Elemental Dieting Resolves Chronic IBS

Intro:

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DrMichaelRuscio:

I’m here with Kacheena, who has been able to improve her health, thankfully, because if you’ve been suffering with health stuff like I had at one point and like Kacheena had at one point, it’s so nice to be able to improve your symptoms. She is here today to kind of share her story with us. So thank you so much for the willingness to be open and use your story to help give other people hope and hopefully some instruction for how they can navigate through not feeling well.

Kacheena:

Of course. Yeah. I’m glad to be here because it’s been a long road, honestly.

Where it Started

Kacheena:

Yeah. The road often is. Tell us a little bit about the road. What were your symptoms? What were maybe some of the things you had tried prior, or doctors you had seen?

Kacheena:

So I’ve never really seen a doctor. When I was 18, I went into massage school and while I was in massage school, we had, I can’t remember exactly what the class was called, it’s been a long time ago, but, he was a chiropractor and I think it was called Touch for Health. I hadn’t had any kind of gut problems and I think this started with some food poisoning because one day I went into class and I couldn’t even get out of my chair. So I would lay down in the back of the class and listen to this chiropractor and he’s was like, what is going on with you? I said, I don’t know. So he started, muscle testing me for different foods.

DrMR:

So I really quick was this because of digestive symptoms, you were having? Bloating, pain?

Kacheena:

Major bloating, terrible, terrible pain. I’ve never experienced that before. It was just awful. So he did some manual muscle testing and asking my body what was going on. He found through that, that onions and garlic were kind of a culprit and that orange juice was terrible. I haven’t had orange juice since, well, I shouldn’t say that. I’ve tried it a couple of times and it just tears me up. I can’t drink it. It hurts my stomach. I get bloated, pain, stuff like that. So that was when I was 18. He just kind of mentioned that I might have some irritable bowel syndrome stuff, but I’ve never actually been formally diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. So I’ve just been living with all this stuff, basically my whole life. Just kind of saying, okay, do I stay away from garlic?

Kacheena:

Do I stay away from onions? It’s just been this process and I’m 46 now. So over half of my life I’ve been having these issues. Probably about five or six years ago, I ran across some leaky gut stuff that Dr. Axe was doing. So I started taking some probiotics of his. It helped, but it wasn’t a cure. I was really hoping that I would find something where I would just be done. I would be done with doing all these, having all these horrible pains. So I started doing probiotics. I never did go to the doctor for it because I didn’t know what they could do for me anyway. I had always heard that IBS was something that you kind of had to live with. The other thing is that I had also heard that, antibiotics are so hard on the gut and I didn’t really want to do that, you know, for these other things.

Elemental Heal

Kacheena:

So I have been just going my own way. I haven’t really done anything for it beause I just didn’t know what to do. Then probably about two years ago, I had seen you on the Digestion SOS with Shivan and you were talking about the Elemental Heal and I just thought, that’s interesting. You know, I’ll have to kind of give that some thought. Then last summer, when I would start my menstrual cycle, my cramping would actually flare up my IBS so bad that I looked like I was about five months pregnant and was just having terrible pains and all these things. I would actually have to miss it at least one day of work because it was just so terrible. I just thought, you know what, I’m going to give your stuff a try. So I did. I used it for, I think the first 14 days I was supplementing the chocolate one for just one meal.

DrMR:

Did you do 14 days exclusive or were you kind of doing some whole foods in there also?

Kacheena:

I was still eating. I was just supplementing the Elemental Heal for my breakfast. So I did it 14 days in a row and I started feeling a little bit better and I just thought, okay, well, we’ll see how this goes. The next month I started the Elemental Heal before I started my menstrual cycle and I was like, Oh my gosh, I’m having my own cramping, but it wasn’t flaring up my IBS at all. So I did that for the next couple of months and it stopped. I was at the point, honestly, that I went to my gynecologist and said, you need to give me a hysterectomy because I can not take this anymore. Then I started doing your Elemental Heal and my gynecologist ran into me in the hospital probably like a month or two later and he says, hey, I haven’t seen you, are we still on for that? What do you want to do? And I said, you know what? I have to tell you, I got my gut back on track and I haven’t had those terrible pains so no, I’m not taking that out.

DrMR:

Awesome. Awesome. Anytime we can save someone from a surgery, that is, of course, a huge win. Then also the day-to-day quality of life improvement that you’ll see by not having these symptoms interfering with things obviously another huge win. A couple of things just to kind of touch on there from your history. Food poisoning is known for being an initiating factor in IBS. That’s something that was really one of the most novel findings from Dr. Pimintel at Cedars. So we know that’s one factor that can kind of tip you over into IBSs. Then you do the right thing to try to repair your gut or get the microbiota back to balance or help with inflammatio , there are multiple mechanisms that will likely rectify once your symptoms improve, which is why I look at symptoms as such a chief aim.

DrMR:

So in this case, we had the first domino that fell the IBSs, which again, we know what that the food poisoning can lead to IBS. Also something else that you said is such a common observation that I even wrote about it in Healthy Gut, Healthy You, which is a book dedicated to gut health, but there’s this tangental section on female hormones. So often there’s this interplay and this bi-directional feedback between the gut and the female hormones and vice versa. You’ll often see exactly what you described, which is some of these pre-menstrual pains or swelling that tend to get better when someone improves their gut health and does nothing else. Now, there are some herbs like our estro harmony and progess harmony that can help if a woman only sees partial improvement in those female hormone symptoms and needs another little push. Your case is a beautiful example of how, again, always thinking through things in this kind of pyramid model, where we start with the most foundational layers, give the body some time and then reassess.

