Today’s blog post is a guest post by Ben and Rupali Brown, owners of Pali Yoga in Eureka, CA. I reached out to them to help you learn about the most useful and valuable yoga poses to support your digestive health, particularly symptoms of bloating and IBS. Ben and Rupali are a husband and wife yoga team, and offer a wide range of Vinyasa flow classes, restorative classes, barre yoga, and more. If you happen to live on the NorthCoast, check out their studio.
Whatever the cause of belly bloating, simple yoga poses can go along way towards helping to relieve the symptoms of belly bloating.
By practicing a range of asanas, we get our bodies moving, which increases blood flow and aids in the expulsion of gas and excessive fluid retention.
There are both physical and mental results of these poses that will positively effect belly bloating. Simple inversions calm the nervous system and give gas an easy pathway out of the body. Twisting stimulates your internal organs and helps you move internal stagnation, while forward folds can also put direct pressure on the abdomen to squeeze gas out.
Additionally, breathing in a way that encourages abdominal contraction on the exhales and dilation on the inhales will increase peristaltic (digestive) motion.
Lastly the benefits of calming the nervous system and reducing anxiety will have perhaps the greatest impact on the healthy functioning of our digestive system, discouraging the over-production of gases in the first place.
While practicing these poses for bloating, focus on contracting the abdominal muscles during exhales, and relaxing and dilating the belly during inhales. We recommend a range of asanas, or poses, from twists to inversions, that will help increase blood flow and stimulate the digestive tract to remove gases and fluids that have become trapped.
We recommend a sequence that begins reclining on the back, to allow the nervous system time to relax, which will create the correct conditions for the physical poses to help. Here are the poses we feel are most likely to reduce bloating and improve digestion.
Apanasana (knees to chest pose)
Draw knees tightly into chest, without creating tension in the shoulders and neck. If range of motion allows, interlace hands to elbows around the shins and hold for approximately thirty seconds. A simple modification is to practice holding only one knee at a time.
Supta Matsyendrasana (reclined twist)
Twisting sometimes offers nearly immediate relief for significant bouts of abdominal distress, and also offers the benefits of stretching tight spinal muscles and stimulating the internal organs.
Lying on your back, bend both knees and place your feet firmly on the ground. Move your hips a few inches to one side and drop your knees towards the other. Make micro-adjustments to your upper body so that both shoulders can rest easily and evenly on the ground.
If needed place a blanket under the raised shoulder to allow it to rest. Make sure to switch sides, and hold for 30 seconds at least.
Setubandhasna (Bridge Pose)
Inversions like Bridge Pose help calm the nervous system, stimulate the circulatory system, and encourage the expulsion of gas from the abdomen. Of course this can reduce bloating!
Lying on your back, bring your feet to the floor and knees to the sky, taking a moment to bring your heels in fairly close to your pelvis. Engage your thighs towards each other, press evenly through the feet and lift your hips off the floor.
Pause for a moment and bring your hands, elbows and shoulder blades closer towards each other, and then press your hips and abdomen up as high as you can while maintaining even, easy breathing.
Marjariasana Pose (Cat Pose)
Toning the front compartment of your abdomen will stimulate peristaltic motion, allowing your body to bring itself back to equilibrium, and relieve bloating.
Coming to your hands and knees, with your hands under your shoulders and your knees under your hips, press the ground away actively with your hands, broaden your shoulder blades, “tuck your tailbone”, and arch your back strongly to the sky. Focus on contracting our abdominal muscles especially with exhales and softly releasing them on the inhales.
This pose can be held, or it can be practiced in conjunction with “Cow” pose. Alternatively you can come back to neutral spine with the inhales and repeated 10-15 times with each exhale.
Malasana: (Yogic Squat)
This asana simulates the correct body position for elimination, and massages the end of the digestive tract including the colon. This can help eliminate gas and move the bowels, relieving bloating.
In a standing position, turn your toes out slightly, with heels approximately the width of your hips. Squat down between your heels. Lift the crown of your head upwards as you drop your pelvis downwards, using these two opposite forces to lengthen your spine. Use your elbows to press the thighs apart and make Anjali Mudra (prayer hands). Squeeze the thighs in against the elbows.
If it is uncomfortable or impossible to keep the heels down, prop them up. If there is too much strain in the knees place a block or a bolster under the sit bones.
Uttanasana (standing forward fold) with a pillow
Uttanasana offers the benefits of inversion, and is also a great tonic for an over-stressed nervous system. If your bloating is made worse by stress, this may help. The pressure from the pillow may also help expel gas.
