IBS and food: Why you can’t digest the foods you love

The IBS Interrupt™ Perspective: A New Approach to IBS and Food Intolerance
The Reality: Eating bland food but still digesting badly and having flares? Mealtimes shouldn’t feel like a battlefield, yet your safe food list keeps shrinking.
The Core Cause: Your nervous system “red-flagged” those foods during a period of stress or emotional overwhelm. And may be continuing to red-flag new foods if you feel emotional during meals.
The Way Forward: Lasting relief comes from retraining this gut-brain loop, so your body remembers how to feel safe around food again. This is the core of my 3-step IBS Interrupt™ Process.

Do you get the impression there’s something you’re missing about IBS and food?

You digest badly. You’re intolerant to the foods you love – and whatever you do, you never seem to really master your IBS symptoms and diet?

If so, this week’s article will present you with a radically new approach to IBS and food intolerance.

The conventional approach to IBS and food intolerance

Many of us are told that food intolerance works like this:

• You eat the “wrong” foods
• Your diet upsets your gut microbiome (and you can get Candida, SIBO, H Pylori or leaky gut)
• This creates food intolerance, and you have to steer clear of the foods that trigger you.

In other words you can be given the impression that it’s all your fault! Which is NOT the case.

The trouble is, you can BET that some of your favourite foods are the ones you have to avoid.

Your relationship with IBS and particularly with food has probably become really tense.

Mealtimes have become a battlefield.

You do your very best to work out what you can eat, and that won’t set off a flare. But despite your best efforts, you continue to digest badly and have IBS flares.

Sometimes you may even find that there’s SOMETHING ELSE you start digesting badly. And it’s all so unclear!

You can be really “good” and eat the bland boring food, and still have an unexpected flare-up!

I’ve been there, and it’s downright maddening when you have NO idea WHY.

And what you can eat keeps gradually shrinking.

A new perspective on why you are intolerant to the foods you love

Are you hungry for a new approach?

In my experience, food intolerance doesn’t actually work in the traditional way.

So please feel better and realise that you’re not doing anything wrong!

If you digest badly and are battling with your IBS and food, this is what you need to understand:

What starts off food intolerance is the association the mind makes between a food and a strong negative emotional reponse.

Once the association has been made, that particular food (or ingredient) can become red-flagged by the nervous system, creating intolerance.

As we eat 3 times a day, every day, there is a large window for food to become associated with an emotional trigger. And the foods/ingredients concerned will likely be the ones that you eat the most.

IBS and Food: Emotional food triggers can start off gradually

Here’s a practical example:

You’re trying to get a job and keep getting turned down.

And while you’re having lunch, day after day you’re ruminating: – about how unfair it is

– how much you really need the money

– how you feel like a failure.

Then one day when you are really upset, your nervous system may red-flag a food, or an ingredient that you have been eating often, while you feel that feeling.

You will probably start to digest badly and bloat.

And you may even vomit it to get it out of your system.

From then on, every time you eat that food or that ingredient, you will have a reaction. This is how you start being intolerant to the foods you love.

But I don’t remember any emotional reaction…

This association can be created over time when repeated.

It can involve feelings that you are so used to feeling, that you don’t particularly notice them,

Or it can occur in association with a specific difficult event, which is strong enough to alert your nervous system – which will, in turn, attempt to distance you from the perceived danger.

Your mind may even block out the details as a protective measure, so you may not actually remember how you felt.

After Years of IBS and Food Restriction: A Case Sudy

A client of mine changed her reaction to long-term food intolerance using the IBS Interrupt™ process. She had been living with food intolerance for many years, and got by on a “healthy” but VERY LIMITED DIET of fresh fish and cooked vegetables – and little else.

Even if you like fish and vegetables, eating this day in day out for years just sucks all the fun out of food.

She knew this had started while travelling, and had put it down to food poisoning.  Despite trying everything in the book, she just didn’t seem to be able to move forward.

When we went back to that time, she was able to uncover the emotional trigger that had set her food intolerance in motion.

From there we could start releasing that trigger and soothing her body’s nervous response to it.

The imbalance in her gut microbiome was able to rebalance naturally. She was then able to gently reintroduce the foods she had become intolerant to, and get some taste back into her life. At last!

How do I know so much about all this? Because I had long-term lactose and fructose intolerance, and I found I was becoming intolerant to all the foods I loved, plus food additives.

However, I was “lucky” enough to see how my multiple chemical sensitivity started. And from there I was able to figure out how to release chemical intolerance AND all the IBS food intolerance I had accumulated over the years.

Does all food intolerance work like this?

In truth I can’t say. Everyone is unique.

All I can say is that until now I haven’t met anyone whose food intolerance doesn’t work in this way.

So do consider this new perspective if you’re not getting anywhere with the traditional approach.

Where can you go from here with IBS and food?

You are probably very aware of your IBS triggers. If food has been a sore point for years, it is unlikely that any further food journalling will help you.

If you’re just sick and tired of a lifetime with IBS and food intolerance, why not give yourself the expert guidance and support you need to interrupt it.

The IBS Core Reset Program is an in-depth private coaching program that helps you reset your reaction to your food triggers and other IBS triggers, so you can be your real self and fall in love with food again.