A year ago I finally stopped taking antimicrobials for SIBO after a solid year of trying hard to eradicate it with first prescription antibiotics, then herbals and diet.   I never got a totally negative test last May but it was low enough that we all decided it was not worth trying to keep chasing down the last few points.  After the Symposium in June I decided that maybe I would never test negative due to large amounts of m.smithii in the colon so changed tactics to work on my colon flora and ignore the SIBO.

This tactic seemed to work.  A year now without any herbs and I feel great.  I’ve had zero SIBO symptoms for so long that it seems like a bad dream that happened long ago.   In this year I have been able to get back my life pretty completely and am no longer limited because of illness.  I’ve gone from barely running to back up to 25k distances and have set PRs at each distance I’ve run in the last year.  I’ve gone from a very restricted FODMAP free AIP diet to a very full Paleo diet with even a few carb cheats thrown in.  I can even eat at restaurants some.  I’m hiking, backpacking, hunting and fishing as much or more than ever before.  Life is good once again.

Working on the colon in the end is what cleared out the last of my symptoms.  This began with probiotics but now is just regular servings of fermented foods – homemade sauerkraut & kimchi and kombucha – almost daily.   I have gone from very low diversity of colon bacteria to the top 96th percentile of bacteria according to the tests I’ve done.  I just get back my latest UBiome results and have found that from my November to March when I switched to fermented foods only my bacterial composition has changed a bit but diversity is still good.  My Firmicutes is up from 55-68% of my bacteria and my Bacteroidetes is down from 37-25%.  All the smaller families are either the same or slightly lower now that in November.

So, if you are feeling like your SIBO will never go away rest assured it can and you can indeed get your life back to normal.   Keep in mind, I do not have the autoimmune variety of SIBO with vinculin antibodies and I think that makes a huge difference in the prognosis of finally being able to clear out the overgrowth.  With greatly impaired motility it is much harder to clear symptoms and hopefully Dr. Pimentel at Cedars-Sinai will come up with a real fix for that group of people at some point.   Third Annual SIBO Symposium is coming up in a  few weeks, I’ll be there virtually and will be reporting on what I find out.