815 karma · joined September 9, 2013
Having the right amount of stomach acid and low PH is crucial to keep the whole digestive system, gut motility and more running properly.
I tried fasting, a few days eating nothing and drinking only water with a bit of salt. It doesn't really work. The bacteria go into hibernation mode until you start eating again.
I don't drink milk anymore and I tried a low FODMAP diet. The latter helped, but I found it so hard to keep up and it was stressful.
I had every diagnostic under the sun. Chest xrays, stool samples, hydrogen methane breath tests (hydrogen positive). I am 99% convinced it was all caused by stress and the antibiotics I took was the straw that broke the camels back.
Stress triggers flight or fight mode. Chronic stress means you're always in this state which means your body isn't producing the digestive enzymes and stomach acid it needs to maintain correct bacteria levels since you don't need to digest food when you're being chased by a metaphorical tiger, better use that energy to run away instead.
The only probiotic I haven't tried that I would like to try is Symprove which is a refrigerated one that was recommended to me by quite a few pharmacists.
Once I am fully confident my stress levels are very low and I've learnt to manage them I will start to wean off the supplements and see if I get a recurrence of symptoms. I'm not yet fully cured but most importantly I'm on the right track.
A guy on YouTube will help called Pain Free You. Recent studies suggest bad bacteria can continue to flourish if we are chronically stressed (which symptoms like this easily cause). Huge correlation between stress and flare ups for me.
In the short term whilst you work on the mind-body aspect, I recommend taking Digestive Enzymes with each meal along with a Betain HCL + Pepsin supplement. These are the only supplements that removed my symptoms (and trust me I’ve tried them all). They work by ensuring you have the right level of stomach acid to properly digest food, proteins, carbs and fats so that by the time it hits your digestive tract, there’s less undigested FODMAPs for the bacteria to feed off of.
There IS a light at the end of the tunnel.
Happy to chat about this and what I use since I know this can be hard to go through davzie at davzie dot com.