Standing with your feet hip-width apart, place a firm pillow at the top of your thighs. Hinge forward from the hips and let your hands fall towards the ground. Bend your knees slightly especially if you tend towards discomfort in your lower back.
Find the ground, or yoga blocks, or your ankles, with your hands, and fold deeply, relaxing your head to gravity. Allow the pillow to exert light extra pressure to your abdomen.
Balasana (Childs Pose)
Begin on your hands and knees with toes stretched out. Shift your hips back to sit on the heels and rest your abdomen onto your thighs and your forehead onto the floor. Either extend your arms out ahead or behind you. If there is discomfort in knees place a folded blanket in between the feet and hips and/or place a bolster under the forehead. Hold for a minunte or longer.
We encourage practicing these poses and holding each for approximately thirty seconds, and repeating as needed.
Need help integrating relaxation practices AND nutrition and digestive support? Please grab your Free copy of Roadmap to Gut Recovery to learn more. You can also schedule a free 30-minute Assessment Session with me. Together, we’ll identify where your best, most efficient action towards healing can be directed. I look forward to meeting you!
Bloating is one of the most common symptoms of IBS and SIBO, and one of the most uncomfortable. Along with frequent diarrhea or constipation, bloating is probably the symptom that drives most clients to seek help.
Luckily, with some concerted effort, bloating is one of the symptoms that responds well to dietary and lifestyle habit interventions. In today’s post, I’m going to share my top 6 tips for natural bloating relief to reduce bloating due to IBS or SIBO.
What Are the Primary Causes of Bloating?
There are really just a few primary causes of bloating. A huge one is bacterial overgrowth in the intestines. Bacteria eat and excrete, just like we do. Their excretion is gas.
Some bacterial gases that can cause bloating include methane, hydrogen, and hydrogen sulfide. This last one can cause rotten egg farts, and bad breath.
Bacteria generally like to feed on sugars or starches, and this is why a diet like the Low FODMAP diet, that reduces the amount of certain fermentable starches, often helps you feel better if you suffer from bloating. Another microbiome culprit of bloating is yeasts, like candida.
The other main cause of bloating is constipation or slow gut motility. When your gut slows down, this can make it more likely for gases to build up before they are released, and this can make you feel super uncomfortable!
Some people have bloating so severe that they look pregnant by the end of the day.
Therefore my natural bloating relief tips are going to address these root causes.
Natural Bloating Relief Tips
Natural Bloating Relief Tip # 1: Stress
The first thing I want to talk about is stress. You might roll your eyes at me, but stress is a huge trigger for digestive symptoms of any kind. Stress puts your body into fight or flight mode. When this happens, your digestion slows or stops. To keep your digestion moving well, you want to be in the “rest and digest” state. To tame stress, identify your triggers, address the things you can, and create a plan to manage the stress from things you can’t control. Managing this type of stress includes meditation or mindfulness practices, physical activity, laughing regularly, therapy, and doing things you love. You owe it to yourself to handle this first.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #2: Identify Your Food Triggers
You can make a lot of forward progress with bloating by investing time to identify your food triggers. This helps you get your symptoms under control relatively quickly. One of the easiest ways to figure out your food triggers is to work closely with a Food-Symptom Diary. (If you don’t already have mine, you can grab your free copy here and get right to work.)
Once you are feeling a little better, you can turn your attention to healing deeper layers of gut dysfunction, and hopefully expand your food choices again to a more normal template. Here are some food types that may be contributing to your symptoms to consider:
FODMAPs: FODMAPs are types of carbohydrates that feed bacteria, and may lead to a symptom flare. The goal is not to avoid ALL high FODMAP foods, but to identify the particular ones that flare your symptoms. Check out my video Low FODMAP Diet for IBS and the blog Your IBS Diet Plan in Context for instructions on how to do this.
High Carb Diet: Too much carbohydrate, sugar, and starch may be your issue. Most of this may be covered by considering FODMAP foods, but in some cases, it may be more broad than that. See if reducing your carbs while increasing your proteins and fats helps.
Too Much Fiber:Too much fiber, especially too much too fast can lead to bloating. You can reduce your intake of fiber (or prebiotics), or back off entirely until you work through other root causes.
Too Much Fat: Some people experience bloating if they eat too much fat. Some are sensitive to animal protein, while others are sensitive to industrial seed oils like canola, soy, and cottonseeed, which can easily become rancid. And for some of you, no matter what the fat is, your gall bladder is struggling to produce enough bile to help break down your fats. Figuring out which situation applies to you can help you make the right choices.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #3: Support Basic Digestive Function
No matter your digestive troubles, you should always be supporting your basic digestive function. For a more in depth discussion of how to do this, check out my video Digestion Tips for IBS and SIBO. But here are the top three to get you started:
Stomach Acid: Stomach acid greatly helps your digestive tract keep moving, and so helps with bloating. You can support stomach acid by using a little apple cider vinegar or lemon juice in water before meals, or by using betaine hydrochloric acid (HCL) capsules.
