In today's video, I'm going to talk about how to eat for IBS without going crazy, so stay tuned.
If you're new here, welcome. My name is Amanda Malachesky,
I am a certified functional nutrition health coach and a digestive and allergy detective.
For weekly videos on how to find your personal diet and supplement plan for IBS and SIBO, please
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Figuring out what to eat when you have frequent bloating, constipation or diarrhea can be a real
challenge and it's something that I spend a lot of time inside my program supporting my clients with,
and it's something that people have an awful lot of questions about. It's also an area where I feel
like there's a lot of information that I would consider actually questionable or not very useful,
where it leads people astray from their goals which is ultimately to feel better,
right? So in today's video, I wanted to take some time to help ground your approach to eating with
IBS so that you can make sure that you're paying attention to what's most important
on your journey to finding the right diet. Here are my top four tips for eating with IBS
so that you don't go crazy. Let's get started. My number one tip for eating with IBS without
going crazy is to make the smallest number of food changes possible. I know there are a lot of people
out there advocating for massive diet changes and pantry cleanouts and diet overhauls for managing
health conditions like IBS. And in concept, this is a good thing because diet does indeed
impact your gut and all of your health, of course. However, this approach is challenging for a lot
of people, so I'm curious, if you've ever felt overwhelmed with the dietary changes you thought
you needed to make, go ahead and click like for me below this video, I'm curious how many of you
have felt that way. So let me put this IBS food conversation into perspective for you. The main
purpose of changing your diet with IBS is to first of all control your symptoms and second
of all to get clarity about exactly which foods are triggering your symptoms so you can avoid
them. Often the truly offending foods are just a few foods. It's usually not a huge laundry list
of foods. So my main perspective here is that we want to make the smallest number of food changes
that gives us the result that we're looking for, namely to reduce your symptoms and feel better.
One way to do this is a tiered approach to doing food eliminations and this is what I teach inside
of my program. In other words, you want to start with a simple change first, and see what happens,
and if it doesn't help, then you move to a broader plan, and then if that doesn't work,
then you move to a full-blown elimination diet like the low FODMAP diet. So one way to go about
this is to start with the top three inflammatory foods and just focus there. So these are gluten
and dairy and sugar, and if those three together are too overwhelming, you can start with just
one and see what happens. You'll likely see at least some improvement from that.
If you do that and then it doesn't work, then you can consider looking at a broader list of FODMAP
foods and thinking about what you eat and saying, "Well, what are the most likely foods that I think
are the problem here?" and remove those. And then if you still don't see results with that plan,
then you can move on to the full-blown FODMAP elimination diet to help clear the muddy waters
for yourself and figure out what's going on. And remember that these diets are only designed
for the short-term. They're not meant to be followed in perpetuity. They're meant
to be followed for a short period of time to answer the question, is the reason for
this diet the thing that's really interrupting my digestion, and then if so, which specific
foods that I removed were the ones that were causing the problem? So remember, work to make
the smallest number of food changes possible. The number two tip for eating with IBS without
going crazy is to stick to research-backed diet options. Now I know this opinion might
not be popular with some of you and I expect to hear from you in the comments but hear me out.
Going through these diet changes is challenging and can be overwhelming, and it's also a major
change to your body. So before I'm going to decide to do something to my body, I want to have some
expectation that there's some reason to believe it's actually going to work. So the IBS diet with
the most research to back it up is the low FODMAP diet, and because the specific carbohydrate diet
is similar, you can kind of include that inside that umbrella. There's also some limited research
about the effectiveness of the low histamine diet for IBS symptoms, and then the paleo
diet has some good research about its general anti-inflammatory effects though not really
anything specific to IBS. And the paleo diet does remove some of the most high FODMAP trigger foods,
and so depending on where you're starting, this could also be a good option for you.
Now here's a list of diets that don't have evidence as anti-IBS diets. These include things
like the ketogenic diet, the autoimmune paleo diet, the low oxalate diet, the medical medium
diet, and the low lectin diet. Now does this mean that these diets won't help your IBS symptoms?
