5 Tips For Healing IBS

IBS, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome is a general term used by doctors and other health care professionals to describe a cluster of symptoms all relating to digestive distress and discomfort.

The symptoms of IBS can include:

• diarrhea,
• constipation,
• gas,
• bloating,
• pain,
• sensitivity to certain foods,
• incomplete digestion
• any other symptom of digestive distress.

How Is IBS Diagnosed?

A doctor will generally diagnose you with IBS if you have experienced at least 3 episodes of digestive abnormalities over the course of  three months, where no physical damage to the digestive system is present. This means that IBS is very different from issues such as colitis or celiac disease because in these disease states there is literal cellular and structural abnormalities present.

Can I Cure IBS?

IBS can be super frustrating to deal with, because often you have no idea what is causing your symptoms, symptoms jump around and are inconsistent (ie. you are constipated for a week, then the next week you have diarrhea and then back again and you have no idea what changed) and because there is often no real ‘quick fix’ solution for relief. Then when you turn to your health care provider, they will most likely offer you either a little pain killer or nothing! If you have been dealing with IBS for a while, it may even feel like there is no solution and that this is just something you will have to live with forever.

I used to suffer with stomach aches at least 1-2 times a week, constant poor digestion, fluctuations between constipation and diarrhea and bloating and this was something I dealt with for literally the first 18 years of my life. I totally understand the hopeless feeling that can accompany these issues. But there is promise! I have literally healed myself, and I now rarely suffer with digestive issues. Now, this did not happen for me over night. Several things in my life needed to change to support my healing, and the process did take time. What I want to encourage you to do is really get comfortable with the idea that in order to heal, you do need to make consistent changes and you need to practice healing habits over time. You may not feel totally better instantly, next week or even next month, but you can start to feel a little better, bit by bit until you eventually figure your body out.

Top Five Tips For Healing IBS

1. Food Sensitivity Focus: Food sensitivities are the first thing I suggest you look at when you are dealing with any kind of IBS symptoms. The problem here is that sometimes you do not notice that you are sensitive to something right after you eat it. Sometimes the effects of eating something you are sensitive too wont show up for days or even weeks – depending on how much you have eaten, and how quickly or slowly your digestive system is working.

The first things I recommend you look at experimenting with releasing from your diet are dairy products and foods with gluten. My reasoning for this is because these are the two most common foods that cause digestive issues for people. I recommend removing these foods from your diet for at least 3-4 weeks and take note of how you are feeling and where your symptoms are at.  Then add those foods back to your diet for a day or two.  After this experiment you will clearly see what foods are causing you issues. Like I said, you may not notice an improvement right away, and that is why it is important to give it a few weeks. You can then use your intuition to decide if there are other foods you want to experiment with eliminating to see if they bother you. This is an elimination protocol that would most likely be recommended to you by any naturopathic doctor.

2. Simple Meals: Eating several complex meals a day can really wreak havoc on digestion that is already compromised.  This is where I suggest you start reading the labels of any packaged foods you eat, and start noticing how many ingredients go into any food that you prepare for yourself.  You may be surprised how many ingredients are in your foods! When you think about it, eating very complicated recipes is not natural for us humans. In our earliest days when we were wandering the earth, we would not have had access to 10-20 ingredients to eat at once. We would have been focusing on a few ingredients that we could find locally. Know that our digestive systems have not evolved much, if at all, since these early days. When you are eating complex meals – such as dishes that contain concentrated sources of protein, fats and carbohydrates all together (like pizza, pasta with meat and cheese sauces, even complex plant based dishes like vegan curries and casseroles) your digestive system has to work overtime to extract the nutrients from all those different foods.  This is because each item require different enzymes and digestive juices from one another. You can probably notice the difference in how you feel when you eat a very complex meal vs. how you feel when you eat a simple meal.

I encourage you to try an experiment where you keep your meals to 5-6 ingredients total – and try to focus on not combining  concentrated protein foods (like meat and dairy) with concentrated carbohydrate foods (like breads, pastas, potatoes and sweet potatoes) for a few weeks and see how you feel.

A note on Fruit: I also highly recommend eating fruit on an empty stomach and away from other foods – especially cooked foods. Have your fruit early in the day to help ensure it is not going to be running into anything else in your digestive tract. Fruit digests the fastest when compared to all other foods, and if it is combined with other foods or eaten after other foods it will cause digestive upset.

3. Green Juicing: Green juices are my absolute number one favourite things you can ingest for healing IBS and other digestive upsets. Why am I so excited about green juice? For one, I experienced a super charge in my own healing when I started drinking green juice, and second I have seen it work wonders for countless others as well! But first things first, you may be wondering, what the heck is green juice? When I say green juice, I am referring to a fresh pressed unpasteurized vegetable juice composed of 99-100% green veggies. An example could be a juice made from celery, cucumber, lettuce, parsley, cilantro, lemon and ginger. These drinks may take some getting used to as far as taste is concerned, but trust me when I say that the benefits are so worth the initial taste experience.

Green juices are healing for the gut in a plethora of ways:

a)  They are packed full of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, enzymes, antioxidants and other nutrients that your body does not have to do any work to extract. This means that your body is getting a super hit of essential nutrients without putting any tax on your digestive system. Remember that your body will allocate any energy needed to digest food – and this means that sometimes it has to choose between digesting food and healing. When you provide your body with nutrients it does not need to digest you will be creating an environment where your body can do some healing work.

b) Green juices are full of chlorophyll. Chlorophyl is the part of the plant that makes the plant green. It is also almost identical to your red blood cells on a molecular level, the only difference being that your red blood cells have an iron ion at their core, where as chlorophyll has a magnesium ion. This means that green juices are going to super charge your blood, which means that more nutrients will be delivered to your cells (ie. more healing can occur) and more waste will be removed.

c) Green juices can be packed full of digestive healing herbs and plants. Items like ginger (a carminative) dill (digestive aid) Mint (digestive soother) cucumber (digestive cooler) fennel (anti-inflammatory) and cabbage (known to heal ulcers) can all be added to fresh pressed green juices that will super charge their healing qualities.