Enzymes: Enzymes help your food break all the way down, which may reduce the symptoms of bloating. If carbs are a problem, look for enzymes with amylase. If fats are a problem, make sure you are getting lipase or ox bile. And if proteins aggravate your bloating, make sure there is some protease in there (and you did follow the previous step of stomach acid, too, right? This helps protein break down fully.)
The RIGHT Probiotics (usually no histamine producers): Probiotics are important for good digestive and immune function, but the wrong kinds can aggravate bloating. This is especially true if you are struggling with methane-dominant SIBO or histamine intolerance. Make sure to choose probiotics that don’t have histamine producing strains. Check out my video Probiotics Guide for IBS and SIBO for more information.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #4: Get Your Gut Moving
Oftentimes bloating is closely related to how quickly your food is moving through your intestines. The more slowly it is moving through, the more bloating you are likely to have. Check out these tips for helping your digestion move along at a normal pace.
Exercise: The physical jostling of exercise helps move the bowels, and it also creates beneficial biochemical changes. At least a daily walk helps keep things moving.
Stretching and Yoga: My colleagues and friends, Ben and Rupali Brown, owners of Pali Yoga in Eureka, CA shared this with me about yoga poses that are beneficial for bloating (You can read their whole post with photos of the poses over on their blog here):
“Simple yoga poses can go along way towards helping to relieve the symptoms of belly bloating. By practicing a range of asanas, we get our bodies moving, which increases blood flow and aids in the expulsion of gas and excessive fluid retention. There are both physical and mental results of these poses that will positively effect belly bloating.
Simple inversions, such as headstand and handstand, calm the nervous system and give gas an easy pathway out of the body. Twisting, like in Supta Matsyendrasana (reclined twist pose) stimulates your internal organs and helps you move internal stagnation. Forward folds, such as uttanasana (standing forward fold), apasana (knees to chest pose), malasana (yogic squat), balasana (child’s pose) can also put direct pressure on the abdomen to help expel gas. More poses that can help include Setubandhasna (Bridge Pose) and Marjariasana Pose (Cat Pose) can be helpful as well.
Additionally, breathing in a way that encourages abdominal contraction on the exhale and dilation on the inhale will increase peristaltic motion. Lastly the benefits of calming the nervous system and reducing anxiety will have perhaps the greatest impact on the healthy functioning of our digestive system, discouraging the over-production of gases in the first place. We encourage practicing these poses and holding each for approximately thirty seconds, and repeating as needed.”
Prokinetics (ginger, LDN): Certain herbal or pharma consumables help encourage intestinal motility. These include Ginger, and low-dose naltrexone (LDN). A few commercial products that help include MotilPro by Pure Encapsulations, and Iberogast by Iberogast, and Motility Activator by Integrative Therapeutics. (You can find these products in my online supplement dispensary at FullScript.)
Massage: Loving up your belly with a little massage oil every now and then can encourage your motility. And come on, this isn’t so hard! It feel’s nice! The main thing is to always work in a clockwise direction, because this is the direction of flow for your large intestine. Try small circles all around the perimeter of your belly.
Adhesions: If chronic constipation and slow motility are a huge contributor to your bloating, you may have abdominal adhesions or scar tissue physically pulling on your intestines and slowing their flow. The gold standard for this work is the Clear Passage Clinics. There are several around the country, and they have had amazing success treating abdominal adhesions in their patients. Or look for a massage therapist or physical therapist in your area who specializes in working with adhesions.
Enemas: Regular enemas can help keep things moving. This particular tip has been a HUGE help for me. If you make a mistake with a trigger food and you’re really uncomfortable, a simple water enema, or enema with some medicinal components can relieve the pressure and allow the gas to move out quickly.
Vagus Nerve Support: The vagus nerve is the super communication highway between your brain and your gut. It is a major contributor to gut motility, so encouraging vagus nerve function can keep your gut moving. Check out my video Digestion Tips for IBS and SIBO for more information about how to stimulate the vagus nerve.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #5: Correctly Identify Infections and Treat, In the Right Order, for a Long Enough Time
Gut infections and dysbiosis can be a significant contributor to bloating. Parasites, bacteria, and yeasts can aggravate the lining of your gut, produce excess gas and toxins, and blow you up like a balloon, especially the bacterial infections. For more information on this topic, check out my video Gut Microbiome Testing for IBS and SIBO.
