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.