I recommend starting your day with a fresh green juice (after you have had some water) if your schedule allows for it. This way you are going to be flooding your cells with nutrition before anything else enters your system. If drinking your juice first thing in the morning is not possible for you, don’t worry, you will still get tonnes of benefit from it no matter when you drink it.

4. Enzymes and Probiotics: I like to recommend a round of probiotics to anyone who is dealing with IBS symptoms. I do not believe that they are a cure all in and of themselves, but I do know that most of us are walking around with compromised gut bacteria. Your body is actually composed of more bacterial cells and other cells that are not your body than it is of actual human cells. Your good bacteria population, especially in your gut are responsible for several process, two of which are the break down of food and defending your body against bad bacteria. When your body becomes depleted of its good bacteria stores you may find that your digestion and immune system both suffer. This may be something that you have never thought of because perhaps you have had compromised bacterial stores for a number of years without realizing it. Anti-biotic use, poor diets, stress, dehydration, lack of sleep and travel can all destroy healthy bacterial stores within the body, and they are actually pretty difficult to restore without taking a supplement – even if you eat probiotic rich fermented foods. If you deal with any kind of chronic digestive upset I would highly recommend that you go to your local health food store and ask for the very best probiotic they carry and plan to take them for at least 1-2 months. I also recommend looking for one that is dairy free.

Second, digestive enzymes can be a wonderful bridge over to healthy digestion. What digestive enzymes will do is help you to more efficiently and effectively break down the foods you consume. Enzymes are proteins that either cause the building up of structures, or the breaking down of structures. In the case of digestive enzymes, they are going to be working to break down the fat, protein and carbohydrate molecules you ingest into their simpler parts so that they can be absorbed and utilized by your cells. If you are dealing with gas, bloating, cramping and or incomplete digestion of your foods (ie. you are seeing undigested food in your stools) then part of your problem may be coming from the fact that undigested food particles are traveling through your digestive system, causing damage. Taking some digestive enzymes with your meals for a few months can actually help your body to produce more of its own enzymes, which means that they can help to improve your overall digestion over time. There are quite a few great brands out there so check out what is available at your local health food store.

5. Rest and Stress Less: If you would like to choose only one tool to use for healing IBS from this article, reducing the stress in your life, learning to cope with stress in a more effective way and learning to rest more is the one I would recommend. It may seem overly simple to insinuate that you could experience dramatic healing from reducing stress levels but the truth is that so many of the digestive issues we deal with can be boiled down to, or at least greatly exacerbated by stress. This is because when you are in a stressed out or exhausted state you will be operating in your sympathetic nervous system. When this portion of your nervous system is activated your adrenal glands will be stimulated which means that they will be producing your stress hormones. These stress hormones will do several things:

a) They will stimulate the transportation of blood from your digestive system to your arms and legs, to give you the power to fight or flee.

b) They will inhibit the production of digestive juices, digestive enzymes and saliva.

c) They will mobilize stored glycogen so that you have a spike in blood sugar, which means that if you choose to eat you will have too much glucose in your bloodstream which causes your liver and pancreas to have to work harder than usual.

d) Peristalsis (the wave like contractions that move food through your digestive system) is slowed in order to facilitate more energy being allocated to the arms and legs.

Basically these are all things that spell disaster for your digestion. Eating in a stressed out state will mean that you will most likely suffer from gas, bloating, stomach aches and even bowel issues because your body is basically shutting down all digestive function in order to have more energy available for fighting or running. When you are in a resting state, when you have tapped into your parasympathetic nervous system, all those stress response reactions are reversed. Blood is sent to your digestive system, your body goes into glucose storage mode, the production of digestive juices, enzymes and saliva is stimulated and peristalsis goes back to its normal rate.

There are some very simple techniques you can employ today to help improve your digestion and thus help to reduce your IBS symptoms:

a) Take 10-20 deep breaths before you eat: Deep breathing tells your mind, which tells your body that you are in a safe environment. By slowing your breath before you eat you will be creating the ideal conditions for smoother digestion. You will also be helping to oxygenate your system which will also facilitate better nutrient delivery to your cells.

b) Give Thanks: By shifting your state into that of gratitude you literally shift your physical state from stress to relaxation. Taking just 30 seconds to give thanks for what you have (this can be to anyone – your mom, your self, a higher power or whatever else feels authentic to you) you will again be signalling to your body that you are safe and that digestion is a priority.

c) Get To Bed Earlier: There are few things more stressful for your body overall than lack of sleep. Now I totally understand that you have responsibilities – work, children, spouses, school, ect and that getting to bed earlier may seem totally impossible, but trust me when I say that getting even just 30 extra minutes of sleep a night can dramatically improve your digestion over time. This is because your body does the bulk of its healing work while you are asleep. If you are continually depriving your body of this healing time you may be reducing the effectiveness of any other actions you are taking to try to heal yourself.

d) Light Physical Activity: Moving your body in some way that you enjoy for at least 15-20 minutes a day can have a huge impact on your IBS symptoms. This is because physical activity burns off stress hormones, helps to calm and relax your body, helps to stimulate digestive function and helps you to sleep better. Does this mean you need to kill yourself in  HIIT class or run a marathon? No. In fact doing those things may be counter intuitive. Select an activity that feels good to you, that helps you elevate your heart rate a little but in a way that is enjoyable for you. Make it a special time you dedicate just to yourself as a method of self care.

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