Parasites: Parasites, if present, must be addressed first. To skip over this step will usually render any other attempts to deal with bacterial or yeast infections ineffective. Parasites are also somewhat difficult to find with culturing or microscopy stool samples, DNA-PCR analysis can find parasites much more reliably.
SIBO: A very frequent underlying cause to ongoing bloating is SIBO, or Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth. Testing is relatively simple, and treatment includes many of the things I’ve discussed here. If you are having trouble locating a practitioner who offers SIBO testing, please schedule an assessment session with me to discuss.
Yeasts: Yeasts like Candida may be aggravating your bloating, but can only be addressed after any parasites or bacterial problems have been cleared up. Stool testing with a DNA-PCR analysis, like the GI-MAP really helps to identify the level of yeast, and is superior to stool testing that attempts to culture the microorganisms. Yeasts are very difficult to culture.
Natural Bloating Relief Tip #6: Absorb Gases
One last possible way to help is to use binders or herbs that help to absorb the excess gasses that are causing pressure. You may not want to choose this route if you struggle with constipation, as binders may slow things down. Here are two options.
Atrantil: A product designed by a gastroenterologist, this three-herb formula can really help reduce bloating. (I don’t have any affiliation with Atrantil, I’ve just used it and found that it worked).
Binders like clay and activated charcoal: These can also be really valuable, but must be taken on an empty stomach and away from food. The one I use is called GI Detox, by Bio-Botanical Research (also no affiliation).
Conclusion
I hope that all these bloating tips can help you find some relief from your bloating, no matter the cause. Now that you know what to try, where will you focus your attention first? Leave me a comment or a question below.
If all this information feels overwhelming, know that you don’t need to stress about it. I’m here to help you! If you need some extra help sorting out how to make sense of this for your unique situation, I encourage you to do one of two things:
Histamine is a naturally-occurring compound in your body. It is an essential part of your immune system, and is also a neurotransmitter and helps regulate your digestive system. One of the possible root causes of digestive challenges, such as diarrhea and nausea, along with a host of other symptoms, can be caused by histamine intolerance. In today’s post, I want to explain histamine intolerance, help you determine if histamine intolerance may be part of your symptom picture, and help you understand what to do about it.
Histamine Metabolism
Histamine is naturally produced in your digestive system, in brain synapses, and by immune lymphocytes called basophils as well as MAST cells. There are high concentrations of these types of cells in your tissues that are prone to exposure or injury, especially mucous membranes). When a basophil or MAST cell is exposed to the right type of antigen (allergen), the cell “degranulates” and releases histamine to try to destroy the invader.
Histamine also helps regulate your daily body clock, stomach acid secretion, blood vessel dilation, appetite, body temperature, endocrine balance, and itch perception.
So histamine is an important regulator and player in your body!
Excess histamine is broken down by two primary pathways in your body: with the DAO (Diamine oxidase) enzyme and the HNMT (Histamine n-methyltransferase) enzyme and is supported by the methylation process (see What the Heck is Methylation https://confluencenutrition.comwhat-the-heck-is-methylation/). DAO is responsible for breaking down excess histamine in your digestive tract, while HNMT degrades histamine in the nervous system.
Usually, these enzymes break down excess histamine, and you don’t even notice. But if one or both of these enzymes aren’t working properly, or the intake or creation of histamine overwhelms your ability to clear it, you can start to experience histamine intolerance symptoms.
Histamine Intolerance Symptoms
Excess circulating histamine can cause a wide range of symptoms. To complicate matters, the severity of the symptoms can vary widely, and reactions may be delayed making pinpointing the offender difficult.
The classic signs of histamine intolerance include flushing skin or rashes (including hives), itching, and headache, but may also include itchy throat or eyes, fatigue, anxiety or heart palpitations, eczema or rosacea, nasal congestion, dizziness, shortness of breath, and tinnitus or hearing problems.
As always, these symptoms can also indicate other issues as well, so it’s important to create a holistic picture of your case, and to place the symptoms in context to make sure that we are fully understanding what’s involved in your picture, and to make sure we are focusing on the correct things. (See the blog How to Use These 2 Functional Medicine Tools to Clarify Your Path to Healing.)
Histamine Intolerance Root Causes
There are multiple possible reasons that histamine intolerance could be an issue for you, and creating the appropriate solution requires getting clear on your unique root causes.
The first place to always begin is with the food you are putting in your mouth each day. Foods can contribute to the problem if they are high histamine foods, if they are histamine liberator foods, OR if they impede the function of the DAO enzyme.
