How do you slow your gut down when you're suffering from chronic diarrhea?
Keep watching to find out.
Hi there, and welcome to my channel.
If you're new here, my name's Amanda Malachesky, and I'm a Certified Functional Nutrition Coach
and a Digestive and Allergy Detective, which means that I help you sort through your diet
and lifestyle choices that are going to have an impact on your digestion and help you resolve
your health challenges.
So if you want to hear more about this regularly, be sure to subscribe and click the bell to
be notified when I post a new video every week.
So if you're here today watching this video, I want to let you know that I really feel
for you because I have wrestled with somewhat chronic diarrhea from my digestive challenges.
It's usually mostly under control, but occasionally it still flares out of control, and no one
wants this, right?
It's a real pain in the butt.
It's one thing to have diarrhea when you're sick occasionally, but it's a whole nother
thing to have frequent, regular diarrhea from either IBS, Crohn's disease, celiac disease,
or some of these other digestive challenges.
So today I want to share my top five relief care tips to slow your guts down if you are
in the unfortunate position of suffering from chronic diarrhea.
Using these tips, my client Joanne was able to get back to her running practice after
her diarrhea cleared, and my client Erika was able to redevote herself to her animal
rescue practice when she got hers under control, and I think you can, too.
So let's get started.
I want to be clear straight off the bat that the tips I'm going to share today are more
like relief care tips.
They're not really root cause resolution tips that may help resolve some of your diarrhea
symptoms.
I just want to make the point that resolving chronic diarrhea in the big picture long term
is actually a little bit more of a longer process than just these simple tips.
So if you're someone who's struggling with this and you'd like a roadmap big picture
about how you can work on resolving your chronic diarrhea in the long term, I want to invite
you to download my Roadmap to Gut Recovery.
There's a link for it below this video.
I'll also mention it at the end.
But in case you want to get started right away, you can go ahead and grab that.
Also, if you do have really persistent diarrhea, I want to make sure to encourage you to speak
with a physician about that.
So what are we going to do in the meantime?
The first thing I want to invite you to do is just give yourself a little bit of extra
self-care.
This might look like laying down on your back with your knees elevated and putting a hot
water bottle on your belly, maybe taking a warm bath, maybe giving yourself a little
bit of a gentle belly massage if that's not too painful, and just take care of yourself.
This isn't necessarily going to resolve the diarrhea per se, but it is going to help bring
a little additional blood flow to the area and help clear out whatever inflammation is
contributing to the problem.
Next, I want to invite you to add some plant medicine into your routine.
You may already be aware of the long-standing traditional use of things like peppermint,
ginger, and slippery elm as digestive remedies, but I find these are really particularly soothing
and helpful for diarrhea.
So either make tea out of fresh herb, fresh ginger, fresh peppermint or dried peppermint,
ginger, or slippery elm.
The slippery elm you can just mix like a tablespoon of a powdered slippery elm into a cup of hot
water and you can sweeten that with a little honey or Stevia if you like it sweet.
Also, the essential oils of these plants, especially the peppermint and ginger, are
lovely to help soothe the belly when it's feeling irritated.
So you can dilute maybe 10 to 20 drops of essential oil into any carrier oil and just
rub that actually on your belly.
The next step can be a little bit more involved, but it's also really simple.
When you're not feeling well, you want to simplify your diet.
And I always say to drop it back to foods that you know are safe for you.
I often find that people with chronic ongoing diarrhea do have food sensitivities of various
kinds.
The biggest single culprits I see in my practice are gluten, dairy, sugar, and alcohol, but
diarrhea can also be triggered by too much fat or too much fiber in the diet as well
as any food, or supplement, or maybe even a medication or an ingredient in your medication
that you're sensitive to.
The client I mentioned at the beginning who was able to start running again figured out
that the melatonin supplement that she was taking at bedtime was triggering her diarrhea
the following morning.
So if you're regularly having diarrhea at the same time of day, you might try and think
about what am I consuming a little while ahead of time that might be triggering that.
I've talked about this a lot in other videos, but tracking your food and supplements alongside
of your symptoms, including what your poop is doing, can be really valuable and help
you identify what's causing the problem.
The tool I use to help people with this is a food symptom diary.
I will leave a link for mine below this video for you.
But in the meantime, while you're sorting out what's triggering things, as I said earlier,
it's a great idea to simplify your diet.
A really traditional approach to this is to use what's called the BRAT diet.
So the bananas, rice, apples or apple sauce, and toast, gluten-free of course, can be helpful
just to help eat something that's really easy to digest on the stomach, but it might be
something different for you.
