Found my root cause, bloating free 3 months ago!
This was my normal bloating after eating, and sometimes I'd wake up like this in the morning. For reference I'm short (5'1) and around 100lb so this is just not normal for my body. This second photo is me last week after dinner out, wearing pants that I couldn't button before, finally not bloated anymore! this would've wrecked me before!!
I'm not telling my life story so I'll make it short: I've had digestive issues since I was a kid and spent years assuming it was just lactose intolerance, of course it wasn't. The older I got the more foods kept triggering me, the bloating became constant until I finally decided to go to the doctor because yeah it wasn't normal. I went through the usual route, elimination diets, no dairy, no gluten (though I had already been doing that for years…), herbal antimicrobials, and eventually rifaximin which was the first thing that felt like it was targeting something real. I also tried fasting because I kept seeing people swear by it but for me it was awful, just nauseous and unwell the whole time, that taught me early on that not every protocol works for every body and I'm sure my hormonal issues had something to do with that too.
The things that helped me reduce my symptoms were many. First, reducing my stress. At the beginning of the year I moved out of my parents' house, I wasn't paying rent but I was kind of paying with my mental health, and I'm pretty sure that was one of the things making my gut go crazy. It was also exhausting having to cook separately from everyone else because we just can't eat the same things or I'd get sick. Most of the time, someone was already using the kitchen so I had to wait until they were done. That meant I ended up eating out my schedule almost every night.
Moving out gave me the push to make some bigger changes. I found a new doctor, redid my SIBO exams to confirm it was actually that and not something else like parasites, and yeah it was. So with my doctor we decided to look at the root cause instead of just treating symptoms like my previous treatments had. We did a microbiome test to understand what was actually left after all the treatments. From there I started asking what am I actually missing. I had already eliminated multiple food groups for years so more restriction wasn't giving me anything new.
My results showed low beneficial bacteria, specifically Bifidobacterium, markers suggesting my gut wasn't producing supportive metabolites like short-chain fatty acids and butyrate, and overall diversity that was just awful. Words of my doctor. I had already done the kill phase with antimicrobials and rifaximin. What I needed next was rebuilding.
And here's what we did:
- Magnesium for motility and overall gut function. It can tip into constipation for me so I keep fiber consistent in my diet and take it at a different time than iron.
- Iron supplements because I was dealing with anemia caused by amenorrhea (part of the hormonal issues I mentioned), which is also very connected to gut health since a damaged gut just doesn't absorb iron well.
- Kepos for chronic bloating and inflammation. HMOs feed bfidobacteria without broadly feeding everything else, and the lactoferrin helped support iron absorption and made it easier for my body to actually use the iron I was taking.
- Lion's mane for the brain fog and its digestive benefits. It acts as a prebiotic, supports the gut lining, and helps with inflammation along the gut-brain axis
I've been on this same protocol for 4 months now and I can eat pretty much anything. I don't think I'm cured because I know if I drop the routine things could come back, but my quality of life is just completely different!!