In today's video, I'm going to share my top six tips for resolving 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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As a former IBS sufferer and a coach to hundreds of IBS clients, I've learned a thing or two about
what helps people resolve bloating, constipation and diarrhea. By the end of today's video,
you'll have my top six tips to make faster progress towards resolution of your IBS
or SIBO symptoms. So let's get started. Tip number one is to start with the basics
first. A lot of people want to jump right to the end, to dive in on an infection that they found on
a test or SIBO, and they are just really, really focused on that. But what I've found through my
work with people is that if we don't pay attention to the basic foundations first, and by this,
I mean making sure that your diet is supportive of healing and also that your basic digestive
function is being supported, and this includes probiotics, digestive enzymes and stomach acid
if appropriate for you, if we haven't handled these things, then healing those other issues,
like infections, farther downstream are much more difficult to resolve. It's because
your gut is also having to work on dealing with a diet that's not conducive to healing. Maybe
there's too much sugar or too much gluten or too much of a food that's bothering you, and that's
causing inflammation and making healing difficult. Or, some of your basic digestive function could
use a little propping up, and that's just going to make things work better as well.
In about a quarter of my students, I find that this step resolves the problem entirely,
meaning that people don't have to chase after things that might not actually even be there.
So this is exciting news that for some people, all you need to do is make some dietary shifts
and support your digestive function, and you can get pretty far down the road to IBS recovery. And
even if it doesn't make a huge difference, it lays a foundation for you to succeed more effectively
later on in the process as you're actually dealing with those infections or whatever else
you're focusing on. So again, tip one is to focus on foundations first, diet and basic digestive
supports, and I'm going to talk about one other piece to those foundations in just a second.
So step number two is to actually choose the action steps you're going to change,
so whether this is diet, supplements or behaviors, based on your suspected underlying
mechanisms of your symptoms. What do I mean by this? This is a really big one. A lot of people
choose their options based on what's supposed to work for IBS or SIBO. You read all the things
online. You've seen the videos. Some fiber's good for SIBO or probiotics are good for IBS
or peppermint's good for IBS, but these are all theories. And it's true that they've been found to
work for IBS and SIBO for people, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to work for you.
What you need to do is choose action steps based on what your body's initially already telling you
about what's going on. You need to have some idea of the mechanism that you suspect is
underneath your symptoms to make a choice. And then you're going to test the effect of the change
that you're making on that suspected mechanism. The truth is, is that the underlying mechanism
for your IBS is going to be different than five other people with IBS. For some people,
it might bacterial infections or dysbiosis. For other people, it could be food issues. For other
people, it could be a hormone problem. There could be lots of possibilities,
but the trick is, is that you are choosing options that are in the ballpark of what's
likely right for you. So the key thing that you can do here is to choose your actions based on
the feedback that your body's actually giving you about the potential underlying mechanisms.
So for example, the low FODMAP diet is a diet low in fermentable carbohydrates which can feed
bacteria in your gut, which can lead to bloating, gas and diarrhea or constipation. Now, if you've
done your assessment process appropriately like I teach inside the Calm Digestion Method,
and you've found that your food triggers loosely fit into the low FODMAP list, then you might test
that as a possible theory about what's driving your symptoms. And if you do this assessment
process properly, it reduces the amount of time you spend on trial and error trying to find the
right solution. You're not randomly grabbing at straws. You're really relying on what your body is
telling you. So again, step number two is to focus your action steps on testing potential underlying
mechanisms for your symptoms so that you can get clarity about what's actually causing the problem.
All right, tip number three is to get absolutely dead serious about dealing with stress relief.
So when I said a second ago I was going to talk about one of the other basics, this is what I
was talking about. A lot of people overlook this step and they poo-poo it, no pun intended there,
and they don't really take it seriously that it could actually make a really big difference
with their symptoms. But I have to tell you that inside the program, I have seen these
very simple, basic stress reduction steps make a huge, life-changing difference for some of
my students. It was surprising to me too. In theory I knew that, but it really does matter.
So what are these stress relief measures that I'm talking about? So the first is to create
a solid daily stress relief routine. And it doesn't really matter what exactly this is,
so long as it helps your brain and your body get into what I call the rest and digest state.
And this is the state that your normally and naturally performs its digestion in. And when
you are not in this state, when your nervous system is in an excited or stressed out state,
your digestion literally slows down or even stops in some cases. So we want to have you focusing
daily on a practice that helps bring your body and your brain into this rest and digest state.
It doesn't really matter exactly what it is. It really could be anything
that helps you feel relaxed. Some examples would be getting a massage, taking a hot tub,
exercising, for some people, helps them feel really good, spending some time in nature. Doing
something that you absolutely positively love, whatever it is, it doesn't really matter as long
as it gets your brain and your body into that state of like, "I feel satisfied and relaxed."
