As someone who has suffered from IBS my entire life, I have heard every cliché piece of advice there is about eating enough fiber and drinking enough water to wash the pain away. “Just add in a handful of blackberries to your morning oatmeal, or maybe add brussel sprouts to the dinner menu” doctors would say as if I weren’t a nutrition coach with avid knowledge of the concept of fiber.
In addition to knowing that I was eating ample amounts of produce, I also knew that it was uncharacteristic of someone who ate so healthy and exercised so regularly to always be in pain. Frustrated, I exhausted the web in search of IBS treatments as well. Alas, most of what I came across seemed to be the script regurgitated to me by the doctors I had visited.
As time went on, I began to develop more and more anxieties regarding eating and the pain it caused me. To ease these anxieties, I started practicing yoga more regularly. Along with the sense of mental serenity yoga brought me, I was pleasantly surprised to find it soothed my stomach as well.
As I discussed in my previous blog post, yoga has proven to be an effective treatment for IBS in certain individuals. But if I have learned anything from my many years of trial and error, it is that when it comes to IBS treatment, you cannot trust anybody but your gut. The best way to treat IBS is to educate yourself on interactions of certain foods with the GI tract as well as certain types of exercise that may be aiding or hindering regular gut function.
Stomach Turning Sources…
Instagram accounts of individuals also suffering from IBS may make you feel as though you are not alone, but severity and type of IBS varies from person to person. For example, kombucha is a great aid for some individuals with IBS while its black tea base upsets the stomachs of others. Taking dietary advice from these accounts and individuals is ill advised, but they can be a good source for the occasional recipe that catches your eye.
Websites such as Health.com may provide great overviews of a variety of treatments that have been known to work for IBS, but they are all generalized and not known to work in every instance. Furthermore, their advice is broad and may lead readers down the wrong path of treatment. For example, they suggest exercise but do not specify the type, and exercises such as running and biking have been shown to cause lower and upper gastrointestinal distress respectively.
Thus, it is important to take everything with a grain of salt and experiment with trial and error while keeping a log of how certain foods and exercises make you feel.
Help Yourself to Seconds of These Sources…
For starters… Consult with a professional such as a physician or gastroenterologist if you are not already diagnosed with IBS to rule out any other causes of gastrointestinal discomfort. A great source for finding specialty doctors in your area is Doctor WebMD.
The main course… Monash University has dedicated a large area of research to IBS and food intolerances of those with IBS. Their website discusses the Low FODMAP diet in great depth, which is a diet aimed to eliminate consumption of foods that irritate overly sensitive nerves of the GI tract, ultimately resulting in pain in those with IBS.
The Monash University app has an extensive guide of serving sizes of certain foods that may or may not cause IBS flare ups. This food guide combined with food journaling helped me to realize that I cannot tolerate foods many doctors told me to increase my consumption of, such as brussel sprouts and apples, proving that you need to trust your gut over everything.
Just Desserts… To follow up a meal, journaling is a great habit to keep you in touch with your body. Hopkin’s Medicine provides a great template for what to journal about if you are new to food diaries.
Rest and Digest… Yoga Journal provides a library of articles discussing yoga for gut health and yoga poses that are great to perform following meal ingestion. Moving the GI tract in the gentle manner than yoga offers following a meal allows everything to keep moving smoothly and minimizes inflammation.
In Conclusion,
It is important to get a medical diagnosis from a professional in order to ensure IBS treatment options are the correct ones for you, but following diagnosis, the only person who knows best for your stomach is you.
Check out my first blog post for more information on yoga as an IBS treatment. The sources mentioned above are great places to get started, and research journals and universities are great places to search for further information.
Until next time, stay hungry for knowledge and keep your sources clean!
Yoga for Health and Wellness 