In today's video, I'm going to share six gut health hacks for IBS and SIBO, so stay tuned.
If you're new here, welcome. My name's Amanda Malachesky.
I'm a certified functional nutrition health coach and a digestive and allergy detective.
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So as I was preparing to make this video, I found several other videos that offered up gut health
hacks for digestive troubles. The usual players like probiotics and apple cider vinegar and
collagen and whatnot. As an IBS and SIBO coach, I know that these lists of things are nowhere near
enough usually to heal IBS and SIBO. So instead of that, today I'm going to are my top six
unexpected gut health hacks that help resolve IBS and SIBO symptoms, so let's get started.
Hack number one is focusing on supporting your underlying natural good digestive function
instead of wrote lists of stuff. This means supporting your underlying digestive fire.
Obviously if you're experiencing bloating, constipation or diarrhea, your digestive function
isn't functioning very well, right? This means paying attention to the most basic digestive
function supports first, and this actually starts with having the right low stress
mindset when you sit down to eat your food. Good digestive function actually starts by
feeling enthusiastic and excited about the food that you're going to eat,
and approaching your table with these emotions and sensations actually supports your natural
secretions of your digestive juices like saliva, stomach acid, bile, and digestive enzymes. Then
further, an even better way to encourage good digestive function while you're eating is to focus
your attention on really chewing and experiencing and enjoying your food while you're eating it.
Your meals are really your nutrient refueling stops for the day, and because of this you
really should be treating your meals like a spa visit. Eating should be delicious, deductible,
fun and pleasurable. You can also support your digestive function with the basic digestive
support supplements like digestive enzymes and probiotics and stomach acid support, but again,
make sure that you're focusing on supporting good normal natural digestive function,
rather than doing all the things. Hack number two follows up right on the
heels of hack number one, which is to start meditating. I resisted this step for years,
because I really couldn't figure out how to work it into my life. But the truth is is that focusing
on this deep kind of relaxation and stress relief practice really strongly encourages your
good digestive function, because it's putting your nervous system into the rest and digest state and
helping it get out of the fight or flight state. The fight or flight nervous system state actually
means that your digestive system is literally slowing down or stopping, because when you're in
a stressed out state, your body diverts resources from your digestion and sends it all to your
muscles so that you can run away from a threat. So when you're running around in your life getting
your kids ready for school, getting ready for work, interacting with your boss that you don't
get along with, or having trouble with your partner or worrying about your parents or your
kids or whatever, these are all kind of firing up our fight or flight nervous system response. We
need to have a regular daily practice to help us come down out of that and find ourselves
inside the rest and digest state, which is where our best digestion happens.
So, getting in touch with a daily deep sense of relaxation can really work
wonders for your digestion. I found that my students that really put this into practice
see almost life-changing results. We're often surprised at just how much of a difference this
can make for people, but it really and truly does. My favorite meditation tool is called EquiSync.
It's a downloadable series of brain balancing meditations, and I will leave a link for those
below this video so you can go check those out. I also recently recorded a gut healing meditation,
and I'll leave a link for that below this video too so you can find it easily.
Try one of these things out once daily for a week and let me know if your digestion isn't better.
Gut hack number three is to practice titration with every single thing that you try. Titration
is basically starting with a small amount of something and gradually working up to a larger,
more meaningful dose. I teach my students to use titration when they're trying anything new so that
they can, first of all, protect themselves from any negative side effects from the thing that
they're trying, but also so they can dial in and perfect their unique perfect dose.
Your body has a different tolerance to things than everyone else, and this includes food
and supplements and medications. I witnessed a really prime example of this inside my program
when one of my students found that even one eighth of a capsule of probiotic supplement
could affect his brain fog in his sleep. So using titration with every new thing
that you introduce, you get specific and unique information to you about what your body tolerates
and what it really needs. Ultimately, this is the most important information that you need to find
when you're crafting your personalized calm digestion plan. Do you titrate your new
supplements when you give them a try? Click like or leave me a comment below to tell me about it.
Hack number four is to make the least number of food changes necessary to shift your symptoms,
and also to avoid food sensitivity tests. A lot of people head into the food changes like Conan the
Barbarian. They're just going to go in there and dominate the situation and make extreme changes,
but this often isn't really necessary. In fact, it's often kind of counterproductive.
Food is often an important mediator of your symptoms and therefore it's worth
exploring what you can do with your diet to minimize your symptoms. For example,
if you haven't made any dietary changes yet and you're kind of eating just a standard diet,
it's maybe more simple to just focus on removing the big three, gluten, dairy and sugar first,
just for a couple weeks to see whether you need to go deeper with that experiment.
The point is to be intentional with your food changes and to really only try changing things
that are likely to shift your symptom, because sometimes you may not be up for making those big
changes or it's going to be really difficult to maintain them, and that's going to lead to
more stress, which if you remember back from hack number two, that means that you are increasing the
fight or flight nervous system state and that's impacting your digestion further. Sometimes a
slower pace of changes with just one or two things changing at a time is much more sustainable,
gives you really important information, and it's just overall more doable for you.
While we're at it, let's call out the food sensitivity tests. I generally do not use them.
