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Living With SIBO: What Actually Helped Me Manage It | Shivan Sarna · The Shivan Show with Shivan Sarna

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  I had so much brain fog one day I couldn't speak.
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  I really was scared of food.
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  I think this is going
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  to be cured in the next couple of years, frankly.
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  We've been really keeping up with the research.
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  I did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of testing.
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  There are answers.
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  There is hope.
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  I'm glad we found each other.
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  Welcome to The Siobhan Show.
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  Hi, I'm Siobhan Sarna.
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  We're
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  talking about health, wealth, and wisdom in this podcast slash show.
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  My main topic that I talk
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  about like weekly is SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
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  The first couple of
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  episodes here at the Siobhan Show, Health, Wealth, Wisdom, were with Dr. Allison Seebecker, who is my
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  main colleague when it comes to this topic.
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  She was my doctor.
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  We became friends.
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  We've done tons
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  of projects together.
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  We actively do coaching for people with SIBO.
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  We have done courses.
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  She has a
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  ProCourse to help professionals.
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  So like I'm very enmeshed in this area of SIBO.
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  It goes like this.
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  You can get food poisoning and then you get post-infectious IBS and then you can get SIBO.
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  Anytime your motility is impaired from the migrating motor complex being impaired,
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  which is a sweeping motion in the small intestine, you could potentially be getting SIBO,
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  small intestinal bacterial ovaries.
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  You see that like name is quite literal.
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  We run a monthly
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  membership, you get the idea.
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  Within that, people send in their questions.
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  Someone just asked,
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  so Siobhan, how do you live with SIBO?
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  And what's your story?
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  How did this all happen to you?
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  So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to share it with you because I want you to know
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  that there's a lot of hope out there, a lot more than when I first discovered that I had SIBO
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  in 2015-16.
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  But I had had it probably since I was five.
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  Here's how it goes.
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  Grew up in New York City
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  and I went on a trip with my family, probably around seven or eight to India, and I got food
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  poisoning.
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  I remember being sick, but what I really remember is going to the American embassy
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  and my mother being so happy I was eating.
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  There was like a box of like, you know, sugary cereal
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  and some milk.
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  I had been only consuming water buffalo milk at the family's house, my Indian
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  family's house, and it just did not sit right with me.
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  Was that what gave me food poisoning?
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  I don't
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  know.
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  Fast forward.
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  I get home to New York City and my dad, who was 30 years older than my mother
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  and from India, asks my mom, like, is Siobhan going to the bathroom regularly?
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  Which that was
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  the first time I'd ever had like body shame in my brain.
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  I'm like, that's none of your beeswax.
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  Like back off, you know, like I don't want you in my business.
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  But I remember him asking her that.
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  And mom was like, hmm, let me think about that kind of situation.
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  But that was sort of my first memory.
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  She also had this saying up on the bathroom wall, and it was from Pearl S. Buck.
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  And it said, if you love something, let it go.
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  If it comes back to you, it's yours.
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  If it doesn't, it never was.
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  You know when you're little and you learn how to read and then like you learn how to
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  memorize?
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  That was like one of the first things I ever memorized.
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  because I was constantly in the powder room all the time because I was constipated.
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  I don't want
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  to go to the doctor.
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  I'll just do some fiber.
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  Did that.
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  Made me worse.
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  I'll have some apples.
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  Apple a day keeps the doctor away.
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  I'll never forget that.
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  I literally ate an apple.
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  I was
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  like, well, I'm hungry.
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  I'm going to go have an apple.
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  It keeps the doctors away.
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  And I was on
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  the floor just writhing in pain.
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  Those are some of my first food things where I'm like, apples,
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  no pizza my favorite no garlic in sauces no raw vegetables not great uh salad salads are supposed
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  to be good for you no more fiber supplement no this one's supposed to be easy on the gut
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  no the food choices just became smaller and smaller and smaller where i was not eating a lot
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  of food or if I was eating like a reasonable amount of choices and variety, I paid.
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  Like I
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  paid dearly with discomfort up in the middle of the night in so much pain.
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  I have a friend who's
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  a cardiologist.
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  At some point I thought I was having a heart attack.
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  He calls them fart attacks.
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  Really nice.
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  The thing is, is that this is all like done behind closed doors.
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  No one's out there
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  talking about it to their people necessarily.
