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How to Stop Morning Diarrhea · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: If you have to wake up an hour early just so you can finish having diarrhea before you leave the house, we need to talk.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about being somebody who likes to poop in the morning.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about going once, thinking you're done, going again 20 minutes later, eating breakfast, then suddenly needing a bathroom a third, fourth, fifth, tenth time.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Your morning is consumed by bathroom visits.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: When this happens, you start waking up earlier, skip breakfast, move your coffee around, take a modium before you go to work, you stop scheduling anything before 11 a.m., and eventually your entire morning is built around your bowels.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's not managing IBS.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Your IBS is managing you.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Brooke Kane, registered nurse and functional medicine practitioner, and I specialize in helping women get rid of chronic urgent diarrhea.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to show you what I would change first, what your morning pattern can tell me, and the point where I would stop tinkering with breakfast and start looking much deeper.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because the goal is not to build a better morning around diarrhea.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: The goal is to stop having diarrhea ruin your mornings.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you told me your diarrhea is terrible every morning, the first thing I would ask is when does the first episode happen?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Before you eat, after breakfast, after coffee, the moment you wake up before your feet even hit the floor.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Most women are trying to fix the whole morning at once.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know exactly where it breaks.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you wake up and have urgent, watery diarrhea before you have even eaten or you drank anything, I'm not blaming breakfast.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Food is not even in the picture yet.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you wake up feeling okay and then breakfast sends you running, now I care much more about what eating is triggering.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're fine until the first cup of coffee, that gives me another clue.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Those three patterns are different.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So before you start changing 10 different things, figure out which one you actually have.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there is one morning pattern I pay even more attention to because if that keeps happening no matter what you change, I stop thinking this is a morning routine problem at all.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get to that in a minute.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where people get confused.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Your colon naturally becomes more active when you wake up.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's normal.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's one reason healthy people often have a bowel movement in the morning.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a huge difference between having one bowel movement and spending the first two to three hours of your day emptying your bowels over and over again.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when somebody says, well, everyone poops in the morning, I don't really care.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody does not have four to ten episodes of watery diarrhea before they can safely get in the car.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that your colon becomes more active in the morning explains part of the timing.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: It does not explain why that normal morning increase has turned into an emergency.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's the question that I want answered.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then we start stacking things on top of an already active colon.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Coffee is a big one.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know people love their coffee.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to tell you coffee's bad or that everybody with IBS needs to give it up forever.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: But if you already know the first few sips send you running to the bathroom every morning, stop drinking it at 6.30 and then acting surprised at 6.35.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: For some people, coffee stimulates the bowel.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So your colon's already naturally more active because you just woke up and then you pour something on top of that that can stimulate it even more.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: For the next week, move your coffee out a little later, that's it.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Don't change breakfast, supplements, five foods, your whole schedule at the same time.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just move coffee a little bit later and watch what happens.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: If the first part of your morning changes dramatically, that's good to know.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: If absolutely nothing changes and you're still having watery diarrhea before coffee ever touches your lips, that's also useful.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, you learned something about the pattern.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't care about banning coffee.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: I care about figuring out what is making your gut so easy to set off.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And breakfast can tell us something else.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is where I'm probably going to irritate some people.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you already have chronic urgent diarrhea, I would not start my morning by throwing a giant load of fiber at your gut.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I would not do a huge bowl of oatmeal.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I would not make a smoothie with spinach, chia seeds, flax, greens, powder, fiber powder, and everything else the internet told you was gut healthy.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I definitely would not assume that a bowel already emptying too fast just needs more fiber or roughage.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I see women do this all the time.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying so hard to eat healthy that breakfast has become one of the hardest meals their gut has to deal with.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Then they get diarrhea and they conclude great, now I can't tolerate healthy food either.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's not the lesson.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe your gut is already irritated, moving too fast, or struggling with digestion, and a giant high fiber breakfast is simply pouring more work onto a system that's already overwhelmed.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: So for a while, make breakfast simpler.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: Eggs, animal protein, maybe a little bit of fruit if you can tolerate it.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Something simple, uncomplicated, and a little easier to digest.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying you need to eat that way forever, but I am saying stop trying to prove how healthy your breakfast is while your gut is begging you to make things easier.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if higher fat breakfasts are what really set you off, now the pattern is changing again.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say you're relatively okay until you eat something higher in fat eggs, bacon, butter, avocado, a richer breakfast, then suddenly you have watery urgent diarrhea.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now bile moves higher on my list.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Bile is supposed to help you digest fat, but if too much bile reaches the colon, it can irritate the bowel, pull in water, and create the kind of diarrhea where you have almost no warning.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if all of this got worse after your gallbladder was removed, I care about that even more.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because now I have a much more useful pattern.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Morning, food, fat, watery urgency.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: That tells me more than my IBS is bad in the morning.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the shift I want you to make throughout this whole video.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: The morning is giving you clues.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Stop throwing them away by calling everything IBS.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Once you start seeing the pattern, you can separate something that is simply making mornings worse from something that may be part of why you have the diarrhea in the first place.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where most of the women that I work with have gotten stuck.