Suffered With SIBO for Decades! Here’s what Helped Me Manage My Symptoms

Shivan Sarna (0:00 – 2:19)

I had so much brain fog one day I couldn’t speak. I really was scared of food. I think this is going to be cured in the next couple of years, frankly.

We’ve been really keeping up with the research. I did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of testing. There are answers.

There is hope. I’m glad we found each other. Welcome to The Shivan Show.

Hi, I’m Shivan Sarna. We’re talking about health, wealth, and wisdom in this podcast slash show. My main topic that I talk about weekly is SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.

The first couple of episodes here at The Shivan Show, health, wealth, wisdom, were with Dr. Allison Siebecker, who is my main colleague when it comes to this topic. She was my doctor. We became friends.

We’ve done tons of projects together. We actively do coaching for people with SIBO. We have done courses.

She has a Pro Course to help professionals. I’m very enmeshed in this area of SIBO. It goes like this.

You can get food poisoning, and then you get post-infectious IBS, and then you can get SIBO. Anytime your motility is impaired from the migrating motor complex being impaired, which is a sweeping motion in the small intestine, you could potentially be getting SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. You see that name is quite literal.

We run a monthly membership. You get the idea. Within that, people send in their questions.

Someone just asked, so Shivan, how do you live with SIBO, and what’s your story? How did this all happen to you? So I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to share it with you because I want you to know that there’s a lot of hope out there, a lot more than when I first discovered that I had SIBO in 2015-16, but I had had it probably since I was five.

Here’s how it goes. Grew up in New York City, and I went on a trip with my family probably around seven or eight to India, and I got food poisoning. I remember being sick, but what I really remember is going to the American embassy and my mother being so happy I was eating.

There was like a box of like, you know, sugary cereal and some milk. I had been only consuming water buffalo milk at the family’s house, my Indian family’s house, and it just did not sit right with me. Was that what gave me food poisoning?

I don’t know.

(2:19 – 4:26)

Fast forward. I get home to New York City, and my dad, who was 30 years older than my mother and from India, asks my mom, like, does Shivan go into the bathroom regularly?

Which, that was the first time I’d ever had like body shame. In my brain, I’m like, that’s none of your beeswax, like back off, you know, like, I don’t want you in my business. But I remember him asking her that, and mom was like, hmm, let me think about that kind of situation.

But that was sort of my first memory. She also had this saying on the bathroom wall, and it was from Pearl S. Buck, and it said, if you love something, let it go.

If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was. But you know, when you’re little and you learn how to read, and then like, you learn how to memorize, that was like one of the first things I ever memorized, was constantly staring on it, because I was constantly in the powder room all the time, because I was constipated.

I don’t want to go to the doctor. I’ll just do some fiber. Did that.

Made me worse. I’ll have some apples. Apple a day keeps the doctor away.

I’ll never forget that. I literally ate an apple. I was like, I’m hungry.

I’m going to go have an apple. It keeps the doctors away. And I was on the floor just writhing in pain.

Those are some of my first food things where I’m like, apples? No. Pizza?

My favorite. No. Garlic in sauces?

No. Raw vegetables? Not great.

Salads? Salads are supposed to be good for you. No.

More fiber supplement? No. This one’s supposed to be easy on the gut?

No. The food choices just became smaller and smaller and where I was not eating a lot of food, or if I was eating a reasonable amount of choices and variety, I paid. I paid dearly with discomfort, up in the middle of the night in so much pain.

I have a friend who’s a cardiologist. At some point, I thought I was having a heart attack. He calls them fart attacks.

(4:26 – 5:52)

Really nice. The thing is, is that this is all done behind closed doors. No one’s out there talking about it to their people necessarily.

And I went to my nail tech for two years, religiously every two weeks because I was selling jewelry on HSN. And I never mentioned it to her. And then we finally started talking about health as one does with their nail tech friends.

And she was like, oh my gosh, like, I have this, this, and this. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I have this, this, and this. I could have been talking to her about it the whole time and helping each other.

So I do want to encourage people to talk about it more. And I do think that’s happening with social media. But remove all the shame from it.

We’re all physical, in physical forms. We all have bodies. And there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

And colon cancer is on the rise. And SIBO has a lot of underlying causes. And it causes other things.

Restless leg, rosacea, just all kinds of other discomfortable, is that a word? Uncomfortable conditions. And some of them are more serious, like malnutrition, weird B12 levels, weird iron levels, ferritin in particular.

And it’s impacted by hormones. Your motility is just on and on and on, obviously. But it’s not that obvious.

Like if this isn’t your wheelhouse, if you haven’t been thinking about this for a long time, you’re just kind of stumbling into this whole thing right now. I just want you to know you’re not alone. And there are a lot of people that can help now.

(5:52 – 7:40)

When I was first looking for someone, I went to, not in order of importance, Ayurvedic practitioner, acupuncturist, reflexologist. For my fibromyalgia-like symptoms, I went to like an orthopedist and got cortisone shots. I had so much brain fog, one day I couldn’t speak.

