IBS, Digestion Problems, and Food Sensitivities With CFS

Get Your Gut Checked First

If food has started turning on you, the first stop is a doctor. Miguel says this in the video and we'll say it again here. Get allergy tests. See someone who specializes in the gut. Let them run the tests and look for anything that explains what's going on. We're a coaching and education team, not doctors, and digestive symptoms should be checked by a medical professional before you do anything else.

Some gut problems have a clear cause that shows up on a test. If that's you, treat it with your doctor. This post is for the other group: the people who've done the tests, been told everything looks fine, and still can't eat a slice of pizza without paying for it that night. If that's where you are, you can read our guide on which tests to ask for, and then keep reading, because the rest of this post is about what Miguel found when he looked past his plate.

It's an easy trap to fall into. The symptoms live in your stomach, so it feels obvious that the stomach is the problem. You cut one food, then another, and the list of safe meals keeps shrinking while the symptoms stay. That's the pattern Miguel lived for years, and it's what pushed him to look at the state his whole body was in.

That's a different starting point. And it's one Miguel knows from the inside.

When Food Started Turning on Me

Growing up, I could eat anything. Milk, gluten, sugar, chocolate, coffee. None of it bothered me. Then my health started to slide. I felt tired and wired at the same time, and as the symptoms piled up, I noticed something strange. The more symptoms I had overall, the more sensitive I got to food.

It got to the point where candy, chocolate, or anything fried would set off a panic attack. My heart would race and pound. I'd get lightheaded. One morning at the gym where I worked as a personal trainer, the manager bought everyone hot chocolate to get us fired up for the day. I chugged mine, and the sugar plus the little bit of caffeine in the cocoa sent my heart racing like crazy.

Another night, around Christmas, I went for sushi with friends. We'd done it dozens of times before. This time it was after my first few trips to the hospital. We ate sushi and fried chicken, and I woke up at one or two in the morning with my heart pounding out of my chest. It felt like a flare-up.

My stomach joined in too. I'd eat something and it would hurt, or I'd get an upset stomach and need the washroom three or four times in a row. My gut was tested for all kinds of things. I even did a few detoxes with a naturopath to flush my system. They were brutal, they took a lot out of me, and when they were done the gut problems were still there. Nothing explained it. If that sounds familiar, our post on normal tests when you still feel sick covers why that happens so often.

The Perfect Diet That Didn't Help

At my worst, I lived with my grandparents for six months. I could barely walk. My 72-year-old grandma helped me get to the washroom. I had trouble rolling over in bed and trouble feeding myself.

They wanted me as healthy as possible, so they cooked clean food every single day. Eggs, salads, sweet potatoes, avocados, ginger tea every morning. The same meals, day after day. No sugar, no junk, no cookies, no chocolate. Nothing.

For six months on that diet, I kept getting worse. Flare-up after flare-up. And my stomach was still upset, worst of all during the flare-ups. My diet was as clean as it gets, and my gut was still a mess.

That was my first clue that the answer for me lived upstream, in the state my whole body was in.

By the time I got to the hospital, I could hardly eat anything at all. My dad had to blend my food because chewing and swallowing had become too hard. I remember drinking blended tilapia, rice, and hot water. That's the point where the hospital took me seriously and let me stay.

What Changed in the Hospital

After a long stretch in the hospital, I started working with a doctor who did something nobody had done before. He stopped trying to treat each symptom on its own. The headaches, the heart rate, the shortness of breath, the gut. The way it was explained to me at the time, my nervous system was hypersensitive. It was so wired that just about any stimulus pushed my body into fight or flight, and the symptoms followed from that. That was his read on it, and it matched what I'd been living.

So we worked on one problem instead of twenty. And as my nervous system calmed, my symptoms calmed with it. Less pain. Less brain fog. Less fatigue. Easier breathing. And to my surprise, my gut started digesting food again.

My friend Paul visited and dropped off a bag of cookies. I hadn't eaten a cookie in about a year. The first one went down fine, so I had more. Over the next few weeks I ate hospital food, peanut butter on rice cakes, candy, apple juice. I was trading people peanut butter for jam. After six months of the cleanest eating of my life, my body was craving all of it. I'll admit it wasn't the healthiest stretch of my life. But a month or two earlier I could barely tolerate anything. Now I was eating all of it, and I kept getting better.

