If you’ve been diagnosed with IBS, or other digestive disorders, you’ve most likely been around the carousel of treatments searching for a cure. Sometimes there may be temporary relief, only to find symptoms flaring up from time to time. Things that work one week suddenly stop working the next, leaving you feeling frustrated and lost. As someone who used to suffer from IBS myself, I fully relate to the frustration.

The 3 main issues I found when trying to cure my IBS were:

1.The Conventional Approach Does Not Know What To Do

The NHS website admits defeat, stating:

‘It's usually a lifelong problem. It can be very frustrating to live with and can have a big impact on your everyday life. There's no cure, but diet changes and medicines can often help control the symptoms. The exact cause is unknown – it's been linked to things like food passing through your gut too quickly or too slowly, oversensitive nerves in your gut, stress and a family history of IBS’

2.Improving Diet May Help, But Will Not Completely Cure You

I personally found great relief learning how to eat a better diet, mainly concentrating on eating real fresh foods. However symptoms would still flare up from time to time. If, like me, you also found great relief learning to eat better, whenever you have a new IBS symptom you simply attribute the flare up to something you had eaten.

3.Healthy Eating Obsession - Orthorexia

It may seem innocent enough to link every IBS symptom to food, however all this does is create a terrible habit of constantly cutting out foods. What starts as relief through diet, suddenly becomes a healthy eating obsession, otherwise known as orthorexia. I tried gut cleanses, colonics, probiotics, supplements, acupuncture and hypnotherapy. Any new treatment would seem to work temporarily, but then the inevitable flare up would occur out of nowhere.

Mindbody Pain/TMS

Only when I discovered the mindbody community, did I realise the massive effect my mind was having on my IBS. Just like our palms may sweat or stomach may turn when we’re nervous, the body is regularly creating physical symptoms due to emotional stimuli. As it turned out, pain was being created in my body due to:

• Personality traits burying emotions

• Stress From the Past

• Stress In The Present Day

This type of pain was called Tensions Myositis Syndrome (TMS), by the well known pain doctor Dr John Sarno. If you’d like to know more about the proven science behind TMS, read this article.

Continue Working On Your Lifestyle, But Examine Other Areas Of Health

You don’t need to stop improving your lifestyle through holistic modalities, these things are great. However the reason they seem to ‘stop working’, is because they only represent one part of the 4 Components To Healing. There are four parts to healing the mind and body, all of which need to be attended to in order to heal. 

Restore Balance In The Brain To Heal IBS

When you overly focus on just the one component of health with diets and treatments, you end up going round in circles never fully healing. The key is to find as many ways as possible to calm down the nervous system and restore chemical balance in the brain. And focusing on all 4 components allows you to return to harmony.