Like I literally had the thing in my head and it couldn’t come out of my mouth. And that was also where I was in heavy mold exposure at the same time. So that was a combination.

I took a nap and was fine, but like that was seriously toxic. I asked my trainer, like I would lift up my shirt to show my tummy and I’d be like, do you know what this is? Like, why am I so bloated?

I’m skinny, but this is, you’re like, I don’t know. You know, my regular practitioner, one gastroenterologist, Dr. Run-Three-Miles, as seen in Healing SIBO, my book. Finally, I got with the proper gastroenterologist who helped me start the journey.

And then Dr. Allison Siebecker’s appointments opened up and I was able to book a whole bunch with her. So between the two of them, like we got started. And what Dr. Michael Schulman in Largo, Florida said to me when I walked in with like studies and all of that, he was like, oh, great, perfect. You know, they don’t teach us this in school. You see, that’s the right attitude you want to have from a practitioner, unless they’ve studied with Dr. Siebecker, taken her Pro Course or taken some of her courses at NUNM where she teaches at this big naturopathic college in Portland. You want someone who’s open to being educated or staying up to date with the studies.

You can go to PubMed, right? You can watch the Dr. Pimentel videos on SIBO SOS and SIBOinfo.com and on our YouTube channels. It’s also really easy to be overwhelmed.

(7:40 – 8:47)

It also leads to brain fog and anxiety. So I see a hypervigilance. I’m speaking about me.

I had such severe hypervigilance around this condition a lot because of the food. Like, I really was scared of food. And I’m like, do I have an eating disorder?

Like, is that the term? No, I didn’t. But I was really reactive to food.

So, of course, I did the food sensitivity testing. I did the food allergy testing. I did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of testing.

And it came back that I was sensitive to the foods I was eating the most. At that point, it was like carrots. Oh, do I have celiac disease?

No. Am I gluten sensitive? Yeah, probably.

But do I have leaky gut? You go down these rabbit holes. Once I got into it in the, you know, 2015, 16, 17, I was getting so much more support, though, because Dr. Siebecker was my doctor. And she started working with me on these projects, like the SIBO SOS Summit 1 and 2. I was definitely getting better. Oh, my gosh, it was so much better.

(8:47 – 10:05)

Oh, my gosh. So I just want to say, I have the underlying cause for SIBO. I have two or three of them that are not immediately fixed.

So I have the antibody from food poisoning that leads to an impairment of that migrating motor complex. I have Ehlers-Danlos, which is a collagen disorder, which is, in my case, fortunately mild. Can you do this?

Can you take your thumb and touch your forearm like that? It’s actually good that I can’t get it down there. Oh, there it goes.

It’s a laxity in the soft tissue of the body that can lead to displacement of your organs, kind of like a prolapse, depending on the severity. And then that can literally move the organs in such a way that the migrating motor complex is impaired. Like endometriosis, you can have tissue moved from the other endometriosis tissue that could impair that migrating motor complex, also known as MMC.

And I’ve had severe mold exposure for a very long time working in the television studio that is moldy, as I talked about on the previous episodes. And I have old Lyme, and that reactivated the Epstein-Barr virus, and I’m postmenopausal. So I’ve got, like, all these fun factors.

(10:05 – 11:59)

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. For those of you who are like, oh, man, I want all my tests to be negative. I don’t want anything to be wrong with me.

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. We’re on a planet that has stuff in it, and plastics in our stuff, and that stuff’s in your stuff. And I just want to kind of encourage you that if you’re feeling dragged down and discouraged when you manage it with a prokinetic and with certain treatments, and you rebuild your terrain, which by its very nature gets rebuilt when you reduce the overgrowth, which is hugely important, and a lot of people are not talking about that, then you can feel pretty good.

Pretty darn good. I feel great. This has been a lot of work, a lot of discovery, but it’s not that complicated.

Now, if you have a bunch of things going on, you have slow gastric emptying, you have all the things I just listed, and then you’re still in mold, and you have scleroderma or some other scenarios, Parkinson’s, alcoholism, opioid use, then it’s really a multiple set of perfect storms. But if you’re in a situation where a couple of things are going on and, you know, I’m resolving those, or I’m addressing them, or at the very least, I’m on the prokinetic, I’m helping my migrating motor complex work, and I’m working on reducing the overgrowth, and I’m using digestive enzymes, and I’m expanding my diet, because that is the ultimate goal, right, for nutritional support and also microbiome diversity, chances are you’re doing pretty well.

It mimics other things. So it could be candida. It could be parasites.

(11:59 – 12:43)

You could have all three. You really need to be your own detective to a certain extent, and that’s what Dr. Siebecker and I help you do. There are promising treatments coming from the Cedars-Sinai MAST Program, Dr. Pimentel, Dr. Ali Rezaie. I think this is going to be cured in the next couple of years, frankly. We’ve had him on podcasts, interviewed him a couple of times a year, Dr. Pimentel, bless you, sir, since 2017. So we’ve been really keeping up with the research, and it is very, very helpful.