Some of the most common histamine problem foods include: fermented foods or beverages (kombucha, kefir, sauerkraut, miso, tofu, tempeh, etc.), processed or cured meats (salami, prosciutto, bacon, bologna, ham, luncheon meat, etc.), bone broth, alcohol, vinegars, avocado, tomatoes, and really ripe or overripe fruits.
Another reason for histamine issues can be dysbiosis or gut damage. This impacts your gut’s ability to produce the DAO enzyme that breaks down histamine.
If you also happen to have high amounts of bacteria that produce histamine, you may have histamine flares when you eat foods that encourage these bacteria. Candida toxins may also flare histamine symptoms.
Additionally, if you have a leaky or permeable gut (See video on How to Fix a Leaky Gut below), immune triggers may be sneaking through your gut lining and triggering a histamine response.
Or the problem may be that you are deficient in some of the nutrients that support methylation, which helps break down your histamine. The most important co-factors, which I find many people are deficient in, include vitamin C, vitamins B6, B12, and folate, as well as magnesium.
Finally, some people may have genetics that reduce their efficiency at breaking down their excess histamine. This includes people with certain MTHFR mutations.
How to Tell if Histamine Intolerance is a Problem for You
If you suspect that histamine intolerance may be part of your symptom challenges, here is a step by step way to expand your awareness and build understanding of what your body is doing.
With these broad lists of foods high in one particular food element, the goal isn’t to remove ALL the foods. This isn’t possible, and generally isn’t advisable, because we want to keep you eating as wide a variety of foods as possible. The goal is to clearly identify YOUR unique symptoms triggers and to focus your attention there.
Take a look at the Histamine Handout and mark the histamine foods that you regularly eat (daily or very frequently). Using your Food-Symptom Diary to track your food for a few days, taking particular note of the histamine foods, and how your body responds (there are instructions for how to use the Food-Symptom Diary inside it).
Can you see any correlation between when you eat the histamine foods and your symptoms flares? Make sure to note any and all signs or symptoms in the Symptom column of your diary.
If you DO notice a correlation between eating the histamine foods and your symptoms, try reducing or removing that food for a short while, 1-2 weeks. Keep note of your symptoms, and see if they decrease.
After you’ve completed the elimination exercise, eat a trial serving of one of your suspected foods, and keep your eyes on your symptoms for a few days afterwards. Did your symptoms flare up again? If so, that food may need to come out of your diet for a period of time, or you can experiment with dosage or timing to see how you can tolerate it. For example, you may be able to eat tomatoes once a week, but more frequently causes a flare.
Other Steps to Support Histamine Intolerance Symptoms
The food changes are only one part of the process of resolving a histamine imbalance, and there is more you can do to resolve the root causes. Here are some other places you can focus your investigations to get to the bottom of your histamine issue.
Consider gut testing to see if SIBO or other gut infections are a factor, and address what you find. Sometimes these infections can really aggravate a histamine situation, particularly SIBO, candida, or other bacterial overgrowth. (See Gut Testing for IBS and SIBO for more info).
Add methylation support supplements. Because the methylation process helps break down excess histamine for eliminiation, supporting methylation can help. These nutrients include vitamin C, vitamin B6, B12, methylfolate, and magnesium.
Natural antihistamines can help with symptoms while you address underlying causes. Options include quercetin, vitamin C with bioflavinoids, and DAO enzyme.
Reduce or eliminate alcohol: Alcohol is a histamine double-whammy because it is very high in histamine, but also reduces the effectiveness of your available DAO enzyme.
Should you feel that you’re on the right track, but the details are confusing, or you need some more help getting gut testing, or interpreting your Food-Symptom Diary, please schedule a free 30-minute assessment session with me, to find out how I can help you work through this process.
This week is Endometriosis Awareness Week, and as I had my own journey with Endometriosis (see my latest YouTube video where I talk about it HERE), I wanted to share what I learned about eating a proper endometriosis diet with you.
Endometriosis is a complex condition that is largely misunderstood. But like every complex health challenge, diet and lifestyle factors are significant contributors to your ability to manage and cope. In today’s blog, I’d like to share what I’ve learned about how to eat an endometriosis diet to minimize symptoms.
Endometriosis 101: What Is It?
Endometriosis is an inflammatory, possibly autoimmune disease, where tissue like the inner lining of your uterus, or endometrium, is found outside your uterus. The misplaced endometrial tissue responds to your monthly hormone cycle just like your uterus lining, and this causes inflammation, swelling, scar tissue build up, pain, and adhesions.
