Day Seventy Nine!!

Have you ever experienced an angry bowel? Oh my God, the pain! The name to that angry bowel feeling is Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), and that, is because it actually really feels like your bowel has become angry. 


Symptoms include; bloating, cramping and pain, constipation and sometimes diarrhea and some people flip flop between the two. Actually ten to fifteen percent of people suffer from it. IBS is caused by dysfunction of the immune and nervous systems that regulate the lining of the bowel, and the flow of fluids in and out of the intestines. If your intestines can’t absorb the fluids and your last meal moves too quickly from start to finish, that is the diarrhea. When your meal moves too slowly and your bowel absorbs too much fluid then that equals constipation. 


Serotonin is actually found primarily in your gut, and it is commonly known as the feel good hormone. People who suffer from IBS, have been shown to have abnormally low levels of serotonin, so that when these kinds of digestion problems arrive, people who have low levels of serotonin are more susceptible to feeling the pain. Generally speaking, stress can cause irritable bowls and the same stress can also cause depression, when brain serotonin levels are low.


Spastic colin and IBS can also be caused by hidden infections, because if your bowels are working sluggishly, the bacteria can be pushed from the large intestine into the small intestine, which causes the painful bowel symptoms. Yeast overgrowth in the gut is viewed as another cause, which means that avoiding sugar (which intern feeds yeast) is a way to overcome yeast overgrowth along with the use of probiotics. 


So eating food that helps calm the digestive process is important. So, eliminating foods that are high in fat such as fried foods, as well as alcohol, caffein, carbonated drinks, lactose, and anything that contains sugar is important to calm the angry bowel. 


One suggestion is to eat slowly and regularly to avoid overeating and starving. Being able to identify your trigger foods is really important as well. 


Peppermint intake is a suggestion for relaxing, smoothing and calming your digestive system, probiotics is another. These are intake suggestions to decrease inflammation as well as omega-3 and vitamin D. Adding foods to your diet that are high in fibre are also recommended as well as drinking a lot of water. 


I have noticed that when I don’t drink water, my bowls will tighten sharply, and it can be very painful. I also have noticed that the next morning I have problems getting rid of waste because everything feels dry. 


When my mom was a teenager she suffered from what my grandparents titled “wind” which is pain in the gut (not a lot of farting like I thought). Their home remedy for such gut pain was putting whisky in her tea. The whisky was to help relax the gut as well as the heat of the tea with milk. Not only did it not taste very good but it actually seemed to work, because by the time it would take to drink the horrible concoction the “wind” would have seemingly disappeared. The actual truth was, upon reflection, that she was eating a huge amount of sugar everyday as well as sugar from milk. Back then milk was a huge component of dietary intake everyday, especially coupled with not only chocolate flavouring but strawberry flavouring and vanilla breakfast shakes. After my mom moved out of the house, every single time she went back for dinners and celebrations coincidentally ,so would the IBS.


I also had a friend who loved drinking coke. He was a coke-aholic. He actually got up to drinking a case of coke a day and eventually he started to develop gut pain, so much so, that he ended up at the hospital. He had absolutely no idea why, until the doctor pointed out to him that he was drinking not only a huge amount of salt everyday, a huge amount of carbonation everyday, a huge amount of sugar everyday, as well as a huge amount of caffein everyday, on top of his coffee consumption. Changing his diet, stopped the gut pain.


Bottom line, there are triggers that can set off our digestive system into spasming, and we need to pay attention to what they might be, as well as paying attention to our stress levels, so that we don’t continue to stress our digestive symptoms to the point of being in so much pain that we can’t even function.