The second piece to the stress relief habits is to really focus your efforts and attention on chewing
your food thoroughly. This process of chewing and really engaging with your food and enjoying it,
tasting it while you're eating it, again really helps bring your digestion
into this rest and digest state. And finally, the third little tip,
and it's not exactly a stress relief tip, it's a really simple behavior that can really make
a big difference, and that's to refrain from drinking water while you're eating.
This one change, for one of my clients, made a really huge difference. She was really surprised,
and so was I. But she was drinking a ton of water with her meals, and just changing that improved
her digestion. When we drink a lot of water at our meals, it dilutes our stomach acid and can impede
our digestion because of that. So step number three is to get serious about focusing on these
stress-relief practices to improve your digestion. Are you focusing on stress relief to address your
IBS? If you are, I'd be curious to hear about it in the comments. What do you do
to relieve stress for yourself? Okay, tip number four
is to build on what you know. What do I mean by this? Well, as I reflect on my own experience as
an IBS patient and also the experience of all the various people that I've met and worked with over
the years, is that we often, in our desperation to feel better, will grab at things randomly or
again, like we talked about a few minutes ago, work from a place of theory. And when we do this,
we don't make the most out of what our experiments that we're trying can give us.
So in my last video, I mentioned that a lot of people will stay on restricted diets for a
really long time, even if there's no direct evidence that they might be helping them,
and that this can really impact their nutritional status and can also lead to a lot of frustration
and anxiety. So doggedly doing something, even though it's not working, isn't really a great
strategy. And ultimately, we want to take what we learned from that experiment that like, "Okay,
I tried this diet and it didn't really do anything for me. Therefore,
the underlying mechanism that I was testing with that diet actually isn't likely an
issue in this situation, and I need to look elsewhere for the possible underlying cause."
A much better strategy than just randomly grabbing or just going back to the Google list of things
is really to try and understand what did or didn't work about your experiment and to make
your next choices from that place of understanding about what you just learned. And in this way,
you build on what you know over time, and your knowledge about the edges of your symptoms or the
causes of your issue become more and more clear and you have a lot more information to work with.
So for example, if you found that probiotics made your or symptoms worse, you would want to take
that information and consider what that means. And another likely follow-up inquiry after that
would be that "Well, it's common for probiotics to aggravate a histamine problem. So actually,
maybe I have a histamine problem that I need to deal with." And that's where you would move ahead
with testing supplements or diets or other changes that might actually address histamine intolerance
to see if you get improvement there. You might get lucky with random guessing,
but more often than not you're just wasting your time and money on something that may not be really
related to what's going on. So make sure that your follow-up experiments or inquiries are building on
what you've learned in your previous experiments. Tip number five is to try one new thing at a time.
Only one new thing. This can be challenging because a lot of recommendations put forth a long
list of things to change all at once. But when we change a ton of things all at once, it can muddy
the waters. And we might get a lot of feedback, but we don't know exactly what's causing it.
So if you start a bunch of supplements at once and you have a negative reaction,
you don't know which supplement is causing the problem. And this is a bummer because all the
other ones might actually be helping you. So you really get the clearest signals from your
experiments when you choose and start one new thing at a time and really get a read
on that before moving onto something else. And even if you're planning on adding in
several things one after the other, you can go through this process pretty quickly
in general and get a sense of like, "Okay, this works for me or this doesn't." But ultimately,
you want to carefully do this process one thing at a time so that you can actually tell
which things are helping, which things are hurting and you can move forward with that information.
Tip number six is to always, always, always, without fail, listen to your body. The primary
test of whether to continue with a supplement or a diet or anything or stop is, how does your body
feel? How is it responding? Are you improving or are you getting worse or is it staying the same?
Not only does this prevent you from continuing with things that may be harming you, but it also
can save you a lot of money by not continuing to use an expensive enzyme supplement, for example,
that isn't helping you at all. If you get anxiety from taking a B complex supplement,
then it's time to find another approach. Did the elaborate diet you tried improve your digestion?
If not, it's time to sack it and try something else. So again, rely on your body's signals
to help you decide whether to move forward or not with things and to adapt and adjust your approach.
So again, always, always, always listen to your body to guide you and your approach.
Need more help figuring out how to resolve your IBS and SIBO? Go ahead and grab a free copy of
my roadmap to gut recovery, which shows you how to create your personalized plan for calm digestion.
There's a link to download that below this video. If you like this video, please click Like and
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for you here to check out. So hope you're having a wonderful day, and I will see you next time.