Ways to Use Elemental Heal

DrMR:

So in your case, there wasn’t a need to layer in additional supports. It seems like the Elemental Heal was enough to starve, what I’m assuming was some kind of bacterial overgrowth or imbalance, potentially also a fungal overgrowth and imbalance likely some inflammation. That inflammation makes you hypersensitive to gas pressure, that all causes this feeling of bloating and pain. So it’s just fantastic to see how a simple intervention of the Elemental Diet was really able to move the needle for you. There’s something else there that I think is really worth repeating, which is you only used it to replace breakfast. This touches on another concept that I’ve tried to share with our audience repeatedly, which is we want to be, evidence-based and look to the science. Yes. But not evidence limited meaning if the Elemental Diet, let’s say for IBS has been in the application of two weeks of your only nutrition, meaning it’s exclusively liquid, it doesn’t mean that’s the only way that we can use it. It just means that researchers used it this way in this application and they documented improvements. But a clinician can modify it and loosen up some of those boundaries so as to make it more doable outside of a research setting. So in your case, I’m assuming it would have been a much harder sell if we said two weeks, nothing but liquid nutrition. But if we said, hey, why don’t you replace breakfast with a shake, that is much more doable. In your case, that was enough to get you devoid of symptoms. I’m really glad that you found that information regarding elemental dieting, because I’m sure you would agree much easier to get you over the hump to replace breakfast than replacing all of your food.

Kacheena:

I totally agree. Honestly, I was at the point that I was going to have surgery. That’s how terrible it was. I couldn’t function. So once I found that it seriously changed my life. I’m so, so grateful that you’ve come up with this product. In fac, I’m drinking on this morning. So I usually try to drink it twice at least twice a week, just to kind of help me, you know, maintain some stuff. So either two or three times a week, I drink this Elemental Heal.

DrMR:

Awesome. Yeah. I mean, it’s just wonderful for me to hear. Again, as someone who had really bad fatigue, mood dips and food reactive brain fog way back when just knowing how a day you could be feeling great and then all of a sudden you feel terrible and how no amount of money can be assigned to the value of getting out of feeling terrible and just being able to feel normal. So I’m obviously thrilled that you’re feeling so much better. And some of the details of your case, I think are really good lessons for our audience to learn from. We don’t have to be dogmatic or super strict in how we use Elemental Heal and remember the connection between female hormones and your gut health. That’s a good place to start with your gut. Sometimes you just need some additional support. But you’re a great example of how just getting that inflammation down, likely improved both some of the pain associated with your sensitivity that can occur as your hormones skew, but also the bacteria in the gut help to detoxify estrogens. So that’s another mechanism by which multifold improvements can be experienced just by rectifying and balancing your gut health. So just a fantastic story. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to share with people as we kind of move to a close?

Episode Wrap-Up

Kacheena:

You know, if you think that you should try it, just give it a try. I was at that point, I was so desperate. I mean, what did I have to lose? I had nothing to lose. Oh, and the other thing I do take that I really have enjoyed is your other product, the Intestinal Repair formula. That’s I think that’s been helpful as well.

SponsoredResources:

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DrMR:

Now, did you layer that in afterwards or was there a kind of sequencing? First Elemental Heal and then you started with the intestinal?

Kacheena:

Nope. I actually got both of them. I read up on your Intestinal Repair Formula and just thought, you know what, I’m just going to try both of them and see how it works. So I take the Intestinal Repair Formula in the morning every day and then, like I said, I drink the shakes like two to three times a week. Then when I’m really stressed out, I usually try to drink more of the Elemental Heal just because I’m hoping that that will help too, with all my stressing out and my gut and things like that.

DrMR:

So, perfect. Perfect. Another important concept there, which is sometimes with issues that are internal, we tend to beat ourselves up more psychologically if we have a flare. Like something’s wrong with me, oh my goodness. I always like to parallel this to something like an ankle sprain, where if you were overdoing it after you sprained your ankle and you had a little bit of soreness, you would take it a little bit easy and you wouldn’t really think, Oh my God, something is deeply wrong with me. For some reason, these gut issues, and maybe because they’re truly at the core of us, they tend to mess with people’s minds a little bit. But I just think it’s really worth repeating that if you’re stressed or maybe if you’re traveling or eating some bad food, it’s not abnormal to feel like things regress a little bit. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong or broken. So we should all be careful not to frame it as such. Just knowing a simple therapy you can do to improve your status, like using more Elemental Heal is almost like taking some time off the ankle or doing some mobility work or what have you. So it doesn’t mean anything is wrong or broken. We’re just learning how to optimize your system and how to offset for some of the knocks that life can give you when you get off of kind of your ideal routine.

Kacheena:

Completely agree.

DrMR:

Awesome. Well, great stuff. Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to hear that you’re feeling so much better. So just, uh, awesome stuff all around.

Kacheena:

Thank you so much for creating that. I really appreciate it.

DrMR:

You’re very welcome.

Kacheena:

All right. Take care.

Outro:

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