A few days ago I listened to Dr. Ruscio’s summary of the SIBO Symposium podcast and in it he mentioned a previous podcast with Chris Kresser about how Chris turned his illness around by simply choosing to live again instead of being so focused on his health and illness. I pulled that podcast down and listened to it yesterday, you can find the transcript here and the podcast in iTunes here. In this podcast several examples are given of people who got better when they finally stopped obsessing about their health and just went out and lived. One guy even got better on a beer & pizza diet, primarily because he was out living life and being social again.
In my Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN) training we talk a lot about the importance of “Primary Foods”. These are Relationships, Career, Spirituality and Physical Activity. They aren’t food per-se but nourish a person in ways that food cannot and may be more important in recovery than actual diet. This follows what Dr. Ruscio and Chris Kresser were talking about, by taking the focus off trying to stick to a diet and fretting over tests and supplements by focusing on these Primary Foods one can find healing.
In my case this seems to hold. Last month at the Symposium I simply declared myself well and decided to get out and enjoy life as much as I could. In this last month I have been outside daily – I spent 20 days wading rivers fishing tenkara, I spent 4 days backpacking, 2 other days hiking, 6 days trail running and 3 days bicycling. I spend quality time with Catherine each day sitting by the river in the afternoons. I continued with my daily practice and I started working again adding some features to my SIBO app and starting on a new web project. Yes, I stay AIP but I’ve let my diet expand quite a bit. Most days I have had no symptoms at all and the few days a week I have minor symptoms it is late in the day and usually after cruciferous veggies for dinner.
I’m staying off anti-microbials still. The only thing I’m adding now is some probiotics and vitamins. Today I did my first infant dose of Custom Probiotics 11-Strain Probiotic Powder and took one capsule of Pure Encapsulations Nutrient 950 w/NAC multivitamin. The probiotic was chosen since it contains several of the strains recommended by Dr. Siebecker for SIBO, is a powder so I can slowly ramp up the dose and has NO prebiotics in it. The vitamin was chosen since it most closely matched the recommendations of what I need from my Organix Acid test that we reviewed yesterday. We’ll see how it goes. Plan is to slowly ramp up the probiotic and continue with ferments and then retest a stool test in September to see if things look better than they did last year and to see if I ever killed the Blasto.