I haven't been posting as much as I would have liked to. The main reason for this is my gut health has not been where I hoped it would be, and I didn't feel like it would be fair for me to be giving advice when my gut health isn't in the place I want it to be. I'm still battling these issues, however, as a result have kind of come to the conclusion that actually this is about community and this is about helping as many people as I can and being together. I'm doing the research on my side so that I can share it with people and hopefully help people. For full transparency, I am also working with a functional health doctor who I'm paying a lot of money for and will hopefully not only teach me a lot of things but help me to understand. The first stage of that is I've done more testing with the GI map, another SIBO test, to see whether my symptoms are as a result of the same things coming back or something's changed. I invite any questions. I invite you to ask things. I don't promise to know it all. I'm learning. I'm doing as best I can, but my goal is to help as many people as possible.

What was the moment you realised your gut wasn't normal? For me it was a flight home from Portugal in 2022 that I won't describe over breakfast. What was yours? Drop it below.

You cut the seed oils. You're eating grass-fed butter, olive oil, avocados, wild salmon, pasture raised eggs. Textbook gut healing diet. But you're still bloated two hours after meals. Nauseous if the meal was too rich. Pale, floaty, greasy stools that stick to the bowl. Maybe a dull ache under the right rib. Dry skin, dry eyes, hair falling out more than it should. That's not the fat. That's your bile. Bile is the detergent your liver makes and your gallbladder stores. Every time you eat fat, your gallbladder squirts a shot of it into the small intestine to emulsify the fat so your enzymes can actually break it down. No bile flow, no fat digestion. No fat digestion, no vitamin A, D, E, or K getting into your cells. That's why you can supplement vitamin D for a year and your bloods still look like you've never seen the sun. Bile does more than digest fat though. It's antimicrobial. It keeps the small intestine relatively sterile, which is exactly what stops bacteria from creeping up and colonising where they shouldn't. Weak bile flow is one of the biggest reasons SIBO keeps coming back no matter how many rounds of berberine or allicin you throw at it. You can kill the overgrowth all you want. If the terrain that caused it is still broken, it's coming back. Bile also carries waste out of the body. Old hormones, toxins, metabolised drugs, mycotoxins from mould exposure. If bile isn't flowing, that stuff gets reabsorbed back into circulation. This is why sluggish bile looks like so many different things at once. Anxiety, hormonal issues, skin breakouts, brain fog, histamine intolerance, fatigue. Same root, different costumes. So what kills bile flow in the first place? Years of low-fat dieting that told your gallbladder it had nothing to do. Chronic stress keeping you stuck in sympathetic, which shuts down digestion. Dehydration. Not enough sunlight, which you need to build cholesterol into bile acids in the first place. Too much estrogen thickening the bile. Low stomach acid meaning the signal to release bile never gets sent. Basically modern life.

Please bear in mind this is just based on my experience, any questions on it let me know:)