So many women have used the Low FODMAP diet to help heal IBS.
Using the Low FodMap diet to help you discover what foods you might be sensitive to is a common first step.
I went on the Low FodMap diet when I was first trying to heal my IBS. I was so grateful to how cutting out certain foods helped control my bloating and pain.
If you are thinking about trying this diet, it is so essential to really know what you are getting into before starting and to have a planned way out.
The Low FodMap diet was not designed to be a lifestyle or a permanent way of eating if you have IBS.
If you are using this diet that way, today we will talk about how this restrictive diet can impede healing in the long term and what you can do instead.
Find the full transcript for this episode and other resources at HealingHerIBS.com/4.
Can Going Low FodMap Help You Identify IBS Trigger Foods?
The Low FODMAP diet was not created as a lifelong diet for people with IBS. And yet, that is often how it is being used.
Is this how you are using the Low FODMAP diet? Have you been on it forever?
This diet was created as a way for you to eliminate certain foods that might be triggering you and to get relief from your IBS symptoms.
It was intended to be used in the short term, and with a very specific protocol for reintroducing foods into your diet.
When I did the Low Fodmap diet, I did the total elimination of all FODMAPS for around six weeks and then every two or three days, I would introduce foods I had cut out. I would notice how these foods made me feel. I took notes.
Have you tried the Low FODMAP diet? Did you have guidance around how to do it properly?
Women with IBS tell me that they have been restricting FODMAP foods for months or even for years.
This is not a good strategy for healing your gut. If you aren’t eating enough variety of macro and micronutrients in your diet, it’s most likely making your IBS worse.
You may have received the message that restricting foods is what’s best for your health in general. Especially with IBS, we are often forced to restrict foods to get the relief that we need from our IBS symptoms.
The truth though is more complicated because restricting nutrition too much can backfire our healing goals.
How Low FodMap Can Actually Make Your IBS Worse
I am so curious about other women’s experiences with the Low FODMAP diet, and how you’ve used it to help manage your IBS.
Who told you about Low FodMap and how was it explained to you? Or maybe you have never even heard of Low FODMAP before? This could be the first time you’ve heard of it at all!
I remember that my general doctor casually mentioned the Low FodMap diet to me in one of our appointments and told me that some people with IBS get relief by following the diet.
I had never heard of it and I was immediately ecstatic. This was one of the only suggestions I got from my general doctor around what I could do to help me feel better.
I bought a book on the subject and I did as much research as I could to figure out how to do the diet properly.
I am so thankful that at that time I did understand that the diet was an elimination diet and that there was a reintroduction phase as well. I got lucky enough to get the right information when there is so much misinformation about the Low FodMap diet.
I think a lot of women with IBS haven’t been guided at all around how the diet works or how it ideally should be used.
Maybe you just thought that you should eliminate all the FodMap foods from your diet. And you eliminated those foods and probably got some relief!
You thought that’s now how you were supposed to be living- Low FodMap forever!
But you don’t need to live this way and eat this way. You don’t need to obsess about excluding all FodMap foods from your diet.
Maybe there are some foods on that list that you will need to be more careful around for sure, but your goal should be to have as diverse a diet as possible for you. Diversity in your diet is unquestionably important for healing.
Restricting too many foods can backfire, making healing from IBS longer than it needs to be. Because our bodies are so complex and need such a wide variety of nutrition to function optimally, restricting foods could quite easily make healing harder.
When we don’t get enough good nutrition, our bodies suffer.
How to Reintroduce FodMap Foods for IBS Healing
Let’s imagine right now that you are restricting a lot of FodMap foods from your diet.
What can you do to start reintroducing those foods?
There’s no exact right or wrong way to re-introduce foods and I think it greatly depends upon your personality, your body, and the amount of fear that you have or don’t have around certain foods.
What I would recommend is to start thinking about the following:
- Think about the foods you really don’t think you are sensitive too and slowly introduce those first.
- Consider introducing foods first that are foods that you love but have cut out because you thought that you were supposed to.
- Go through the Low FODMAP list and choose a food to introduce every few days or every week that seems like it’s lower reactivity food.
- Go through the types of sugars list and choose to tackle one category at a time. Maybe you start with the “F” category and decide to reintroduce certain fructose foods first and see how they make you feel.
The important thing is to have a plan and to stick to it and to be mentally and emotionally prepared and open to trying new foods.
One thing that happened to me during this reintroduction phase was at times I felt terrified. Terrified of certain foods and the symptoms I anticipated them giving me.
I’m curious if that terror is going through your mind as well as I speak of this? If you have a lot of resistance to the idea of reintroducing certain foods?
If you do feel scared of introducing new foods to your diet, I felt the same. We’ll discuss on next week’s episode how you can manage better some of that food fear.
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