The most root-cause resolution approach for treating endometriosis is wide-excision surgery, which removes all of the visible endometriosis tissue with a wide margin of healthy looking tissue. Though there is some recurrence rate, it is much lower than more conventional laproscopic cauterization surgery, and is certainly far more effective than hormonal or other pharmaceutical treatments.
However, these treatments are only one side of the coin. Endometriosis, especially long-term endo, often causes secondary problems, which need to be addressed in addition to surgery for best long term success. Many of these secondary problems are manageable with diet and lifestyle. These include things like: IBS, SIBO, generalized gut dysbiois and leaky gut and the downstream nutrient deficiencies this can lead to, adrenal fatigue, underlying hormone imbalances, food sensitivities, interstitial cystitis or other bladder problems, and internal structural problems due to scar tissue.
Though it can be tempting to try to “attack” all these issues aggressively, the most real, lasting effects are gained by drawing your attention back to the basics, and to create a nourishing, supportive environment, where your body’s cells fundamentally get what they need.
What to Eat and What Not to Eat on an Endometriosis Diet
As with most other inflammatory conditions, an endometriosis diet template reduces or removes inflammatory foods like gluten, rancid vegetable oils, dairy, sugar, and processed foods as a starting place for eating. But here are few specific considerations that may help you find your way to the least symptom-tiggering endometriosis diet.
WHAT TO AVOID on your Endometriosis Diet
Dairy products
No matter whether your sensitivity or dairy source, all dairy products come from a lactating or pregnant cows, and therefore all contain hormones. Because endometriosis is generally hormonally mediated, naturally-occurring hormones from dairy can aggravate the mixed up hormonal messages your body is already experiencing or sending. Avoid dairy products or evaluate each type to see if they affect your symptoms.
Industrial Seed Oils and Trans-Fats
As Americans, we generally over consume industrial seed oils like canola, safflower, sunflower, soy, and cottonseed oils. These oils are easily oxidized, or turn rancid, and this rancidity causes inflammation in your body, especially when not balanced by an abundance of omega-3 fatty acids, like those from fish and seafood.
Reduce or eliminate these seed oils, and replace with olive, coconut, or avocado oil for cooking, and sesame or flax oils for cold uses. You can also increase your consumption of fatty fish or consume a fish oil supplement.
Red meat and Farm-Raised Fish
Many women with endometriosis find that red meat or farmed fish aggravates their endometriosis. For some people, red meat consumption increases inflammatory cytokines, which leads to more pain. Meanwhile, farm-raised fish is raised in toxic, chemical-laden ponds, and is often given antibiotics.
If you can, purchase organic, grass-fed or pasture-raised meat, and wild-caught seafood. Avoid seafood that accumulates toxins like mercury, such as mackerel, merlin, shark, tuna, bluefin, and orange roughy. Commonly farmed fish include tilapia, catfish, and salmon. Choose short-lived fish and seafood species such as wild-caught salmon, cod, shrimp, and pollock.
Oxalate Foods
Oxalic acids naturally occurs in some foods. With certain gut conditions, oxalic acid can deposit into any body tissues and form sharp, jagged crystals. Oxalate crystals are the most frequent cause of kidney stones, and can often be involved with body pain.
Some common foods high in oxalates include spinach, chard, sweet potatoes, chocolate, almonds, peanuts, wheat, chia, and rhubarb. But before you run out and remove all foods these foods (please don’t do this!) you need to know that if you suspect oxalates to be a contributor to your pain, you must slowly reduce the oxalate content of your diet over a period of weeks. This prevents an episode of oxalate dumping, which can lead to a major pain flare. If this is you, I suggest working closely with someone who can guide you through this process. You can start by downloading my Food-Symptom Diary and doing a little tracking to see if you notice a correlation between your symptoms and oxalate foods.
Caffeine and Alcohol
Both caffeine and alcohol can increase the severity and incidence of endometriosis pain, and they can also affect your estrogen metabolism, which is also involved with endometriosis. Reduce or eliminate these from your diet, except for an occasional treat. Green tea is a wonderful substitute for caffeine, and is generally anti-inflammatory.
Sugar
Sugar is generally an inflammatory food, and depletes your body of important nutrients, including magnesium, vitamin D, calcium, chromium (which helps your sugar metabolism), and vitamin C. Since several of these nutrients support your immune function, sugar reduces your healthy immune response. Eliminating sugar can make a significant difference in your level of endometriosis pain, and your body’s ability to manage the inflammation and swelling.
WHAT TO INCLUDE on your Endometriosis Diet
Though it’s easy to say what you should avoid, I also want to take a moment to share a few foods that may be helpful for you to include to modulate your endometriosis. These foods help balance hormones, support proper hormone detoxification, keep your balanced blood sugar, and reduce inflammation.
