Last year was a crazy year in terms of my physical and mental health. I started off the year strong adhering to a strict gluten free diet as I had just discovered that I have Celiac Disease. I was finally beginning to adjust, but my stomach never felt 100%. I was constantly bloated and nauseous eating the tiniest bit of food, and I never understood why. I finally saw my doctor who suggested to do a SIBO test, and surely enough it came back very positive.
What is SIBO?
SIBO is short for small intestine bacterial overgrowth. Usually people with SIBO have an overgrowth in several different types of bacteria that are found in the colon, and some just have an overgrowth of normal bacteria. This overgrowth causes problems with digestion and absorption of food, which is what can cause excessive bloating, constipation, diarrhea and more.
Risk Factors:
- Celiac Disease
- Antibiotic overuse
- IBS
- Crohn’s Disease
- Low stomach acid
- Moderate to heavy alcohol consumption
- Oral birth control pills
For me, Celiac Disease is obviously a huge risk factor. Before doctors figured out I had Celiac Disease, they prescribed me a ridiculous amount of antibiotics, which also could’ve contributed to my SIBO.
What Can Prevent SIBO From Getting Better
Stress: Stress is huge when it comes to SIBO. If you constantly deal with stress everyday while you have SIBO, it is going to be harder to get rid of it. Stress can cause inflammation within your nervous system making it harder for your gut to heal. I dealt with a lot of stress and anxiety from my living situation as well as my relationship, and I truly believe that alone made it SO much harder for me to get rid of my SIBO, and sometimes even made my stomach feel worse than it should have. Removing myself from those unhealthy environments has helped me tremendously, and each day I am feeling better and better.
Poor Diet: The way you eat can greatly impact the symptoms you are experiencing when you have SIBO. There are several different diets that doctors can choose to put you on, however these are a few I have tried and my experience with them.
- SCD Diet– The SCD diet is a specific carbohydrate diet that allows you to eat fresh vegetables, eggs, fish, poultry, unprocessed meats and certain legumes. This diet was particularly hard for me to follow because of how restrictive it is. This pretty much implies you can’t really have any sauces on your food. I followed this diet while taking xifaxan and neomycin, since I had both hydrogen and methane based SIBO. I noticed a huge improvement in symptoms, but it’s hard to tell if it was just diet or if it was the antibiotics improving the symptoms.
- Kristy Regan SIBO Diet– Second, I tried the Kristy Regan SIBO diet, which is a diet that starts out very restrictive, and each week allows you to add in new foods to allow you to see if any of these foods are causing you symptoms. This diet was also a little difficult as you are supposed to follow specific recipes for 4 weeks in a row. I followed these recipes to the best of my ability, and I now have some really good recipes from her recipe book. I followed this diet with an herbal protocol when I felt my symptoms were starting to return. This protocol included taking ADP, Dysbiocide, FC Cidal, and Berberine. I slowly incorporated one at a time every couple days because I realized die off symptoms caused me bad side effects if you took too many at once. I did not feel like the herbal protocol helped me that much in the end, but all treatments work differently for everyone.
Slow Motility: Slow motility often leads to constipation. It is hard to get rid of constipation when you are told to avoid fibers. Constipation can also led to other problems.
As Digestive Health Institute mentions, constipation causes the body to work overtime:
“Metabolic waste, excreted toxins and fermentation products accumulate in the intestines with constipation. These byproducts of digestion and liver detoxification (toxins) are absorbed back into the blood stream, causing the liver to increase its workload. Eventually, the extra metabolic waste in your bloodstream can cause symptoms and illness.”
Curing constipation can not only allow you to feel better and less bloated, but it can prevent your body from allowing waste and toxins to build up. One way I have learned to help with this problem is by adding magnesium powder to my morning smoothies. I like the powder version because it allows you to play around with the amount you want to add.
What Has Helped With My SIBO
Experiencing SIBO first hand has allowed me to understand it better, and realize how difficult it is to live with a chronic illness. I wanted to share a few things that have helped me with my SIBO so that hopefully they will help others that are struggling with it as well.
Xifaxin: As far as antibiotics go, Xifaxin really helped at least lower my SIBO to a less extreme level. Normally, I am very against antibiotics because of how they affect your gut, however, Xifaxin is very different than the normal antibiotic. It passes through your stomach and into your intestines without being absorbed into your bloodstream. My doctor is going to have me go on it again for a few more weeks to see if I can get rid if my SIBO completely. The only downside is you can have side effects to Xifaxin, but in the end, it did give me a lot more relief than before, and I realized the anxiety I developed probably was not from the antibiotics, but more my environment.
Diet: Changing my diet has helped manage my symptoms better. After doing the diets listed above, I developed a lot of anxiety around eating because I was so worried about eating something that would cause my symptoms to come back. I realized this was not really healthy for me, and so now that I have a better understanding of these diets, I just try to follow them as best as a can, but not obsessing on every little thing that is in my food when I eat out. I make sure that everything is gluten, sugar, and lactose free, and I try not to eat garlic and onion. This has allowed my symptoms to calm down a lot.
Smoothies: My doctor suspects I need some gut healing because I most likely have leaky gut, and so she had me try incorporating a bunch of GI powders to support gut healing. For the past few weeks, I have been making smoothies that have helped tremendously. I drink one of these smoothies every morning. The taste is not the best, but you start to get used to it after a little while. In these smoothies, I incorporate:
- GI Calm: 1 scoop ( I get one from my doctors office, but they sell different versions of it online).
- GI Integrity: 1 scoop
- Magnesium powder: 2 scoops (to help with motility; you can add or subtract depending on your condition)
- SBI Protect: 2 scoops
- Glutashield: 1 scoop. I use the vanilla flavor.
- Liquid Biobody PC: 1 tsp
- Almond milk
- I also add in a scoop or two of frozen blueberries and a scoop of peanut butter to mask the taste a little bit more.
Corebiotics: There is a stigma around taking probiotics with SIBO. I have always been scared to take them especially after reading about how it has made SIBO worse in some cases. This probiotic is a little different in the sense that it has spore forming probiotics, which allows it to make it into the intestines without degrading when it passes through the stomach. This allows it to prevent pathogenic bacteria growth. I have been taking 2 a day every morning, and I feel like its been helping restore my gut as well.
These are just a few things I have found to help with my SIBO so far so I thought I would share! Hopefully this can help some of you who struggle with SIBO as well.
