It seems almost inevitable that I ended up becoming an IBS Coach, although I certainly wouldn’t have thought so when I was younger. I didn’t choose gut health because it looked like a good business niche or because I fancied spending my working life literally talking about ‘other people’s shit.’ I ended up here because I spent a huge chunk of my own life dealing with a digestive system that didn’t work properly and eventually became completely fascinated by ‘why.’
My gut issues go right back to my 70’s childhood. I was born prematurely and was horribly constipated even as a baby. Mum knew this was not normal but the doctors had no useful advice. Going to for a poo once a week was completely normal for me – although obviously I didn’t know there was anything particularly unusual about that at the time. When you’re eight years old, you’re not comparing bowel habits with your friends in the playground, are you? Urm… I think not.
I remember lying awake at night when I was about eight with my stomach feeling like it was on fire. This was a regular thing. I was in absolute agony and yet, because I’d always had constipation and stomach pain, I just accepted that this was something my body did.
I also developed skin problems as I got older, including dermatitis and eczema, but nobody ever joined any of it together. You went to the doctor with whatever was bothering you at the time, that particular thing was dealt with (or not), and off you went again.
This was long before gut health became the enormous industry it is now. Nobody was banging on about the microbiome or the gut-brain connection, and I certainly wasn’t looking at my diet and wondering whether what I was putting into my body might have something to do with how I felt. I was just getting on with my life.
And I did get on with it. I travelled, went out, did the whole 90s rave scene, had boyfriends, worked and had fun. I wasn’t defined by my digestive problems, but they were always there in the background, and I became very good at hiding them. Or so I thought…
When I went to America as an au pair in the mid-nineties, I had a boyfriend and became so self-conscious about my digestive symptoms around him that I simply wouldn’t eat in front of him. Like ever. He thought I had an eating disorder, and in some ways, I guess I did. I remember one occasion when there had been pizza and I ended up creeping out for a pee in the middle of the night to find the box and eating the leftover crusts – because I was absolutely fucking starving! I’d rather not eat in front of my boyfriend than risk what my digestive system might do afterwards (bloating, grumbling, gas etc.) and at the time that somehow seemed like the more sensible option…
I was so fed up with being hungry all the time and not daring to eat. That was the first time I really realized that something was totally wrong with my gut.
Looking back now, it’s ridiculous, but I also know I’m far from the only person who has behaved like that because of IBS. People skip food before journeys, dates and meetings. They check restaurant menus before agreeing to go somewhere. They work out where the toilets are. They turn down invitations because their stomach has been playing up and they don’t want to risk it. You gradually become incredibly good at organising your life around your gut – without necessarily realising how much of your life it is actually controlling.
I came back to the UK in ‘95 and eventually built a career in London, starting off as a nanny, and then spending around 16 years working as an EA/PA in the corporate world. I loved my life and I was perfectly capable of working, travelling, socialising and doing all the normal things everybody else was doing, but there was always a digestive contingency plan running quietly in the background. I know knew it was IBS. This wonderous terminology had FINALLY made it out and into the world. Beforehand, I just thought I was a bit weird (well, I may still be a bit weird to be honest – but that has little to do with IBS).
I never left home without my IBS “go bag,” containing the various things I might need if my stomach decided to kick off while I was away from home. You know the score – spare pants, spare toilet roll, perfume, air freshener, wipes, a change of clothes, Rennie’s/Gaviscon/Imodium/laxatives/suppositories. I even carried a mini bottle of bleach around at one stage in case I visited a friend’s house and they didn’t have any. I mean FFS! Honestly…
I knew where toilets were, thought about what I was going to eat and made all sorts of little adjustments that probably looked completely insignificant from the outside. That’s one of the reasons I understand so well when somebody tells me IBS is taking over their life even though everybody around them thinks they look perfectly fine. You can have a full life and still be making a ridiculous number of decisions around your bowels.
The really significant change for me started in the early 2000’s when I went to Thailand and did my first 7 day fasting and detox retreat. My digestive symptoms practically disappeared, and that got my attention because I had spent years assuming this was simply how my body worked.
Suddenly I wanted to know what had changed. Was it something I had stopped eating? Was it something I had started doing? Why did my digestive system behave completely differently under different circumstances? Most importantly, if my symptoms could change that dramatically, did that mean I didn’t actually have to spend the rest of my life putting up with this shit?
