SIBO can be a very isolating illness. Suddenly you can’t go out to eat with your friends since you are sensitive to everything. You can’t really go out to a bar with your friends either, drinking is not recommended. Often you just don’t feel like even leaving the couch when your gut is churning and you aren’t sure when you’ll next need to run to the bathroom. Friends and family rarely can understand what is going on since until you experience SIBO you really don’t get it. All of that can leave you feeling alone and a bit depressed, I know it did me. I think the only person I saw outside of my immediate family for months was a string of doctors as I was trying to figure out what exactly was wrong and what to do about it.
Monthly Archives: February 2016
Can you breath your way out of SIBO?
Me with puffed out cheeks doing my breathing
SIBO may be happening in your small intestine but in many cases it is specifically a motility problem and thus tied to the enteric nervous system in the gut. The most common cause of SIBO is actually an auto-immune reaction where the body destroys a key protein that is part of this enteric nervous system and drives the migrating motor complex, the MMC. The MMC fires the small intestine’s cleansing wave to flush any unwanted bacteria out. If this protein, vinculin, is destroyed then the cleansing waves to do not fire as strongly and bacteria can back up in the small intestine causing the symptoms of SIBO. The MMC can also be compromised if there is an issue in the vagus nerve, the main nerve bundle between the brain and the gut. The vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system is so important that the gut is known as the ‘second brain’. In fact, there are more neurotransmitters in the gut than in the brain itself, 95% of the serotonin in the body is produced in the gut and serotonin is a key transmitter in the MMC.
Finally, some UBiome results
My gut bacteria ratios
It only took about 3 months but I finally got my first set of results back from my UBiome test back in November. I’m doing a series of three tests each spaced 2 months apart to see if I’m making any progress with my gut repopulation. I really don’t know what to make of a lot of these results but a few I do know what to make of. I did a Genova test in August which had me in semi-bad shape, way low on the diversity index and in the red zone on butyrate and short chain fatty acids. After that test I started heavily in on probiotics and fermented foods in hopes that this would improve. Well, I have to say I think it worked!
Getting fit again after SIBO
In one of my recent posts I talked a bit about exercise in relation to the Primary Foods concept and a bit about how I slowly got back in shape as I healed up from SIBO. I thought this topic deserved a bit more discussion since it is an important part of my life and I know many people who are currently struggling with how to get back in shape after being ill for a year or longer.
Before SIBO I was in the best shape of my life. I had come off a solid year with a personal trainer, I had run several trail marathons and an ultra marathon and was pretty much doing 13+ mile trail run every Saturday. When I got sick all that fitness went out the door. I lost a lot of weight, down a total of 35-40 lbs and with that weight went a lot of muscle mass. With Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV)( coursing through my system I was exhausted and seriously unable to get up and do much of anything so all my cardio conditioning went out the door too. After a year of this I went from being in great shape to being in the worst shape I’d probably been in for most of my adult life.
Winter Trail Series Wrap-up
The last event of the Winter Trail Series was held yesterday at Soaring Eagle park in Sammamish, the Frost Eagle event which this year was neither frosty or mucky for once. As usual I arrived early to help with setup and registration before the run. Everything went pretty smoothly given that we had a few no-shows on volunteers and both of us doing registration were running too but we got it taken care of and both got ready to run before the start.