Wow, it's been over a year since I was significantly 'healed' or 'cured' of a 7 year battle with irritable bowel syndrome and I feel amazingly blessed to be able to eat 'normally' again without 'side-effects' from eating!
At my worst I have experienced inflammation and spasms (both extremely painful and uncomfortable), anxiety, panic attacks and tummy jolts when I got a fright. I would find that either I could eat or I couldn't, in other words it was all or nothing (not a specific food).
Many people these days are either diagnosing or being diagnosed with food allergies but I found that I could not avoid my symptoms by cutting out any particular foods, apart from caffeine (which gave me anxiety without fail) and sulphates in wine or dried fruit (which gave me pain and gas the next day without fail). I could literally tell you within seconds of drinking coffee whether it had caffeine in it because I was so sensitive, so I gave it up completely.
These days I am a far cry from that and any tendency I get towards those symptoms I put a swift end to, by applying what I've learnt about keeping my system working properly, but it was a process getting here.
Many people are diagnosed with being gluten-intolerant so I tried doing that to see if it helped but it's not easy. You have to learn to cook new foods for variety and it's also quite difficult socially.
For 7 years I struggled with IBS and didn't get far without a flare up. The main things I learnt to help me to cope:
1) Take a daily fibre supplement to effectively eliminate build up in the digestive tract.
2) Use a probiotic daily on an empty stomach and then wait an least half an hour before eating (this allows them to multiply) and also make sure that the capsule has at least 5 billion units, preferably a variety of different strains also.
And eventually, I was able to conquer IBS with BEMER therapy. In 2 weeks, I was healed and the whole ordeal was history :)