Green Tea
Green tea contains powerful antioxidants that help clean up inflammatory damage in your body. A cup or two of green tea per day, or using supplemental ECGC can help.
Red Veggies and Fruits
These contain lycopene, another naturally-occuring antioxidant, which may reduce adhesion formation.
Cruciferous veggies contain a relatively high amount of sulfur compounds, which aid your liver in detoxing estrogens and other compounds.
Flaxseed
Flax has a reputation for being estrogenic, but it actually helps bind up the “bad” estrogens and eliminate them. Daily ground flax seeds are helpful to keep estrogen in check.
Fermented Foods
Sauerkraut, pickles, kombucha, and more are a wonderful source of beneficial and diverse good bacteria. Keep in mind that if you already struggle with IBS or SIBO, probiotic or fermented foods may not be the right thing until you handle this because increasing your intake of these foods may exacerbate your bloating or belly pain.
Evening Primrose Oil
This supplement may help with estrogen metabolism and to reduce pain.
Water
Drink plenty of clean, filtered water.
Conclusion
Changing your diet and taking a few supplements won’t likely make your endo go away, but it can make your symptoms largely manageable, and make your other treatments or pain management more effective. And these same dietary changes can help you manage the conditions downstream of your endo as well. By working methodically to shift your life terrain, you can expect to find your cycles less painful, as well as improved pain management, sleep, moods, and immune function.
If you are feeling confused about how to navigate all these choices to manage your endometriosis, I encourage you to reach out to me and schedule a free 30-minute assessment session. I can help you set a course for success.
If you’re not ready for that yet, I invite you to download my free guide, Roadmap to Recovery, where I share the how you can make sense of what your body is telling you so you can experience relief from your most pressing symptoms.
If you struggle with IBS or IBS-like symptoms, you may have found your way to the low FODMAP diet or another therapeutic diet. In this blog post, I will help you understand how the low FODMAP diet fits into the context of your full IBS diet plan.
Making sure your IBS diet is low on aggravating foods is a key part of healing, and will dramatically improve your quality of life. But dietary intervention is rarely enough to help you resolve your IBS from the root cause level.
Because IBS is so frequently caused by dysbiosis, what you are really aiming to do with all of your interventions, is to support your body in shifting its gut microbiome.
So if you’re trying to resolve your IBS or IBS-like symptoms at their roots, what does this plan look like? And where does your IBS diet plan fit in?
Getting to the Right IBS Diet Plan
The first step in any plan is doing a proper assessment and finding which areas are ripe for easy action. These areas usually fall into a few different categories:
choosing the right diet for your unique body.
creating a foundation of health practices that supports you (sleep, stress management, exercise, balancing blood sugar, hydration, and supportive community).
recharging nutrient deficiencies with proper food and supplementation.
So many people think that the diet part is all they need to do. But this is only one small piece of the journey.
Though tempting to skip these steps, finding your way to the right combination for you can often remove some of the root causes that are contributing to your current health challenges. This makes your bigger healing project easier and more efficient and effective.
By cleaning up these foundational pieces, you set yourself up for much greater success.
How to Create the Wrong IBS Diet Plan: Potential Pitfalls
I made a lot of mistakes using therapeutic diets before I was trained as nutrition coach, and I’ve seen countless others make the same mistakes.
Here is how my story went:
Like many of you, I had intermittent, but challenging digestive symptoms. They at times, but not always, had me staying close to a toilet, and feeling very puzzled. Sometimes my symptoms struck in the morning, sometimes it was the middle of the night. Either way, it was always unwelcome.
I have been a DIY health person since I was in college, when I succeeded in curing my recurrent bladder infections using herbs and homeopathy. So I started researching.
I learned about therapeutic and elimination diets, and tried them out. I stared with simple gluten, dairy, and sugar free. This one actually made a lot of difference, but I didn’t know I should stay on it for a while. I gradually slipped off after the initial month.
A few years later, still struggling, I learned about the ketogenic diet, and based on the testimonials of people who had been wildly successful with it, I dove in whole hog.
I felt a little better, but didn’t seem to access the profound energy that many keto advocates describe. Then, after several months, my digestion, hormone, and skin issues all started to get WAY worse.
I shifted back toward a more paleo template, and added more carbs back in, but cut dairy out. This helped, but by now, the issue had exploded, and was bothering me more days per month than not.