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  And I went to my nail tech for two years,
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  religiously every two weeks because I was selling jewelry on HSN.
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  And I never mentioned it to her.
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  And then we finally started talking about health as one does with their nail tech friends.
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  And
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  she was like, oh my gosh, like I have this, this and this.
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  And I'm like, oh my gosh, I have this,
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  this and this.
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  I could have been talking to her about it the whole time and helping each other.
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  So I do want to encourage people to talk about it more.
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  And I do think that's happening with social media.
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  But remove all the shame from it.
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  We're all physical in physical forms.
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  We all have bodies and there's nothing to be ashamed of.
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  And colon cancer is on the rise.
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  And SIBO has a lot of underlying causes and it causes other things.
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  Restless leg, rosacea, just all kinds of other discomfort.
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  Is that a word?
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  Uncomfortable conditions.
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  and some of them are more serious, like malnutrition, weird B12 levels, weird iron levels,
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  ferritin in particular, and it's impacted by hormones.
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  Your mortality is just on and on and
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  on, obviously, but it's not that obvious.
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  Like if this isn't your wheelhouse, if you haven't been
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  thinking about this for a long time, you're just kind of stumbling into this whole thing right now.
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  I just want you to know you're not alone and there are a lot of people that can help now.
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  When I was first looking for someone, I went to, not an order of importance,
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  Ayurvedic practitioner, acupuncturist, reflexologist.
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  For my fibromyalgia-like symptoms, I went to like an orthopedist and got cortisone shots.
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  I had so much brain fog.
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  One day I couldn't speak.
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  Like I literally had the thing in my head and it couldn't come out of my mouth.
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  And that was also where I was in heavy mold exposure at the same time.
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  So that was a combination.
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  I took a nap and was fine, but like that was seriously toxic.
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  I asked my trainer, like I would lift up my shirt to show my tummy and I'd be like, do
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  you know what this is?
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  Like, why am I so bloated?
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  I'm skinny, but this is, I don't know.
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  You know, my regular practitioner, one gastroenterologist, Dr. Ron Three Miles, as seen in Healing Seba,
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  my book.
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  And finally, I got with the proper gastroenterologist who helped me start the journey.
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  And then Dr. Allison Seebecker's appointments opened up and I was able to book a whole bunch with her.
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  So between the two of them, like we got started.
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  And what Dr. Schulman in Largo, Florida, said to me when I walked in with like studies and all of that, he was like, oh, great, perfect.
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  Yeah, they don't teach this in school.
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  You see, that's the right attitude you want to have from a practitioner, unless they've studied with Dr. Seebecker, taken her pro course, or taken some of her courses at NUNM, where she teaches at this big naturopathic college in Portland.
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  You want someone who's open to be educated or staying up to date with the studies.
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  You can go to PubMed, right?
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  You can watch the Pimentel, Dr. Pimentel videos on SIBO SOS and SIBOinfo.com and on our YouTube
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  channels.
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  It's also really easy to be overwhelmed.
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  It also leads to brain fog and anxiety.
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  So I see a hypervigilance.
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  I'm speaking about me.
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  I had such severe hypervigilance around this condition, a lot because of the food.
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  Like, I really was scared of food.
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  And I'm like, do I have an eating disorder?
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  Like, is that the term?
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  No, I didn't.
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  But I was really reactive to food.
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  So, of course, I did the food sensitivity testing.
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  I did the food allergy testing.
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  I did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of testing.
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  and it came back that I was sensitive to the foods I was eating the most.
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  At that point,
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  it was like carrots.
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  Oh, do I have celiac disease?
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  No.
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  Am I gluten sensitive?
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  Yeah, probably.
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  But
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  do I have leaky gut?
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  You go down these rabbit holes.
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  Once I got into it in the, you know,
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  2015, 16, 17, I was getting so much more support though, because Dr. Seebecker was my doctor
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  and she started working with me on these projects like the SIBO SOS Summit 1 and 2,
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  I was definitely getting better.
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  Oh my gosh, it was so much better.
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  Oh my gosh.
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  So I just want to say I have the underlying cause for SIBO.
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  I have two or three of them
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  that are not immediately fixed.
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  So I have the antibody from food poisoning that leads to an
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  impairment of that migrating motor complex.
