Living in pain, all of your life is not an option that anyone wants to put up with, nor should you. If you are someone who lives with IBS pain on a regular basis, you may be looking for some support in dealing with the flare-ups. It’s possible that a food intolerance test could just be the previously unturned stone to help you get a handle on the pain in your gut.
The link between IBS pain and a food intolerance
The connection between these two things comes from understanding what IBS actually is. It stands for “irritable bowel syndrome” and it essentially just means that your bowel is sensitive and is easily triggered into painful spasms that people label as flare-ups. They often appear to be brought on randomly and take a lot of focus when it comes to reducing those flares and what they could possibly mean for your day to day life.
It’s suspected that most people who live with IBS have food intolerances, rather than allergies like it was previously suspected. This comes from the fact that food intolerances cause symptoms such as gas and bloating which are due to having a sensitivity — aka intolerance — to a certain food ingredient. When that food is eaten, they start having negative symptoms which will trigger the already sensitive gut that you have with IBS and create a flare-up.
How a food intolerance can help
If you want to explore this with your own case of IBS, the first thing that you’ll have to do is get a food intolerance test and see what comes up. There are a lot of people who have food intolerances to everyday foods and don’t even know it, so it’s important to get clear, confirmed test results that will let you know.
Accompanied by the results from an intolerance test, an elimination diet will give you the power to effectively cut these problem foods from your diet. As your body detoxes from these intolerant foods, your gut won’t get as agitated, and you’ll find that you will have fewer flare-ups as a result.
This elimination diet is practised in people without IBS, and it can drastically improve their day to day life as far as lack of symptoms and a better relationship with food. If you deal with IBS pain almost daily, imagine how good it’s going to feel to be able to not only have fewer flare-ups but a better and healthier relationship with food. You’ll be free from chronic IBS pain as well as bothersome and downright painful food intolerance symptoms, too, that you otherwise may not have known that you had.
While a food intolerance test — and the elimination diet it recommends you do — is not a cure for IBS pain, it will help you understand your body’s likes and dislikes better so that you can have the power and support that you deserve to take on your day to day with fewer IBS symptoms.