That experience sent me down what turned into a very long rabbit hole. I started learning about food and nutrition, experimenting with my own diet, researching, trying different approaches and going on further retreats. Some things helped, some didn’t, and I learnt an enormous amount simply by paying attention to my own body. Hilary became an important mentor during that period and helped me develop my understanding of nutrition and health even further.
Gradually, things I had previously thought of as completely separate started making more sense together. I began understanding the relationship between digestion, food, nutrition, stress, lifestyle and everything else going on in the body. I also started to understand something that has become absolutely fundamental to the way I work now: there isn’t one magical IBS diet that works for everybody.
My own digestive system improved because I learnt what worked for me, not because I found a generic list of “good IBS foods” and followed it.
Eventually my fascination with nutrition became much more than something I was doing for myself. In 2015, I left my career in London and started working professionally in nutrition and digestive health. I developed my signature FIT Program and, over the years, found myself working with more, and more people whose experiences sounded incredibly familiar.
They had spent years putting up with IBS and adapting their lives around them. They had removed foods, tried diets, bought supplements and googled the absolute shit out of IBS, but many of them still didn’t understand why their own gut was behaving the way it was.
And I understood that frustration because I’d lived it.
Somewhere along the way I became The IBS Coach, which still makes me laugh when I think about the child who believed going for a shit only once a week was perfectly normal. I now spend a completely disproportionate amount of my working life discussing the frequency, consistency and general behaviour of other people’s bowel movements. It wasn’t exactly the original career plan, but there we are. I had originally wanted to be a vet. Or a famous showjumper!
Anyhoo, the fact that I have lived with IBS myself matters enormously to the way I work because IBS doesn’t stay neatly contained inside your digestive system. It comes to work with you, goes on holiday with you, comes on dates, goes to restaurants and gets involved in your relationships, confidence and social life. You can become so bloody good at accommodating it that eventually you forget how ridiculous some of those accommodations actually are…
Since figuring all this shit out, thankfully, my digestive system today is unrecognizable from the one I grew up with. I go for a poo every day (hooray) which will sound like the most mundane achievement imaginable to somebody who has always had a perfectly functioning bowel. If you have spent half your life being chronically constipated, however, you’ll understand why a reliable daily BM is actually a rather lovely thing.
I also know what works for my body. I generally avoid wheat, pasta, bread and cake, eat very little dairy, drink more water and a lot less alcohol these days and have sugar occasionally. That is what works for me, and I think that distinction is incredibly important because I absolutely do not want somebody reading my story and deciding they need to remove the same foods.
One of the things that frustrates me most about the way IBS is approached is how frightened of food people can become. By the time somebody reaches me, they may already have tried gluten-free, dairy-free, low FODMAP, probiotics, supplements, more fibre, less fibre and whatever else Dr. Google has suggested that week. Then onions get fucked off, garlic gets fucked off and before long they’re wandering around the supermarket wondering what the hell they are actually allowed to eat.
That isn’t IBS freedom.
I don’t want somebody to become brilliant at managing an increasingly restricted diet and an increasingly restricted life. I want them to understand what is going on in their own body. That means looking at their symptoms, their history, their diet, their nutritional intake, their lifestyle, their habits and their individual triggers rather than handing them the same generic food list I could give to everybody else.
That is probably the biggest thing my own journey has taught me. I spent years accommodating my digestive system before I started understanding it, and understanding it was what eventually changed things.
So yes, I’m now a Nutritional Therapist and IBS Coach. I’ve studied this professionally, worked with clients since 2015, and created programs to help other people improve their IBS and gut health, but my relationship with this subject started long before my qualifications or IBS Freedom Method existed.
I now help my clients to build up real-life Food Confidence, so they can enjoy eating without the food fear. Food really is glorious when you can trust it completely.
Funny to think that I was the kid who thought going to the loo once a week was normal. I was the young woman who would rather go hungry than risk her gut embarrassing her in front of a boyfriend. I was the woman going to work in London with an IBS ‘go bag’ and a gut health contingency plan.
I totally get what it feels like when your IBS symptoms are running far more of your life than anybody else realises, and I know how bloody lovely it is when it finally isn’t. That’s why I do what I do.