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  I have Ehlers-Danlos, which is a collagen disorder,
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  which is in my case fortunately mild.
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  Can you do this?
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  Can you take your thumb and touch
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  your forearm like that?
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  It's actually good that I can't get it down there.
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  Oh there it goes.
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  It's a
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  laxity in the soft tissue of the body that can lead to displacement of your organs kind of like
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  a prolapse depending on the severity and then that can literally move the organs in such a way that
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  the migrating motor complex is impaired.
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  Like endometriosis, you could have tissue moved from
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  the other endometriosis tissue that could impair the migrating motor complex, also known as MMC.
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  And I've had severe mold exposure for a very long time working in the television studio that
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  is moldy, as I talked about on the previous episodes.
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  And I have old Lyme, and that reactivated
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  the Epstein-Barr virus, and I'm postmenopausal.
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  So I've got like all these fun factors.
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  And I also feel better than I've felt in decades because a managed chronic condition can make you feel 100% better than when it's unmanaged.
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  For those of you who are like, oh man, I want all my tests to be negative.
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  I don't want anything to be wrong with me.
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  Well, unless you're still 20 years old with no mold exposure and super strong genetics and you're eating well and you're exercising and all that, that's probably not realistic.
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  We're on a planet that has stuff in it and plastics in our stuff and that stuff's in your stuff.
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  And I just want to kind of encourage you that if you're feeling dragged down and discouraged,
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  when you manage it with a prokinetic and with certain treatments and you rebuild your terrain,
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  which by its very nature gets rebuilt when you reduce the overgrowth, which is hugely important,
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  and a lot of people are not talking about that, then you can feel pretty good.
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  Pretty darn good.
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  I feel great.
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  This has been a lot of work, a lot of discovery, but it's not that complicated.
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  Now,
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  if you have a bunch of things going on, you have slow gastric emptying, you have all the things I
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  just listed, and then you're still in mold, and you have scleroderma or some other scenarios,
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  Parkinson's, alcoholism, opioid use, then it's really a multiple set of perfect storms.
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  But if you're in a situation where a couple of things are going on and I'm resolving those or
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  I'm addressing them, or at the very least I'm on the prokinetic, I'm helping my migrating motor
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  complex work, and I'm working on reducing the overgrowth, and I'm using digestive enzymes,
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  and I'm expanding my diet because that is the ultimate goal, right, for nutritional
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  support and also microbiome diversity, chances are you're doing pretty well.
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  It mimics other
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  things.
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  So it could be candida.
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  It could be parasites.
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  You could have all three.
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  You really need to be your own detective to a certain extent.
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  And that's what Dr. Seebecker
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  and I help you do.
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  There are promising treatments coming from Cedars-Sinai MAST program, Dr.
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  Pimentel, Dr. Rezaei.
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  I think this is going to be cured in the next couple of years, frankly.
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  We've had him on podcasts and interview him a couple of times a year, Dr. Pimentel, bless you, sir, since 2017.
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  So we've been really keeping up with the research, and it is very, very helpful.
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  But in the meantime, let's get you better.
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  Let's get you eating more.
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  Let's get you what I call spinning the plate.
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  The different variations in food that you so richly deserve and that you're not vetoing everything.
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  You're not bringing your own container of food to family picnics and barbecues and Thanksgiving, whatever holiday at the end of the year you celebrate.
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  And if you need to do that, do it.
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  Cool.
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  Do you.
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  There's a resilience that is needed as a SIBO patient.
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  And I just want to encourage you to hang in there.
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  There are answers.
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  There is hope.
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  I hope you don't have SIBO.
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  But if you do, I'm glad we found each other.
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  That's it for now from me and Sadie signing off.
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  So that's a wrap on today's episode.
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  Thank you so much for being here.
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  It genuinely means everything to me.
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  If something in this conversation
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  sparked something for you,
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  share it with a woman or a guy in your life
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  who needs to hear it.
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  That's how this show grows.
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  That's how we heal the planet together.
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  And that's how we really connect.
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  For more resources, free tools,
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  and everything we talked about today,
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  head over to SiobhanSarna.com.
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  That's S-H-I-V-A-N-S-A-R-N-A.com.
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  It's all there waiting for you.
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  And until next time, keep asking the questions, keep finding the answers.
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  You deserve the full picture and the very best.
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  Namaste.