Absolutely not, I would never say that. It just means that the research generally
suggests that most IBS food sensitivities have to do with FODMAPs, fermentable fibers
or carbohydrates. There are definitely going to be exceptions to this, and that's fine. But the point
is kind of like I was saying in number one in this video, you want to stick with the simplest,
most likely to work things first and then work towards more complex things.
So if you've exhausted your other opportunities, feel free to look at these other diets that don't
have direct research to support them, but start with the ones like the low FODMAP diet that have
research to back them up. I'm curious to hear from you what foods you think are triggering your IBS
symptoms. Drop a comment down below this video. All right, tip number three for eating with IBS
without going crazy is to stick to simple meals. This is a huge tip because I know sometimes when
people get going on a new diet they get really excited about trying new recipes,
buying new cookbooks and testing new things out or trying exotic foods. But this can definitely
get overwhelming and take a lot of time for some people and it's not necessarily the best
strategy. So I highly recommend either adapting your existing dishes that you normally prepare
or just finding a couple of really simple staple recipes or things that you like to make
to make this a little simpler and easier on yourself. My basic meal template in my household
is to cook a healthy protein which in our household is chicken, buffalo or fish, a health
whole foods carbohydrate like rice or other whole grains, winter squash, potatoes or sweet potatoes,
and sometimes some brown rice pasta and a veggie dish that's either a salad or a cooked
veggie stir fry or steamed vegetables, roasted vegetables, some kind of vegetable side dish.
What does this look like in my house? Well, it looks like things like a baked chicken with
a side of rice and a green salad or pasta with buffalo meatballs and marinara sauce
with lots of vegetables in it. Or it looks like burgers with oven fries and a veggie stir fry.
Or chicken soup with lots and lots of veggies. In our house these are the staple dishes and I
can make them with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back and it's really
simple to make them. I know the quantities and I don't have to think about it too hard. Ultimately
you'll be more successful if you find basic recipes to work with that are easy to prepare,
or to reimagine dishes that you already make by swapping a few
key ingredients and otherwise it's the same. Tip number four for eating with IBS without
going crazy is to above all things to listen to your body instead of listening to dogma, lists, or
rules. This tip is perhaps the most important and I can't emphasize it enough. There will always
be information or opinions out there that can cause you to second guess or wonder if you're
doing the right thing or to feel anxiety or fear about what you're doing or to feel like,
"Oh God, I missed something important. I'm not doing everything I could be doing."
And instead, I want to invite you to get clear about what your body is saying about the things
that you're choosing to test and experiment with. If you feel worse on a diet or using a
supplement for that matter, I want you to listen very closely to that and take your body seriously.
I ignored these signs when I started the ketogenic diet a number of years ago and I had been told and
read and heard that it was excellent for all kinds of inflammatory problems and that it was
probably going to solve everything for me. And so I doggedly stuck to it and pursued it for
these benefits but I was ignoring the warning signs. My acne got worse, my energy got worse,
my hormones got worse, my endometriosis got worse, it kind of happened slowly,
like the frog in the slowly boiling pot of water, but over time, all these things were happening,
and I wasn't attributing it to the diet but that's really what had happened and ultimately it really
derailed my digestion and made it even worse. Every single thing that you try for your digestion
needs to be measured against your body's response to it and whether it truly makes sense for you to
continue going forward. Any recommendation that you receive is coming from a place of theory and
you want to make sure to ground that theory out in the reality of how it really and truly affects
you and only you to decide what to do next. And when you use this as your guide, you can't really
go wrong. So please, please, please take this to heart and remember to always listen to your body.
If figuring out what to eat to control your IBS symptoms has been a challenge for you,
I want to encourage you to download a free copy of my guide called The Roadmap to Gut Recovery,
and inside that guide, I share the exact strategy that I teach my students inside my Calm
Digestion Method program to help them find their personalized plan for calm digestion, including
with their diet. You can grab your free copy at confluencenutrition.com/roadmap and I will be
sure to leave a link for that below this video for you. All right, get out there and start working
with your food in a grounded way so you can get to your symptom resolution. If you like this video,
please click like and consider subscribing and also send it onto somebody who you think could
use it as well. I look forward to connecting with you further and talk with you soon.