A lot of people come in saying, "I got to figure out what I'm allergic to, I want to do these food
sensitivity tests." But the food sensitivity tests usually are only testing for one type of
immune response, the IgG antibody response. There are lots and lots of different ways that you can
respond to foods, and this test only looks at one of them out of maybe five or six or seven.
The other reason is is that they often pop up with lots and lots of foods that
are showing a reaction, but this often leads people to feel anxiety and feel despair about
what am I going to do, or what am I going to eat? How am I possibly going to work with this
list of foods that I'm not supposed to eat? Really the gold standard for figuring out what
foods you're reacting to is the process of doing food eliminations with targeted reintroductions
afterwards to check and see if your body's actually producing noticeable symptoms from foods.
This process gives you much more accurate and specific information for your unique body.
Now, if you've already done a ton of that and you've gotten nowhere with that and you're sure
that food is related to your symptoms, in this case I sometimes feel like, okay, we might try
the IgG food sensitivity test and see what kind of information we can get out of it, but it's
definitely not where I recommend people start. Hack number five is to get tested for SIBO and
other infections. As one of my previous mentors, Reed Davis, likes to say,
test, don't guess. I definitely was guilty of guessing about my own underlying causes just
by looking at lists of symptoms and thinking, "Oh, it looks like I have Giardia, or maybe I
have a parasite, or maybe I have whatever." A lot of people come into my practice also saying, "I'm
pretty sure that I have worms or I have a parasite and I think what's driving my digestive symptoms."
The danger of this is that you really can't tell specifically what kind of infection you
have just by looking at symptoms, because the symptoms of all these various GI infections
kind of overlap and are pretty similar to one another. On the other hand,
it's really important to know specifically what kind of infections you're dealing with so you
can make an appropriate plan to deal with them, because they're all handled in different ways.
So once I finally ran a stool test on myself after all of this personalized self-diagnosing,
I discovered that I did have a parasite called Blastocystis hominis. Once I had that information,
I was able to create a plan to deal with that, and I have successfully eradicated it. Then
recent research from Dr. Pimentel who's the main SIBO researcher out there has discovered
that approximately 60% of IBS cases are caused by either SIBO or intestinal methanogen overgrowth.
Then the remainder of those cases are often caused by other types of underlying infections that
can be living in the large intestine. These can include parasites or candida or viruses or worms,
or opportunistic bacterial infections or specific bacteria like H. pylori or Giardia for example.
I've recently found both H. pylori and Giardia on a GI-MAP test for one of my clients which was
pretty interesting, and they definitely had symptoms that sort of matched up with that,
but unless we had run the test, we wouldn't have known specifically what they were dealing with.
So especially if you've already exhausted all the conventional assessments and testing and
have kind of come up empty-handed for your chronic bloating, constipation or diarrhea,
I highly encourage you to check out getting tested for SIBO and running a stool test
with a GI-MAP or something similar, because these tests can reveal key hidden underlying
stressors that might be aggravating your symptoms and making it really impossible
to heal. You might need to address some other things first, but it's important to have this
information to be crafting your plan that really takes into account everything that's going on.
Gut hack number six is to make slow, small and sustainable changes that grow over time.
I know firsthand how it can feel to be desperate to find a solution to your symptoms that are kind
of wrecking your life, and you're in this place where you are willing to go to any lengths almost
to get resolution and feel better, but what I found over and over again with my clients
is that we have to prioritize making sustainable changes that are doable over making changes that
are just overwhelming or too much all at once. The clients that have the most success make
small changes, incremental changes, and then they build on them and grow them over time. This starts
with really simple changes like chewing your food well or remaining relaxed at meals like we talked
about in hack number one. When we're talking about food changes, again, it may mean just making small
changes, a few things at a time to see if you can shift the situation with just incremental changes.
It also means only taking on changes that are truly likely to help and taking it slow if big
changes are hard to manage with your life and your circumstances. If you live a really busy life,
you're not going to have the bandwidth to take on a major overhaul. It means adding supplements
slowly one by one and assessing their impact on you before committing to using them long-term.
Most of all, it means creating daily routines that support your digestion in your life.
For me personally, one of the things that I do every single day that I use to support
my digestion is I take a daily walk. It's short. It only takes 15 minutes or so, but
early on in my health journey I discovered that if I skipped that,
my constipation was worse. That daily walk really made a difference.
At this point, it's woven intricately into my daily life.
My dog loves to go on this walk and begs for it every morning, so he doesn't let me get out of it.
If you can't maintain something, it's not going to be able to help you, even if it's the right
thing. So again, you want to focus on things that you can actually manage and build from there.
Are you needing more help figuring out how to manage your IBS or SIBO symptoms?
Doors are currently open for The Calm Digestion Method Program, and I want to invite you to book
a free 45 minute discovery call to learn how I can help you go from food anxiety and supplement
confusion to a confident plan for calm digestion. You can book that call by going to
confluencenutrition.com/contact, and I will be leaving a link for that below this video.
I look forward to helping you identify your personal underlying causes of your IBS symptoms
and creating a plan to help resolve them. If you like this video, please click like
and consider subscribing and also consider sending it on to someone else you know who
might need help with these same issues. Also, check out these other videos that might help
you with your IBS or SIBO symptoms, and I look forward to seeing you another time. Take care.