In today's video, I'm going to talk about how to heal your gut naturally from 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 in a digestive and allergy detective. For weekly videos on how to
make the best sense of the diet and supplement and lifestyle advice for IBS and SIBO, please consider
subscribing and be sure and hit the bell to be notified when I post new videos every week. As an
IBS and SIBO gut health coach, and as a former IBS sufferer, I help people restore their gut health
using diet, supplements, and lifestyle changes to overcome constipation, bloating, and diarrhea.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of options and tools for working with your gut health than
trying to improve things. And one of the things that I see my clients struggling a lot with is how
to use these various tools and when to use them. So today I'm going to share my best hard-won
wisdom about how to heal the gut naturally. So let's get started.
There are a million possible tools to help you heal your gut, but the tools alone will not
get you there. I like to apply a strategic approach to this problem because some kind
of organization of action is really necessary to get results in this situation because otherwise,
you're kind of just searching for a needle in the haystack. So what I've seen work best is to
focus on three main foundations of gut healing. And so I want to start talking about those. So
the number one top priority foundation you need to address to heal your gut naturally is your stress
and anxiety. It's normal and natural to feel anxious and overwhelmed when you're having a lot
of physical symptoms. And this worry and anxiety further derails your normal and natural healing
process by over-activating your nervous system and running it through the fight or flight program
more frequently than the rest and digest program. And in fact, it's often a stressful event, like a
major life change, maybe going through a divorce, having an illness, or losing someone you love,
or having a hard time at your job, or stress about money. These kinds of ordinary psychosocial
stresses often are a contributing factor to the emergence of IBS and other gut symptoms. And the
stress can leave your nervous system stuck in overdrive so that it can't physically calm down
and your brain and nervous system are working continuously to keep you amped up and looking
for a threat. And this can get in the way of your healing. Now, you've probably been told to do some
kind of stress reduction or meditation. And I know firsthand how this can feel a little bit insulting
when you're having these really physical manifestations and symptoms that are really
driving you crazy. Now, I do believe that there are very physical reasons for these symptoms.
But I also know and have seen firsthand for my clients, how profoundly focusing on this
foundation can really minimize symptoms or bring them into some semblance of control so that
they're running your life a lot less strongly. So even though it can be challenging to master,
meditation is a really profound tool for helping reset your nervous system into a state where
it's willing to work with you and willing to let you heal. One of my favorite tools to make this
really easy is something called EquiSync. They are brain-balancing meditations. They're all about 23
minutes long. And I personally have found them very profound for my own stress response reset.
And they've also been shown to me over and over again with clients and my family
members to make a really big difference. I'll leave a link for that below this video. Really
don't wait to address your stress and anxiety. It is a really crucial, crucial foundational piece
that you need to handle before working on many other aspects of this situation for yourself.
The second foundation for healing your gut natural is eating the right diet to reduce your symptoms.
This is a really key strategy for healing your gut naturally, but you have to A, do it correctly. And
B, it's most often not the true underlying root cause. And so you have to come into it
with this perspective that it's not going to fix everything. Your goal with diet is to eat the diet
that produces the least amount of symptoms and flares so that you can calm down inflammation. And
you can also buy yourself a little breathing room so that you can work on deeper layers. And while
it's common advice to use particular pre-made or preset diets for gut challenges is like the low
FODMAP diet or the low histamine diet. What I've found works best for people to identify the things
that need to change the most is for them to start with what they already know makes them flare-up.
Usually, people have a pretty good idea of their kryptonite foods, the ones that are really making
the worst difference, and starting with a shortlist of these foods helps you pinpoint
and target which therapeutic diet might be a place to start, or which other specific kinds of
dietary changes might be needed. Approaching your food changes from this perspective of mechanism,
like what's the underlying mechanism of my reaction to my foods helps prevent you from
going down the rabbit hole and getting overly obsessive or anxious about your diet.
And it also helps you minimize the number of factors that you're trying to change. Once
you've chosen, which particular foods you need to change, then you're going to do a structured
elimination and reintroduction process. And this shouldn't take longer than two to four weeks.
I've made a whole other video about this topic, about how to use a therapeutic diet.
