Today, I'm going to share the three phases of eating for SIBO, so stay tuned. If you're new
here, welcome. My name's Amanda Malachesky. I'm a certified functional nutrition gut health coach,
and I'm also the host of the Calm Digestion Method online program where I support people
with IBS and SIBO to find their personalized IBS relief plan. For weekly videos on how to
find your personalized IBS and SIBO relief plan, please consider subscribing and be sure and hit
the bell to be notified when I post a new video. So today, I want to talk about a framework for
eating during the different phases of SIBO management and treatment,
so that I can hopefully cut through some of the confusion a lot of you are having about what
the heck should I eat and when's the right time to eat different things. So if you don't know me yet,
I'm in the trenches every single day with IBS and SIBO patients, helping them figure out what to
do about this kind of challenge and how to solve this problem. So, I'd like to help you solve it as
well, so let's dig into this just a little bit. By now, you probably know that there's a lot of
conflicting information about what's the right way to eat for IBS and SIBO, and this can get
really confusing for you, understandably. But the truth is, is that each person with SIBO and IBS
is unique, and the specific diet that's going to really help you is going to be personalized
and individualized. So how do you then apply the different dietary theories, food lists,
and pieces of advice to get where you'd like to go? Well, the first thing I think it's important
to understand is the role that food plays in SIBO treatment. Since SIBO is an overgrowth
of bacteria in your small intestine, changing your diet alone is unlikely to cure your SIBO
and leave you without SIBO. You usually have to do other things. The true purpose of changing
your diet during SIBO treatment is to figure out specifically which foods are triggering
your symptoms and making you feel horrible, and then removing those foods to reduce your symptoms,
so that you have a better quality of life while you're working on figuring out the
root causes of your SIBO and dealing with that. So for starters, this is how I like to think
about it. It's a change that you're making to minimize your symptoms and feel better while
you focus on the real problem, which is the SIBO. Beyond this, I see that there are three phases of
eating for SIBO, and there's different strategies for each phase. So this is what I really want to
dig into. So let's get started with phase number one. The first phase of eating for SIBO is what
I think of as the pre-treatment phase. And this is the time when most people naturally
are having digestive symptoms and trying to change their diet to improve things. That's
naturally the first thing that people want to do. And people in this phase often don't even
know that they have SIBO yet. They just know that they're having symptoms and they want to feel
better. And this is where most of us get really lost in the advice about the different diets.
Should I use the FODMAP diet or the low histamine diet or the keto diet or the biphasic diet or
whatever diet you have learned about in your research? So the key question that you really want
to answer in this phase of the project is, what is the underlying mechanism of my food symptoms? In
other words, how are my food symptoms happening? And what I've seen in practice is that this is
most commonly fermentable carbohydrates for people with IBS and SIBO. So this is like the FODMAP diet
removes foods that have fermentable carbohydrates in them. The second most common thing I see are
histamine foods. So this is another possibility. The third most common is oxalates, though,
that trails pretty far behind the fermentable carbs and the histamines. Each of these diets are
huge topics in themselves, and I do have several videos about all of them elsewhere on my channel.
So if you need more info on that, go check that out. But the purpose of this first phase where
you're changing your diet is to do the best you can to figure out how your food symptoms are
happening and to remove the specific foods that are causing the problem, so that you can get a
little symptom relief while you're doing the rest of the process. Okay. Phase two is eating properly
during your SIBO treatment. Now, I just made a video about this last week, where I discussed
this really in-depth, but I'll summarize the key points for you here. Generally, I advise eating
the diet that most minimizes your symptoms during SIBO treatment. I know that there's
a lot of advice that contradicts this and says you should feed the bacteria during treatment,
so that you have a better outcome. I disagree. I think that increasing your symptoms during
treatment is just likely to make you give up on treatment and maybe even fail treatment and just
makes the treatment have to work that much harder. In addition, I don't like to see people changing
more than one thing at once. So I don't like to see people adding their SIBO treatment
and changing their diet at the same moment, because this means that we can't tell which of
those changes is responsible for the symptom changes that we're going to see. So again,
during SIBO treatment, you're going to stick with whatever diet you figured out in phase
one or whatever diet you're currently eating, and you're going to do your SIBO treatment. Okay. And
now after you've finished your SIBO treatment, and this is key, you've confirmed with testing that
you are SIBO negative, the third phase of eating for SIBO is reintroducing foods that you may have
removed previously, to see if your tolerance has changed. This is the moment to reintroduce those
foods you had to take out that were your personal kryptonite to see if you can tolerate them now,
because wouldn't that be grand if you could get back to eating a normal diet again?
Successful SIBO treatment doesn't always remove food intolerances, but in many cases it does,
or at least minimizes them or reduces them. In my personal case, once I successfully treated
my SIBO, I was able to reintroduce gluten-free bread, gluten-free treats, chocolate, beans,
FODMAP foods. I generally can eat a wide variety of foods, even if I can't necessarily tolerate
eating beans every single day. And then my client, Darrell, once he finished his SIBO treatment,
was able to go back to eating ice cream and just an ordinary diet, and he was super thrilled. So
again, phase three, reintroduce foods that you previously had to eliminate to see if
your tolerance has changed. So to summarize, think of it like this. Minimize your symptoms
as best you can before treatment by making diet changes. During treatment, continue eating that
diet you figured worked best for you, or just continue eating what you've normally been eating.
And after you've confirmed that SIBO is gone, then you can try doing food reintroductions
to see if your tolerances have changed. Now, are you needing help figuring out what you should be
eating during your phases of SIBO management? You can do this very easily by using my calm digestion
method that I teach inside my Calm Digestion Method program, and you can get started with
that right now just by grabbing a free copy of my Roadmap to Gut Recovery. You can get ahold of
that by going to confluencenutrition.com/roadmap. I'll leave a link for that on the screen here and
also in the description below this video. All right, let me know if this video was helpful
for you by clicking like, leaving me a comment, subscribing, or leaving me a question if you have
one. I'm happy to answer. And you next might want to check out this video, How to Eat for
IBS Without Going Crazy. I've linked it here on the screen for you, and I will see you next time.