When adopting a diet template for digestive problems, I was missing a few very key pieces of information:
Your Diet Highly Contributes to Your Microbiome: Extremely low carb diets like keto can dramatically shift the composition of the microbiome, and this isn’t always a positive thing. Our good bacteria survive by consuming the natural fiber in plant based foods, such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
In my case, the keto diet removed most fruit, some high fiber vegetables such as beets, carrots, potatoes, and winter squash due to their carb content, legumes, and whole grains. Essentially, I starved my beneficial bacteria, which contributed to a lot of worsening mood and hormone symptoms. When choosing a therapeutic diet, it’s important to be mindful of the varied effects it is likely to have on your microbiome, and to be sure to support it.
Diet Templates Must Be Customized: Any diet template, for any health condition, needs to be customized to you to minimize the potential negative affects that widespread eliminations can produce. You want to remove the foods that are causing a lot of inflammation or other problems, but minimize the number of removals so you don’t destabilize the microbiome, create nutrient deficiencies, and minimize the disruption your experience of eating.
In my case, eating a much higher fat and lower carb diet overburdened my already struggling digestion and elimination, and contributed to increased acne, anxiety, diarrhea, constipation, and hormone havoc. Had I been paying closer attention with diet tracking, I would have noticed that these changes were worsening my symptoms.
Diet is ONLY ONE piece of a complex puzzle that may require multiple steps. I feel the diet shift is beneficial to do at first, to focus on providing symptomatic relief, as well as underlying inflammatory relief. Once you have diet sorted out, then and only THEN should you focus in on resolving the other pieces of your puzzle, such as nutrient deficiencies, detox support, and hidden infections or pathology.
I think a lot of experts and authors sell a lot of people short here. Many people promote their therapeutic diet as the magic bullet or likely cure for an illness. For some people this is the case, but I believe it is the slim minority. Most people require not only diet changes, but also habit realignment, customized supplementation, and sometimes, more significant protocols to shift the microbiome or even prescription medications. It’s a great disservice to tell people that diet will fix them when it’s not really the case.
Your IBS Diet Plan: Customized and In Context
The Low FODMAP diet is currently the only peer-reviewed diet proven to support IBS. The Specific Carbohydrate Diet is similar, but has not yet been proven scientifically to be effective. But since diet templates are simply a place to begin, this doesn’t really matter. You start where you need to start, and work from there.
In the basic FODMAP diet, you focus on removing high FODMAP foods, which are foods high in certain fermentable carbohydrates. These carbs and fibers feed bacteria in the gut and can contribute to gas and bloating, as well as the diarrhea or constipation that are hallmarks of IBS.
But the high FODMAPS list is really broad. It includes a lot of generally healthy foods, including (this list is not complete):
asparagus
artichokes
garlic, onions, and leeks
apples
cherries
figs
mango
agave
high fructose corn syrup
honey
peas
soybeans, black, fava, kidney, navy beans
dates
persimmon
plums
cauliflower
mushrooms
apricots
blackberries
carob
chicory
and more…
But here’s what you need to know about this list: it would be difficult to remove ALL those foods entirely, and you don’t need to. You likely have sensitivity to one or two TYPES of FODMAPS, but not necessarily ALL of them.
You might mostly have a problem with Fructo-saccharides, or fructose. By using detailed FODMAP lists of foods (check this really detailed one out) along with your Food-Symptom Diary (you can download yours here) properly to assess this, you may find that you don’t need to eliminate the segments of the list that pertain to other types of sugars.
And even within one sub-segment of the FODMAP list, you may find that some of the foods on that list bother you, while others are just fine and don’t contribute to your symptoms.
So while anyone can read a list, and decide to remove everything on it, the true benefit of the list is to use it as a tool to know WHERE TO LOOK for your unique sensitivities. Then you do the elimination work to discover what specifically is true for you.
Once you have THAT information, you can move ahead with confidence, knowing that you won’t be triggering your symptoms while you address whatever other underlying causes are contributing. Ideally, you’ll be able to discover the specific dysbiosis or other mechanisms that are creating the conditions that make your IBS happen, and you can work through the process of resolving them. (To read more about how to use Gut Microbiome Testing to resolve IBS, read Gut Microbiome Testing for IBS).
Conclusion
Healing from a chronic illness like IBS is really a transformative experience, and requires context. Transforming your practices and habits sets you up for a lifetime of not only improved health, but the ability to deal with and successfully face any future health challenge that comes our way because you will have learned how to work WITH your body. What you learn about your body never deserts you. It becomes something you build on as you move forward.
Now you know how to use the Low FODMAP Diet in the proper context to create your IBS diet plan, but what about the other steps along your Roadmap to Recovery? Grab your free copy here.
And if you’re feeling confused about how to wade through all those FODMAP food lists, and you’re ready for some support with diet and supplement customization in your pursuit of your personal remission, schedule a free 30 minute Assessment session with me right here.
