Two months ago I was shocked when I tested positive for SIBO. As a digestive health coach I taught people how to eradicate SIBO overgrowth. And in the midst of it all, I came down with a pretty severe case.
I was confused and emotional, wanting to call it a personal failure. But I also believed SIBO came into my life to teach me something that I was refusing to deal with. And it definitely got my attention.
Anyone can get SIBO, because SIBO is simply the symptom of a deep imbalance in your gut and most likely in your life also.
In my case, I was constantly stressed and overwhelmed. I was taking care of way too many people who were quite sick and anxious.
I cared about what I did but it wasn’t the right type of work for my nervous system and personality.
I’ve always been a sponge, soaking up the emotions of other in my attempt to connect to them and empathize.
While it was deeply healing for my clients to be heard and understood, I was taking it all inside of myself. That and the increasing amount of pressure and stress from a growing client case load just did my body in.
The final straw was a really bad case of the flu to tax my immune system and a week long road trip where I ate an uncharecteristic amount of sugar, gluten and junk.
My SIBO was probably in the making for years, but it took this perfect storm of events to finally start feeling the symptoms of my imbalance, which were primarily brain fog and bloating.
I believe the lesson that SIBO brings is different for everyone, but I think it revolves around stepping up self care. We are all so busy trying to do it all and be someone that we put ourselves last. Nothing like being sick to help reprioritize life.
Get more sleep, eat better, worry less, rest, finding a new job or fix a toxic relationship. SIBO is the best motivation on the planet because it’s damn painful.
I don’t know about you but I don’t do well with pain. So I rather work on creating a life that works better for me and my body.
SIBO was the push I needed to make some hard changes. I reduced my workload significantly and studied how to rebuild my gut from ground zero.
And it took more than diet and supplements and I talk about those details in the video below.
A speedy recovery
My SIBO case was pretty dramatic. My hydrogen gas level topped off at 101 at the 100 minute mark (you can see my original test results a few blog posts back) and I was able to reduce that to 13 parts per million.
From my research, I was not supposed to recover that fast. An overgrowth like that can take about 4 month or longer to reduce. But I did it in 6 weeks. So anything is possible.
If you are curious about my protocol you can read about it here. I suggest you don’t copy what I did, but rather get help from a SIBO professional, with lots of experience.
I was able to design the best program I knew for hydrogen dominant SIBO, but if you have methane your program needs to be different, with the addition of Allimax pro to address the methane gas.
In the video below I go into greater detail about my experience, including things I did that had nothing to do with supplements and diet. That is often the missing piece of SIBO, the lifestyle component. And the mental piece.
These are the things that sped up my recovery.
Being a “Superhealer” is about fixing what doesn’t work in your life from an emotional and physical perspective. Introspection leads to awareness which leads to transformation. And healing is about transformation.
Throwing out what doesn’t serve you and replacing it with what does, whether it’s about foods, lifestyle, thoughts, emotions or beliefs.
Let me know if you have question or how I can support you in future blog posts below. Let me know what you found valuable or inspiring in the video.
Two corrections. I forgot to mention the probiotic I took while taking my antimicrobial herbs to help replant the bacterial garden I was weeding.
The probiotic is called megasporbiotic and it’s a product I sell to my clients with SIBO. I find that people who are sensitive to other probiotics don’t react to it because it’s free of lactobacillus and bifido strains.
Also at one point I think I said sleep reduction, when I meant to say stress reduction…
Anyway, I hope the video helps you with either the information or inspiration you need to find balance in your gut and life.
Angela Privin is proof that IBS is NOT an incurable disease, but a cry for help from a gut out of balance. When the body AND mind are complaining, it’s an opportunity to examine what’s not working and change it. After solving her own IBS mystery almost two decades ago, Angela became as a health coach to help others. Angela uses root cause medicine protocols personalized to the individual to solve each IBS mystery. Her tools are lab testing, dietary changes, supplementation, subconscious mind work and nervous system rebalancing . Learn more here.
[…] are plenty of success stories out there and I want to highlight them. I beat SIBO recently and wrote about it here. And I’m not the only […]
Hi,
I am also suffering with SIBO and the bloating/constipation is very uncomfortable. May I ask when you began seeing a reduction of symptoms and if you took anything to help with bloating/constipation (if you suffered with this). I tried herbal remedies and they did not work, so I was prescribed antibiotics from my doctor, I have just 4 days left after a 2 week course, and the bloating/constipation still remains and is very uncomfortable. Do you have any advice?
Many thanks.
There is so much more to SIBO eradication than antibiotics. There is diet, prokinetics, stress reduction, boosting stomach acid and finding the root cause and fixing that. If you want to go deeper into troubleshooting your bloating I invite you to book a discovery session consult.