But in the meantime, let’s get you better. Let’s get you eating more. Let’s get you what I call spinning the plate, the different variations in food that you so richly deserve and that you’re not vetoing everything.

(12:43 – 13:50)

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. And if you need to do that, do it. Cool.

Do you. There’s a resilience that is needed as a SIBO patient, and I just want to encourage you to hang in there. There are answers.

There is hope. I hope you don’t have SIBO, but if you do, I’m glad we found each other. That’s it for now from me and Sadie signing off.

So that’s a wrap on today’s episode. Thank you so much for being here. It genuinely means everything to me.

If something in this conversation sparks something for you, share it with a woman or a guy in your life who needs to hear it. That’s how this show grows. That’s how we heal the planet together, and that’s how we really connect.

For more resources, free tools, and everything we talked about today, head over to shivansarna.com. It’s all there waiting for you.

And until next time, keep asking the questions, keep finding the answers. You deserve the full picture and the very best. Namaste.

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Suffered With SIBO for Decades! Here’s what Helped Me Manage My Symptoms

What does it actually look like to live with SIBO for decades, when some of the things causing it are not going away?

It looks better than you would think. A managed chronic condition can feel a great deal better than an unmanaged one, and I feel better now than I have in decades, with three underlying causes that are still there.

Key Insights

I found out I had SIBO in 2015. I had probably had it since I was about five. Dr. Allison Siebecker became my doctor, then my colleague, and most of what I know came out of that.

It Started With Food Poisoning at Seven

We went to India as a family when I was seven or eight and I got food poisoning. I remember being ill, and I remember being at the American embassy afterwards with my mother, delighted that I was eating a box of sugary cereal.

The pattern runs like this. Food poisoning, then post-infectious IBS, then SIBO. Any time motility is impaired, and the migrating motor complex stops doing its sweeping job in the small intestine, an overgrowth becomes possible.

Back in New York, my father asked my mother whether I went to the bathroom regularly. That was the first time I felt shame about my own body, and I was a child.

When You Become Scared of Food

I did not want to go to the doctor, so I did what you do. Fiber. That made it worse. An apple a day, and I ended up on the floor writhing. Then pizza, garlic in sauces, raw vegetables, salads, one thing after another.

The choices got smaller and smaller. Either I was not eating much, or I ate a reasonable variety and paid for it, awake in the night in real pain.

I was genuinely scared of food. I remember asking myself whether that counted as an eating disorder. It did not, in my case, but the fear was real and it narrowed my life. I say that plainly because I do not think enough people admit to it.

The Brain Fog Was the Frightening Part

One day the fog was so heavy I could not speak. The thought was in my head and it would not come out of my mouth. I was in heavy mold exposure at the same time, so it was a combination.

There is a hypervigilance that comes with this. I had it badly, mostly around food. It leads to more fog and more anxiety, and it feeds itself.

Nobody Talks About It

All of this happens behind closed doors. I saw the same nail tech every fortnight for two years and never mentioned it. When we finally talked about health, we discovered we had most of it in common. Two years of being able to help each other, gone, because neither of us said anything.

So talk about it. Remove the shame from it. We all have bodies. And SIBO carries more than the obvious symptoms, restless legs, rosacea, odd B12 and ferritin levels, malnutrition.

My Underlying Causes, and Why Some Stay

I have three that are not quickly resolved. The antibody from food poisoning that impairs the migrating motor complex. Ehlers-Danlos, a collagen disorder, mild in my case, where laxity in soft tissue can shift organs enough to affect motility. And many years of mold exposure in a television studio.

There is old Lyme in there too, which reactivated Epstein-Barr, and I am postmenopausal. A collection.

If you are hoping every test comes back clear, I would gently question that. Unless you are twenty with no exposures and excellent genetics, it is not a realistic goal. We live on a planet with things in it.

What Managing It Actually Looks Like

A prokinetic, so the migrating motor complex has help. Work on reducing the overgrowth, which rebuilds the terrain by itself, and that part gets very little attention. Digestive enzymes.

And expanding the diet, which is the actual goal. More food, not less. I call it spinning the plate, getting variety back for nutrition and for microbiome diversity. Not vetoing everything. Not arriving at Thanksgiving with your own container, unless you want to, in which case do.

It has been a lot of work and a lot of discovery, and it is not as complicated as it looks from the inside. Any of it belongs in a conversation with a practitioner who knows the condition.

Find Someone Willing to Learn

The gastroenterologist who finally helped me looked at the studies I brought in and said they do not teach us this in school. That is the attitude you want. Someone open to being educated, or already staying current.

This mimics other things. Candida, parasites, and you can have all three. You do need to be your own detective to a degree, and you should not have to do it alone.

There is promising work coming out of the Cedars-Sinai MAST Program with Dr. Pimentel and Dr. Ali Rezaie. I think this is going to be cured in the next couple of years, frankly. In the meantime, let us get you eating more, and get you feeling better. There are answers. There is hope. I am glad we found each other.

Show Notes & Resources

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This episode is for general information only and is not medical advice. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any condition. Talk to your doctor before making changes to your care.