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you've spent years waking up earlier, skipping breakfast, taking a modium, and refusing to leave the house until your gut finally settles down, there's a link below to learn more about working with me.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the people who come to me have already tried to manage this every possible way and they still plan the first few hours of every day around a bathroom.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: I want to figure out why the diarrhea keeps happening.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: If that's where you are, check the link below because there are two coping strategies I see constantly that make women feel like they've solved the problem when they have really just gotten good at working around it.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of women figure this one out on their own.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: If I don't eat, maybe I won't poop.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it works.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I talk to women all the time who tell me that the only time they feel okay is when they don't eat.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: So now you don't eat before work, you don't eat before a doctor appointment, you definitely don't eat before getting on an airplane, and if you have to drive somewhere an hour away, you're not eating until you're done.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: I understand why you do it, but think about what we're calling the solution here.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: The only way you can trust your digestive system is if you don't put anything into it.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's insane.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: And yet women live like this for years because nobody has given them a better answer than that.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Skipping breakfast may help you get through Tuesday morning.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: It does not explain why breakfast became dangerous for you in the first place.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm fine with temporary strategies when you need them.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not fine with turning those strategies into your whole life.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the same thing happens with Imodium.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: I am not anti-imodium.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you have to get on a plane and Imodium lets you take the trip without spending the entire flight terrified of the bathroom, just use it.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can't leave your house in the morning without taking it first, I want you to understand what that means.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: You have found a way to slow the diarrhea down.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: You have not necessarily changed what is causing it.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how women get stuck for years.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Waking up earlier, don't eat, take imodium, wait, finally leave, then do it all again tomorrow.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: At some point, I want to stop asking how do we get you safely out the door by 8 a.m.?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to ask, why does your gut need this much management just to get through a normal morning?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And now we get to the pattern that I mentioned earlier.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: If your diarrhea is already happening before breakfast, survives moving the coffee, survives simplifying what you eat, and keeps showing up three, four, five, ten times every morning anyway, I stop tinkering with your morning because now we've learned something important.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Coffee may make it worse, breakfast may make it worse, fiber may make it worse, but they're not enough to explain why your bowel is already an overdrive before any of that happens.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's when I start looking even deeper.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Could bile be involved?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Could there be inflammation?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: What do your short chain fatty acids look like?
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Are you eliminating toxins or are they recirculating in your bowels?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is the bacterial environment badly disrupted?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is digestion working properly at all?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is there something else in the gut keeping the whole system too reactive?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there are several of those layers happening all at once.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: That is when I want a more comprehensive and advanced test so I can see what is actually happening with things like inflammation, digestion, bile, bacterial environment, instead of guessing from your symptoms alone.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to guess at the answer yourself.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: You just need to stop ignoring the clues that tell us where to look.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: There is one more layer here, especially if mornings have been a disaster for years.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: You wake up and before your feet hit the floor, you're already wondering, am I going to have diarrhea today?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it already hit you.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then you feel the first little cramp or gurgle.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now you're watching the clock, you have 45 minutes before you have to leave.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Your body remembers exactly what happened yesterday morning, and the morning before that, and the morning before that.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So now you're not only dealing with whatever is happening in the gut, you also have a nervous system that has learned mourning means danger.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be really clear here because women with IBS get told constantly that this is just stress or it's anxiety and they need to quit thinking about it.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: No, you can have a very real gut problem and a nervous system that has spent years bracing for the consequences of that gut problem.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: These two things can feed each other.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, I work on the nervous system too, but I do not use nervous system work as an excuse to stop investigating the gut.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot breathe your way out of a bile problem.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot meditate your way out of a candida overgrowth or a parasite.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you also can't ignore years of panic around the bathroom and pretend the nervous system isn't playing a role here.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: I want both pieces to be addressed.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow morning, do one thing differently.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Observe before you intervene.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Before you change breakfast, before you take five supplements, before you decide that coffee is evil, notice when the diarrhea actually starts.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Did it happen before food?
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: What happened after coffee?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: What happened after breakfast?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Did fat clearly make things worse?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: How many times did you actually go before you could leave the house?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And what did the stool look like?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Give yourself a few mornings of actual information instead of changing five variables every day and then having no idea what helped.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: If coffee is clearly adding fuel, then just move it later.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: If your giant high fiber breakfast is making things worse, simplify it.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: If fat reliably triggers watery diarrhea, then take note of that.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're still having repeated diarrhea before food, before coffee, with coffee, no matter what you move around, stop trying to perfect your morning routine.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's when I want a deeper investigation because now the question is no longer what should I do differently tomorrow morning?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: The question is, what is happening inside my gut that keeps creating the same morning no matter what I do?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: That is the question that can actually move you forward.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: If emodium is one of the ways you get through mornings like this, watch this video next.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'll show you when imodium actually makes sense, the point where people start relying on it too much, and why daily use can keep you stuck managing diarrhea instead of figuring out why it's happening in the first place.