That proved it to me, for my own body. My digestion followed my nervous system. When the system settled, my gut settled with it.

Why Fight or Flight Can Block Digestion

The common explanation for why it's so hard to digest food when you feel wired goes like this. When your body is in fight or flight, it's getting ready to run or defend itself. To do that, the body tends to prioritize the parts that move: your arms and your legs. The middle of your body, where your stomach and gut live, tends to drop down the list. That's the way Miguel understands it, and it's the picture his doctor gave him.

A body that thinks it's in danger puts survival first. Lunch can wait. So you eat a normal meal and it just sits there. Your gut feels heavy, bloated, or cramped, because it's being asked to do its job while the body is busy with something it thinks matters more.

The opposite state is called rest and digest for a reason. The idea is that when you're calm and settled, the body gives itself permission to break food down. Digestion tends to work best when the body feels safe. That lines up with what many people notice: food reactions tend to be worst when you're feeling extra anxious, extra wired, extra buzzy. The gut seems to be reading the same alarm the rest of you is.

Look back at Miguel's sushi night with that in mind. He'd eaten that same meal dozens of times. This time it came after his first few trips to the hospital, while he was tired and wired. His own read is that the meal and his wired nervous system made for a rough night. To Miguel, the racing heart at two in the morning felt like the alarm, and his stomach felt caught in the middle.

This also helps explain why the list of foods that set people off can look so random. Sugar, caffeine, fried food, chocolate, a big meal. A wound-up nervous system tends to react to stimulation of any kind, and food is stimulation. The same pattern shows up with chemical and scent sensitivities, where the body overreacts to things that used to be no big deal.

The Stress-and-Stomach Loop

It can go back and forth, and this is where things snowball. Say you're in a flare-up. You're upset that you can't move around and do the things you used to do, and you start feeling down. That drops you deeper into a stressed state. In that state, the body tends to put digestion lower on the list, and the gut acts up.

Then the gut symptoms upset you even more. Which stresses you more. Which brings more gut symptoms. You can see how the whole thing feeds itself, the same way Miguel saw every other symptom feed itself when his nervous system was stuck. Many people notice that worry makes gut symptoms louder too. The gut seems to listen to the stress.

When your stomach flares, it can help to remember the explanation Miguel's doctor gave him: a wired nervous system can push the body into fight or flight. Our guide on getting through a flare-up walks through how to keep the loop from winding tighter.

Miguel doesn't sort people by label on his coaching calls. His doctor treated his symptoms as one problem, and that's the lens Miguel still uses.

Working on the Root Cause

When you have gut symptoms, it's natural to focus on the gut. That's what Miguel did for years. In his case, the gut turned out to be a branch, and the thing feeding it sat upstream. Working on the branch alone kept him busy, and it kept him stuck.

Miguel saw this play out in his own body. Every gut test, every clean meal, every attempt to settle the stomach on its own came up short. Then one doctor stepped back, looked at the whole picture, and worked on the nervous system instead. For Miguel, twenty symptoms eased around the same time, and the gut was one of them. That's what working on the root looked like for him. Our post on nervous system retraining explains how that work happens outside a hospital.

So again, get the tests done. Rule out anything happening in the gut itself. Once that's crossed off the list, the question Miguel would ask is what state his nervous system is in. His gut symptoms eased as his nervous system calmed. Miguel works with people whose symptoms started in many different ways, and the focus stays on calming the nervous system.

When people come into our recovery system, we ask what recovery looks like to them. A lot of them say a food. If I could just eat a slice of pizza. Some fried chicken. A nice meal out without worrying about what happens after. Those are the goals people name, and they're good ones.

I thought I'd have to avoid those foods forever. When I was at my sickest I wrote out a whole page of foods I'd love to eat again. Today I can eat most of that list. I eat a bit healthier than I did in the hospital, and I can bring things back into my diet knowing my body can handle them. Food is enjoyable again, and I appreciate it more than I ever did before, because I went without it for so long.

If your tests are clean and food still turns on you, you may recognize the spot Miguel was in. For him, the gut was one more symptom riding on a wired system. As that system settled, his digestion came along with it. A stuck system can settle.