IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome)

After assessing your medical history and making sure you’ve had all the right tests before trialling dietary intervention, there are a few elimination style diets that our dietitians can implement to help you to figure out your trigger foods and improve your symptoms. The most commonly used one is a low FODMAP (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols) diet. A low FODMAP diet involves restricting short chain carbohydrates, which increase small intestinal water volume leading to rapid fermentation in the large intestine. This then begins a pathway of symptoms as increased gas is produced which can result in you experiencing varying degrees of symptoms such as pain, bloating, flatulence, nausea and altered bowel movements.

The FODMAP diet is a three stage process. The first stage is to eliminate any high FODMAP foods from your diet for a certain time period to first understand if they are causing your symptoms or if we need to alter our course of treatment. If the first stage shows significant symptom improvement, In the second stage, you can begin to add some of these high FODMAP foods back into your diet in a measured and methodical way for us to identify your individual trigger FODMAPs (some people react to all, some people react only to some!) and just how much of these your body can tolerate (some people can have a lot, some people can only have very limited, infrequent amounts!). The third stage is liberalisation or the stage where we begin to work with you to add as many foods that you love back into your diet in a way that you can tolerate. This process can be difficult, especially if you are trying to figure this out on your own. We often see patients after they have tried to go it alone and find out that it is a particularly tricky process to follow and their intolerances might just be a bit too complex to DIY! Our dietitians can help make this process easier, answer all your questions along the way, are connected with other local health professionals to refer you for more testing if necessary and get you on the right track to manage your IBS fast!

In around 1–2 weeks of following a meal plan designed by one of our dietitians you’ll either be feeling A LOT better or we will have ruled out a lot of possible causes. Most clients with IBS symptoms feel significantly better at around the 1–2 month mark after initial consultation. You can also expect to learn about your individual dietary triggers in a clear and practical way as well as understand how to eat out, cook and live a positive lifestyle whilst managing your symptoms.