Overcoming food intolerances.
As someone who's done the whole food intolerant thing, I get asked a lot how I came out the other side. Now, I'm no doctor - but the experts couldn't tell me why I was suddenly intolerant to everything. Then they told me it would never go away. And then when it did go back to normal, they couldn't explain it. Hooray for the joys of modern medicine! So basically I had no help, and I'm sure many people in a similar situation feel the same way. Hopeless. I'm here to tell you that there's a light at the end of the gastric tunnel.
Backstory - suddenly I had a lot of IBS symptoms for no apparent reason. So the doc put me on a FODMAP exclusion diet. With the premise that my body wasn't digesting certain foods, so I should stop eating those. Which SUCKED. There are so many vegetables I had to avoid - the most difficult being onion and garlic. Not to mention lactose, although there are lots of options there. Admittedly, excluding these foods did help control my IBS symptoms.
But who wants to go through life not eating delicious things? Eating out was a nightmare, and my requirements were a huge burden on anyone cooking for me. Not satisfied with the medical advice given to me, I turned to the interwebs.
Firstly, I figured out why I was suddenly intolerant.
In retrospect it seems very obvious, I have no idea why the doctors didn't pick up on this. Just before my IBS shit came up (literally), they'd put me on a hardcore dose of antibiotics. Fuckers killed my whole damn ecosystem!! No wonder my gut couldn't digest anything anymore - all my little worker microbes had been destroyed. And without those little dudes breaking down certain foods, I was up shit creek without a paddle.
The solution?
Get my gut microbiome back. My rainforest was dead, and needed to be rebuilt from scratch. After a bit of research digging around online, I formulated a plan. Certain foods help biodiversity growth in the gut. And funnily enough - a lot of the foods I was intolerant to were the ones I needed to eat in order to become tolerant to them. WHAT WHAT. So by excluding them from my diet I was actually perpetuating my intolerance to them. If that makes sense you're doing well.
So, I started eating small amounts of the stuff I wasn't supposed to. Little bits of lactose here and there, garlic, onions, avocado, cabbage, whole grains - little by little I added them back in. And little by little my gut started to process them again. Sure, there were explosive bouts of diarrhoea here and there. But 2 years later, I can eat anything and everything I want! In my diet, I now have a solid focus on gut health and keeping all the little dudes in my belly happy.
