Hey you,
***I AM IN NO WAY AFFILIATED WITH ANY PRODUCTS OR DOCTORS SINCERELY JUST HERE TO SHARE MY VICTORY AND ENCOURAGE OTHERS***
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. 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
I sought help from a highly regarded gastroenterologist in LA who studied the Pimentel papers. 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.
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.
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 liquid diet for many more weeks than recommended until I stumbled upon Dr. Dinezza and started to work with her.
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 you search for. Can’t heal your body without giving it the building blocks for your body
- 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)
- 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. (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.
- 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 a 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 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 do this until sorting the HCL
- I treated Candida with Caprylic acid and bid farewell to my lifelong chronic fatigue and sugar problems in about three days.
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), but it doesn’t regrow anything.
I repeat: SIBO is dysbiosis, a disruption of this delicate balance. It’s not an “overgrowth,” but opportunistic bacteria thriving when the ecosystem is out of balance. You can not “add” more bacteria by taking probiotics by the way.. /endrant
(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.
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.
Stay resilient! 🌟 Buddhism helped me the most tbh
(Additional learnings:
The American diet standards target 25g of fiber per day. I heard most fail to get 5g…
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, 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.