So I will be sure to leave a link for that video up here and also below the video. And it's really
important to keep in mind that food reactions may be a side effect of other underlying causes. They
really may not be the root cause. They're more of a symptom of some other underlying cause. So
it's just really important to keep that in mind that the diet alone is not the initial problem
or the root cause usually. And in addition, it's also important to know that food changes
are not likely to be enough to really resolve the problem. I only say this because I sometimes see
people going to heroic lengths trying to figure out the specific diet that's going
to cure their problem. And this isn't really realistic. That's not generally what I see the
role of diet being for people with food problems. So again, doing your best to find the diet that
minimizes your symptoms is a key foundation for healing your gut naturally, but we don't want
to get overly obsessed with this particular step. I'm curious to hear from you if food has been one
of the really confusing pieces of the puzzle for you. So go ahead and leave me a comment about that
below this video. And keep in mind that if this is something that you're really struggling with,
this is the exact kind of thing I help people with inside my Calm Digestion Method Program. So,
be sure to stick around till the end of the video to learn more about how we can work together.
Okay. The third foundation of healing your gut naturally is supporting your natural and
normal digestive function. Now, the stress relief piece we talked about in foundation,
number one is going to help with that. And so is finding the diet that's going to minimize
your inflammation and symptom. But if you're having trouble with bloating, constipation,
and diarrhea, obviously your digestive function isn't working quite as well as you would like. If
you're having constipation it's moving too slow. If you're having diarrhea it's moving too fast.
If you're having bloating there's something weird going on there. And so we want to do our best to
focus on the basics that helps support your basic digestive function. And these sometimes include
supplements like digestive enzymes or stomach acid support, and sometimes it's behaviors.
So these include things like chewing and the stress relief pieces we already talked about.
And it's important to focus on these basics before moving onto working on things like infections,
for example, because if you haven't handled this, sometimes dealing with the infections
is much harder, if you haven't given your body the opportunity to have some support with this
basic function. And just like with the food, these techniques, and tools aren't likely to necessarily
solve the whole problem. But again, we're laying a solid foundation here for you to build on when you
move onto working on the more root causes. Now, once you've addressed these three foundations,
so stress and anxiety relief, figuring out which diet's going to minimize your symptoms and you've
supported your basic digestive function, then you can start to look towards the underlying
root causes, things like infections, or maybe there's a diagnosis that needs to be made
or found underneath something like celiac disease or some other autoimmune disease.
And for some of you, the foundation piece will give you enough symptom resolution that you may
not need to continue to this level. But if you get through all of that and you still have symptoms,
that is the time to start digging deeper into addressing these particular things.
So this might include doing things like stool testing, SIBO testing if you haven't already.
Doing further evaluations with your doctor or your naturopath to try and investigate and understand
what else is going on under the hood. Finally, what you need to make sense of all of these
various tools and techniques and everything is a strategy. Now I know it's tempting to go it alone
with Dr. Google as your sidekick, but the truth of the matter is that Google isn't a very good coach.
It's very good at grabbing lots and lots of information and just spitting it back out to you,
but it doesn't include any information about whether those tools are right for you,
how to use them, or how to strategize about when and where to use them.
And this is why I teach my students a core strategy for how to choose and use their various
gut support tools so that they know how to determine what's right or wrong for them,
whether something's likely to help or not. And if they decide to go ahead and use it,
how to use it, and then how to tell whether or not it's worked and how to build on
that information to choose their next steps logically based on what their body told them.
I share my complete strategy about how I do this inside my roadmap to gut recovery,
which you can grab a free copy of down below this video. I'll be sure to leave a link for
that for you. And I want to encourage you to grab a copy of that document
because it shows you the technique that I use with my students to help them make sense of this.
You're not alone in this fight. And it is something that a lot of people struggle with,
but there's a really clear path to making sense of it. And remember that having a strategy
is really the difference between swimming in a sea of conflicting information and having confidence
with what you need to do for your gut to help yourself feel better. Helping my students create
their unique natural gut healing strategy is just one of the many ways that I support them inside
my Calm Digestion Method Program. So if you're someone who is wrestling with these questions of
like how do I use these tools and how do I figure out what's right for me? And how do I make sense
of all of this? I want to invite you to schedule a free 45-minute discovery call with me to learn
more about how I can help you go from food anxiety, endless questions, and second-guessing
to a confident plan for calm digestion. Doors are open right now for the program.
And I would really love to meet you and have a conversation with you about how we can help you
resolve your bloating, constipation, or diarrhea using my signature method. You can book that call
by going to confluencenutrition.com/contact. I will be sure to leave a link for that below
this video. It's also here on the screen. So go ahead and schedule that call. I really look
forward to meeting you. If you like this video and you feel like this information was helpful,
please click like and consider subscribing. And also maybe pass this video onto someone
who you know who could use the information. I've also curated a couple additional videos
for you to watch here, so go ahead and check those out and I will see you next time.