to climb back over the ledge. It took me 90 days to climb over the ledge, and about a year to get as far away as possible and live a normal life now.
Stay resilient! 🌟 Buddhism helped me the most tbh
(Additional learnings:)
The American diet standards target 25g of fiber per day. I heard most people fail to get 5g…
This is becoming more common knowledge now.
- Check out The Invisible Extinction documentary on Amazon. The side effects of our mass fiber starvation and dysbiosis are concerning but might have answers for widespread epidemics….
- Also.. watch Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut – Netflix
Also, check out Michael Pollan, the SAD (standard American diet results in the most diseases out of the entire world. Fiber starvation… anyone? ). This framing of food helped me view food as a method to heal and jump out of the restricted dietary spirals we see today in pop culture.
(Yes I made a post about my IBS struggle last year, but it was when I was just living on Fodzyme and before I decided to get to the root cause and fix it for real.)
TLDR: Your microbiome is like a pie. The more you repopulate with good bacteria, the more the bad guys get squeezed out. Good bacteria have an antimicrobial effect on the bad guys, who are opportunistic and take hold in dysbiosis. This is how I healed without antibiotics. This is how I healed this “impossible” problem.
Nam Myoho Renge Kyo
Lynz