So if you know that something is easy on your stomach, go ahead and use that.
Some other possibilities here are bone or vegetable broth, simple vegetable juices if
you can tolerate them, or anything else you like.
And if you still haven't figured out this part yet about what's triggering your diarrhea
that you may be eating or consuming, this is the perfect moment for a structured elimination
diet.
If you'd like to hear more about how to do that, you can check out my earlier video,
How to Do an Elimination Diet for IBS.
The next thing I want to talk about are supplements that can help with your diarrhea situation.
The first obvious thing is to make sure that you're incorporating probiotics or probiotic
foods.
Although, I always say, and I will say here again, that you want to start low and go slow
because some people do experience increased digestive symptoms when they start their probiotics.
So if you'd like to learn more about how to safely use probiotics and probiotic foods
without having more symptoms, go ahead and check out my earlier video, Probiotics Guide
for IBS and SIBO.
Next category are supplements that soothe the irritated lining of your intestines.
These include things like L-glutamine, which is an amino acid that you consume as a powder,
deglycerinated, I think that's how you say that, licorice, DGL for short, is a very soothing
digestive supplement, and aloe juice, which you can usually find in the health and beauty
aids section of your health food store.
All three of these supplements help repair or soothe the lining of your intestine and
can be really helpful while you're experiencing diarrhea.
As with any supplement, do start low and go slow, but give these a try and see how your
body does with them.
The third category of supplements that I like to consider in these cases are what's called
binders.
The main purpose of binders is to grab up and bind toxins that may be irritating the
lining of your stomach.
This is especially great when you have acute gastroenteritis or stomach flu, but also food
poisoning or even if your problem is due to some kind of food sensitivity, say you accidentally
made a mistake and ate something you know you're sensitive to.
You can add binders.
These are usually things like bentonite clay or activated charcoal.
The product I like to use is called GI Detox from Bio-Botanical Research.
I'll leave a link to my dispensary down below so you can find that product.
It's nice to have a bottle of this on hand for the moment when the symptoms strike, and
I definitely don't travel without them.
The only thing to know about binders is that you need to take them at least an hour away
from food or other supplements or medications because they can bind up the active ingredients
in those things and you don't want to get in the way of your meds or your supplements.
Finally, if poor fat digestion seems to be the trouble for you, you could consider taking
an ox bile or lipase enzyme supplement.
This is going to help your body digest those fats so they're not as irritating for your
intestine.
One additional way to support your fat digestion is to support your stomach acid because stomach
acid helps your gallbladder release bile into the intestines.
To learn more about that, you can check out my earlier video, How to Support Stomach Acid
for Digestive Health.
So once you've got your diarrhea situation stabilized and you also have gotten clear
on which foods or supplements may be triggering your symptoms and you're still having problems,
it's then a good time to start considering what else may be going on underneath.
This is the moment where it's really useful to incorporate functional lab testing to see
what kinds of dysbiotic bacteria or other organisms may be causing a problem.
So I definitely suggest a stool test and/or a SIBO breath test, depending on what kinds
of symptoms you have going on, or an organic acids test.
I discuss all of this thoroughly in my earlier video, Gut Microbiome Testing for IBS.
So if this sounds like you, you'll definitely want to go check that out.
I'm curious to hear how you manage your diarrhea symptoms.
Have I left something out or have one of these tips really helped you?
I'd love to hear about it.
Leave me a comment below this video.
I hope these tips can help you get a handle on your diarrhea symptoms and get your symptoms
settled in the short term so that you can begin to turn your attention to the big, longer-term
picture of how am I going to resolve this permanently.
So when you're ready to get started with that big picture process, I'd love to invite you
to download the Roadmap to Gut Recovery.
It's a simple self-starting guide to help you get started creating your personal gut
recovery plan.
It'll help you get going right away, and it also includes access to my food symptom diary.
You can download it for free by visiting confluencenutrition.com/roadmap.
And if you've already done a bit or even a lot of this work and you're still feeling
confused about how to move forward or how to deal with the food piece, especially a
lot of people get really hung up there, I really want to encourage you to schedule yourself
a free 30-minute assessment session with me.
I just help you talk through things and talk about what your next steps might be, and we
can explore the possibility of working together.
You can schedule that free 30-minute visit with me by heading over to confluencenutrition.com/contact.
I hope these tips help you get out of the bathroom.
Be sure and leave me a comment below about how you manage your diarrhea, or definitely
ask me a question about something you'd like me to answer in a future video.
I'll see you all next week.