Latest / The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane / Do This If You Have IBS and Want to Lose Weight

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Do This If You Have IBS and Want to Lose Weight · The IBS Solution with Brooke Kane

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You'd think having chronic diarrhea would make you lose weight, but for women with IBS, it doesn't always work that way.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the first thing you have to do has nothing to do with diet, medications, or exercise.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a question I get asked all the time.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: If everything runs right through me, why can't I lose weight?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not a dumb question.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: If your food isn't sticking around long enough to digest, you'd think you'd be skin and bones.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, you stay the same weight, or maybe you're even gaining weight.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: But with IBS, your body isn't counting what's going in and what's coming out.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's asking one question over and over all day, every day, and that is, am I safe?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if the answer is no, nothing else really matters.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not what you eat, not how often you work out.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Your body is not going to let that extra weight go.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: So what does unsafe actually mean to your body?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever mapped out every bathroom before you leave the house, if you've ever sat in a meeting or on a plane doing the math on how long you can hold it, if you've ever canceled plans because you didn't trust your own gut not to embarrass you, your body has been running on that fear for years.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And your nervous system treats it as a real threat every single time it happens.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Your body has been bracing for an accident for so long it forgot how to do anything else.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And on top of that, there's what's actually happening inside of your gut as well.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Bacteria that shouldn't be there, fighting things out day after day, inflammation that never fully settles or calms.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system doesn't separate the fear of an accident from the inflammation that's causing it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Both register as the same thing: danger.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And once that alarm is going, your body stops caring about your weight altogether.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: It cares about staying alive.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Your cortisol climbs, your metabolism throttles down on purpose because your body thinks it might need to survive on whatever it's got stored up.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: So you end up with women who are eating almost nothing, who have spent years afraid to leave the house without knowing where the bathroom is, and they are still hanging on to water.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: They're still hanging on to inflammation and still hanging on to fat.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Their body isn't broken, it's doing exactly its job.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's protecting them from a threat that, as far as it knows, is very real.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that gets me every time, especially with the women I work with who are high achievers.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: The instinct when something isn't working is to push it harder, eat less, add another workout, more discipline, because discipline has worked for them everywhere else in their life.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I get it, but your nervous system doesn't take orders the way your career does.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when you cut your calories, you grind harder at the gym while your body already thinks it's under attack, you haven't fixed anything.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: You've added a second alarm on top of the first one.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And your body's response to two alarms is not to relax, it's to grip down even tighter, which means the harder you push, the more stuck you actually get.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I'd actually have you do.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's going to sound like it has nothing to do with weight at all.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Calm your body first, before the diet, before the workouts, calm needs to come first.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Think about a tree for a second.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: You don't force a tree to grow.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: You don't stand over it yelling at it to hurry up.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: You give it sunlight, water, soil, and once it has those things, it grows.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: You couldn't stop it if you tried to.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your body works exactly the same way.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Give it calm, give it safety, give it nutrients it can actually absorb, and it starts doing what it was built to do all along.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It lets go of the weight it's been protecting.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to force any of that.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to stop fighting it.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, what does that look like in real life?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you've spent years afraid of having an accident in public, someone telling you to just breathe and relax is gonna sound a little insulting.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I get that.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: So let me explain.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: That fear of accidents is feeding the exact problem you're trying to fix.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: The fear puts your nervous system on high alert.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: High alert keeps your gut inflamed.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: The inflammation makes another accident more likely, and another accident confirms the fear was right all along.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: So for my clients, breaking that starts with breath work, real breath work.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Every day, not something you do once when you're already panicking and then forget about it for a month.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: The whole point isn't relaxation for its own sake.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's interrupting that fear, inflammation, accident loop.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it also means dealing with how you talk to yourself about it, because beating yourself up over an accident or your weight or your symptoms sends your nervous system the exact same signal that the fear does.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: It tells your body that things are bad, you're not okay, the coast is not clear.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Your body will believe what you tell it.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: If this is the first time anyone's had an honest conversation with you about IBS, hit subscribe.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I put out a new video every week on exactly this kind of thing.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, once you actually start doing this, calming your body down on purpose, you're going to land in one of a few different places.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe within a couple weeks you're sleeping a little better, the bloating's easing up, that's your body telling you it's starting to trust the environment again.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Good.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Keep going because you're doing something right.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you do this consistently for weeks and nothing changes at all.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: If that's you, there's something physical still working against you underneath the surface.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: It could be bacterial overgrowth, low stomach acid, could be an enzyme issue, mold, something that breath work by itself is never going to touch.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's when testing matters because you cannot fix what you can't see.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe you feel calmer, but the diarrhea hasn't budged.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: That tells me that the gut itself is still feeding the stress response in a loop.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Calming your mind helps, but it won't hold for long if the thing keeping your gut inflamed is still sitting there untouched.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: If I were you, the one thing I would not skip is doing this every single day.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not the days you remember, not the days that are easy, every day.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Consistency is what actually convinces your body that this is real.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So tonight, before you do one more thing on your list, do five minutes of breath work.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Breathe in slowly through your nose, let your stomach rise, and then breathe out even slower than you breathed in.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Five minutes before you go to bed.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need a stricter diet right now.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need a harder workout.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: You need your body to believe that it's safe enough to let go of what it's holding on to.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've been to a doctor, been told that your lab results are normal, be sure to watch this video to see what normal really means.